Amid soaring subscription prices, Patreon is allowing its content creators to give back to their communities with limited-time free memberships to provide a "really healthy version of social media."
In a blog post on Tuesday, Patreon laid out plans to help the over 30 million accounts using its free membership tier still catch up with their favorite creators on the site.
This will be in addition to new ways creators can monetize their Patreon accounts by selling individual posts, collections, and shareable clips to fans.
Content selling particularly works well in the platform to generate hype and market the creators' services on the platform as it is commonly used by online influencers, artists, musicians, game developers, and production teams.
Patreon touted the new monetization methods as a response to the "shift happening in the creator community."
The new features are part of Patreon's rebranding last year to provide more opportunities for creators and their fan communities to interact.
How Will the Free Membership Access Work?
Patreon's new free membership accessibilities basically work by allowing creators to add non-paying members to the platform's Discord-like chat servers for a limited amount of time.
There, fans will be able to see all the latest updates on the creators' projects, plans, and content. Creators can even start live chats to engage with fans in real time for Q&A portions and other digital fan-meet activities.
Creators will also be given the option to tease old content to non-subscribers as a sort of promotional material for all the benefits people can get out of the subscription.
Patreon's New Feature Encourages Creators to Move Platforms
With the rollout of new monetization benefits on the platform, Patreon seems to be giving content creators more reason to move their entire content to the site.
As it is now, Patreon remains an optional monetization platform for many creators while they still operate on much larger social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube where most content is free to access.
Whether this change in strategy will work remains unclear, especially with many users changing platforms as prominent social media sites move more accessibility features behind paywalls.
