Patreon CEO Jack Conte on supporting artists in the AI slop era

Today, I’m talking with Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon. Jack last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago, in the summer of 2021, and a lot has changed on the internet and in the creator landscape since then, so I was very excited to talk to him again, especially since his ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically as big social media platforms have gotten more closed off and more flooded by AI slop. In fact, you’ll hear Jack say that he now thinks of Patreon as an “index of small business media companies,” a major change in perspective that’s led him to make Patreon a more direct competitor to social platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. This is a huge change. In fact, the last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon. But then Patreon built those features — to help people discover content from new creators. Jack’s reasoning for that change will be very familiar if you’ve been listening to our media conversations here on Decoder: Jack says if Patreon didn’t build its own audience platform, then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences — and customers. You’ll hear Jack say that the current way platforms treat creators is “disgusting,” and you’ll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone’s work however they want, and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag. But you’ll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon’s plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists. There’s way more in this one — Jack came fired up for the Decoder questions, and we spent some real time talking about his approach to how meetings feel, something you just won’t hear from many other CEOs. This was a pretty refreshing conversation; I think you’ll really like it. Okay: Patreon CEO Jack Conte. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Jack Conte, you’re the cofounder and CEO of Patreon. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks, Nilay. Good to be here again. It’s good to see you again. It has been five years since you were last on the show. I can’t believe it. So much has changed. A lot has changed. The creator economy has changed. The idea that everything is a TikTok clip has now totally upended the culture. Patreon itself has changed. Maybe we’ve all changed. Really, the true creator economy is the friends we’ve made along the way. How has your idea of Patreon changed over the last five years? I feel like there has been a lot of change. How would you describe Patreon today in 2026? You know what’s so funny, Nilay? I think my answer to that is probably similar to your answer around the media industry. At the end of the day, Patreon is essentially an index of small business media companies. That’s what we are. We help those small business media companies thrive, get paid, and reach their fans. And so, when they’re hurting, we feel that burn as a business, and we feel that burn for them as our customers. The biggest shift over the last five years is really what happened up-funnel — what happened with TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The shift is really one main thing:the move away from follower-based paradigms and true subscriptions into an interest-driven distribution system. There are so many problems with that, so many problems. It’s hard to even outline all of them. There are societal-level problems around mass polarization, addiction, loneliness, and all the things that I think a lot of consumers are feeling. And then there’s a bunch of problems on the creator side as well, because when you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator’s deterministic line of reach to their fans. If a creator can’t reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build a true community around their work, but they also can’t build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy, that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business, is this shift of the internet away from follower-based paradigms and into interest-based paradigms. It’s very similar to Google Zero. It’s the same concept. It’s when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade-plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms as their top of funnel. It starts to become very clear to everybody that these people were never our users, they were never our community members, they were never our fans. They were Facebook’s users. And Facebook has made that loud and clear to creators, to the media industry, and to publishers. That has created a whole set of very important product launches and problems that Patreon has had to solve over the last five years, which has been the center point for our strategy. I love it. We’re in it. We’re in the heart of it. My criticism of the media industry over the last five years is that these platforms have just been looking us in the eye and saying, “We’re going to kill you.” It hasn’t been subtle in any way, shape, or form. They’ve just been very clear that these are their audiences, and they can remix attention in ways that serve them. They’ve basically even said that to marketers who pay the bills for them, their advertisers. Meta, in particular, is like, “We’re going to kill you too. We will just make the ads.” Mark Zuckerberg has sat on stages and said, “Look, my vision is that you just show up with some money, and we deliver you some customers, and everything in the middle is AI.” I don’t know if that’s going to work out or not, but they’ve been pretty blunt that these are truly their audiences, and they will do with them what they will, and anybody who gets in their way is probably going to die. It feels like, in the publishing company media world where I live, , approximately zero has been done to address this. It’s like this industry has just decided to die, and maybe now they’re all saying Google Zero, and maybe the future of The Verge’s revenue is that I just charge licensing fees for it. You’re saying in the small business world, this is equally the same problem, as the platforms go from follower-based to interest-based graphs. Is there a concerted effort beyond Patreon to do something about it in the smaller creator world? I wish there was something systemic or organized, but honestly, it’s very hard to fight the network effect. At the end of the day, that is what’s happening. And honestly, the only reason creators are still using these fucking platforms is because that is the only place where you can grow your audience. It is not the software that is valuable about those companies, although, in many cases, the software is good. They have built a bunch of features that are useful for media hosting, uploading, and reaching people.It is more the fact that that’s where the foot traffic is. That consolidation of traffic and of attention is one of the core problems. That’s also one of the reasons I was so excited about adding [Flipboard CEO] Mike McCue to our board, and about what he’s doing with Surf. At the end of the day, it would be amazing. The only way to truly systemically address this is if the people own the network effect instead of the platform. Ultimately, that’s what Mike is trying to