Make Art, Not 'Content'

A podcast about wild axolotls. A video series about sneakerhead historians. A ceramic sculpture of a stylish alpaca. One of the most beautiful things about Patreon is the incredible variety of creative talent consistently on display. And so you might think, with over 300,000 podcasters, video makers, writers, musicians, artists, and other creative people sharing their work on the platform, that the word “content” would be one of the most common in Patreon’s vocabulary.

But you’d be wrong. And to explain why, let’s talk about… wheat.

Wheat is what's called a commodity. A bushel of wheat is pretty much interchangeable with any other bushel of wheat in the world. Same goes for a barrel of oil, or a block of gold. They're indistinguishable and inherently replaceable goods.

But now think back to that podcast about axolotls. Or the alpaca sculpture. These are the exact opposite of commodities. They’re unique, singular, and irreplaceable. They’re art.

The problem is, over the past few years, more and more platforms across the social internet have begun to treat your creativity as a commodity, instead of an art.

Platforms like TikTok have cultivated userbases of people who visit the app not for any creator in particular, but just for the experience of TikTok – the general sense that whatever the platform serves up will be engaging and entertaining, regardless of who it comes from.

This is a problem. When creators are commoditized, their incentives fundamentally change. They’re no longer encouraged to make great art, because quality won’t distinguish their work from any other post. Instead they’re incentivized to do whatever they have to do to game the system to compete for attention – be it through trends, memes, spam, dunks, or clickbait. In short, they’re incentivized to make “content” instead of making art.

And that’s why you won’t hear Patreon talking about “content.” Because even just the word itself takes your unique creativity and reduces it down into a tidy, interchangeable corporate package. It commoditizes what you do.

You deserve a creative internet where you are valued as the singular creator that you are, by both your fans and the platforms where your work is shared. And you deserve a space where you’re incentivized to do nothing but your best work.

So going forward, we’ll call it your podcast. Your video. Your media. Your art. If we have to be general, we’ll call it your work. But we won’t call it “content.” Because you deserve better.