Patreon launches 30 new creator features, including short-form Clips and revamped discovery | TechCrunch

Patreon is overhauling how creators get discovered, adding short-form Clips, topic-based communities, and a revamped recommendation system designed to give smaller creators more visibility.

The team at Patreon, the membership platform for creators, has been building like crazy and is now revealing the result. On Thursday, the company debuted dozens of new features to help creators get discovered, build their community, learn from insights, and more.

Patreon says its roadmap is meant to reflect the core philosophy that today’s internet has failed creators by prioritizing fleeting engagement over genuine community, making it hard for creators to be fairly paid.

“The current version of the web is a failed promise for creators and fandoms. As creators, we can’t even reach our followers on the platforms anymore,” wrote Patreon CEO Jack Conte in an announcement about the new features. “Social media has created mass polarization, addiction, and made it increasingly difficult to build a creative community and business. I refuse to believe that this is the best or only way that the internet can work for creators and fans. I believe it can and should be better,” he added.

Patreon’s changes, however, acknowledge the role that short-form video platforms, like TikTok or Reels, play in helping creators find an audience.

To make that discovery easier, it’s rolling out a feature on iOS called Clips, which will turn creators’ videos into short, shareable clips. These can be downloaded and shared off-platform, as on TikTok, or posted as Patreon’s own short-form post format, known as Quips.

Plus, creators will be able to leverage new tools that offer potential fans more previews of their work.

The tools, which are still in early testing, include suggested video previews, which will pull out the most engaging parts of their paid videos, and another that lets creators quote snippets of their longer written posts into Quips. The video previews can be shown to fans who are weighing whether or not to pay to unlock the content or subscribe to a membership, while the text-based quote Quips can be shared as previews to the Home feed, offering creators more exposure.

Native video and Quips are also now rolling out to creators of adult (18+) content.

Another significant change in today’s update involves Patreon’s discovery algorithm.

Before, the company’s recommendation systems focused on finding creators similar to those the user already liked, but it tended to favor larger creators. Now, discovery will focus more on comparing a particular post to other posts by topic, craft, style, theme, and other factors. Patreon says this will help to highlight smaller creators, too.

The company is also rolling out several new features designed to deepen fandoms and help make Patreon more of a destination.

The highlight here is a new communities feature called Niches, which allows creators to participate in dedicated, topic-based communities built around specific interests, subcultures, or fandoms. This could help fans discover more of what they like, without needing to dig around the site to find all the different creators focused on the topic at hand.

Patreon will also roll out other tools, like support for Live Q&As on creator livestreams, and tools that let fans make their own profiles. (Those profiles and the communities are now in early testing, while the Live Q&As are now arriving.)

Another set of tools will help creators track their audience and earnings, which can be key to developing a healthy fandom.

Patreon is launching more granular earnings, membership, and growth analytics, with an earnings tab that breaks down earnings by tier and billing cadence. The platform is also adding membership insights, like member counts that show free trials and members in payment retry, plus filters to break down memberships by trial, gift, active, and retrying status.

A revamped version of the Payouts tab will also show creators a complete record of the earnings moving in and out of their account.

Soon, Patreon will also add creator milestones, or key growth moments, to celebrate special moments in terms of the growth of their community.

As part of its longer-term roadmap, Patreon plans to develop security features like anti-AI scraping tools, real-time spam detection, expanded auto-moderation, additional verification measures, and more.

The full list of improvements includes 30 new or revamped features, some of which are still in early testing. Over the next few months, creators should expect to see many more changes arrive, Patreon said.