address with Surf, and that’s one of the reasons I’m excited about Bluesky. There does seem to be this early-stage effort to build an ecosystem around the open social web. That’s not on our road map right now, but it is something I’m following very closely and very excited about. Because at the end of the day, I think it’s probably one of three main things that needs to change to stop something like this from happening again. If you look back at the last 20 years, essentially, I think it’s fair to say social media is a failed experiment that has failed humanity and been really bad for humans. I’m not saying there aren’t some good things about it. We’ve all been connected up. We’ve been given multiple pipelines to reach people. There are now millions of channels, instead of three channels. People who didn’t used to have voices now have voices. There are some really wonderful things about it, but I would argue that those things are attributes of the internet, not of the current platforms. The internet is beautiful. The internet is important. Connecting people and giving people a way to reach each other, and speak, and make media, and distribute that media, that’s awesome. But the systems and subsystems that we’re using layered on top of the internet, like social media, those systems are a bad implementation of those principles that have had a really harmful effect on humans at a scale that is hard to even comprehend. Something needs to change. When we look at the next 20 years of human collaboration and media distribution, I think we need to do some deep thinking. What are the architectural elements of these two decades of failed experimentation that have had such a bad effect on us, and what do we need to do differently next time to make sure it doesn’t happen again? There’s a bunch of ideas in there. I want to come back to a lot of them. In particular, federation and Mike McCue, who’s the CEO of Flipboard, which runs a platform called Surf. Surf is like a feed builder and browser for Threads and Bluesky and Mastodon, all the open social networks. There’s a lot there that I want to come back to, particularly in this idea of the architecture of social networks. I was talking to Hank Green a couple weeks ago, and he said, “It feels like the end of one internet, and we need to think of it as the beginning of another.” That would be great. I would love to live fully in that zone. The problem is, we have to contend with the end of the internet that we have today — the end of the platform era, if it is truly the end of the platform era. Tell me about Patreon right now in this moment. Maybe we see our way through the other side, but Patreon has to operate today. How is Patreon organized today? We should spend some time getting into this because it’s a really important point. The irony of all this is that in order for Patreon as a business and on behalf of our creators to fight this — in order to give our creators the audience growth and the reach that they need, and the ability to continue to grow and continue to grow on the platform — we have had to build discovery systems into our platform. I actually don’t remember if I talked about this the last time I was on the show. You were opposed to it the last time you were on the show. You did not want to do that. Exactly, and that’s the irony. Now we have had to do that, because what we’ve learned is, if we don’t provide our own top of funnel for creators, then we’re just relying on Facebook to be the top of funnel, and that is not a good business strategy for creators or for Patreon. Essentially, the stage that we’re in as a company now, as for the last few years, is that we’ve been building a bunch of media tools, distribution tools, and hosting tools. We’ve built native video, we built chat, we built discovery, we built short-posting tools, we built a feed. We have built all these new ways for creators to essentially start providing the growth for themselves, start providing a top of funnel for themselves, and for Patreon to have a top of funnel for our creators as well. That’s the irony of all this. Now, that is the right strategy for us, given where the business is, where our creators are, and the current media landscape. That was not our strategy six years ago. That’s something that we’ve implemented over the last four to five years, and we’ve implemented it out of necessity. The main reason is because I don’t want to wait for the platforms. They’re looking us in the eye, and they’re saying, “We’re going to kill you all.” And I believe them, and I don’t want to wait for them to do it. I want to prep way ahead of time. The good news is, a lot of this work has actually worked. For example, one of the things we’ve built since we last talked is free memberships. What is a free membership? It’s a follow. It’s a line of deterministic reach to people who choose to follow you. You get the email address associated with the account that signs up for you, and then when you make a post to your followers, it triggers emails, and you also see those posts in the feed that get ranked above other posts to make sure that your followers actually see your posts. That is very different from how other feeds work. That product has been an amazing success. I think now we have 185 million free memberships on the platform, and that’s up like 2x year-over-year since last year. So, clearly there’s a lot of fan-side demand and a lot of creator demand for a better follower system that is true to the actual word “follower.” We built native chats, which is also something we didn’t have before. We were relying on creators to have Facebook groups and communities on Instagram and we were saying, “Hey, we’re the payments architecture.” That’s different now. Now, we have native chats on the platform. lLast year, I think we had something like 35 million chat messages sent back and forth, and 110 million hours of video have been watched on Patreon. We were previously relying on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube for a lot of these tools and a lot of these experiences. We can no longer rely on them to do those things, and our creators can no longer rely on them to do those things. They need a way to reach people deterministically on the platform. We’ve invested heavily in a lot of those communication and media-hosting tools, and they’ve been very well received, which is why we’re seeing that kind of adoption on the platform. It is very different from where we were six years ago, but necessity is the mother of invention. This is the place that we’re in as an ecosystem, this is where the internet is, and this is exactly what Patreon needs to be doing right now to help creators succeed. You’re describing a lot of change. Again, five years ago, when we talked, you were very focused on payments and being the payment rails. People would basically show up and be like, “I have a lot of Twitter followers and I need to monetize them,” and Patreon would be there. That’s over. I think we all understand that that’s over. Twitter itself is over. It’s called X now. It’s the everything app. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. [Laughs] No, that’s interesting. We do everything there. What’s their strategy? It’s everything, I’m told. You don’t ma