Goodbye unlisted YouTube links, hello Patreon Video

Mimi Xu is the Product Manager in charge of Patreon Video, the new native video hosting service for creators. Mimi has also launched major changes to the design and navigation of the Patreon website. Previously, she worked at Instabase, Dropbox, and Microsoft.

On this week’s episode of the Backstage with Patreon podcast, Mimi walks us through the backstory of developing Patreon Video, including how creator input shaped this feature and plans for additional video features on Patreon in the future. She also shares tips for how creators can effectively use automated teasers to promote your membership and entice new members to join.

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Episode transcript

Brian Keller:
Hello, creators. You are Backstage with Patreon, where we open the curtain on how to build a thriving business on Patreon. I'm Brian Keller from the Creator Success Team, and today, our guest from the Patreon team is Mimi Xu, the product manager in charge of Patreon video, the new needed video hosting service for creators. Mimi has also launched major changes to the design and navigation of the Patreon website, and prior to Patreon, she worked in product at Instabase, a data automation platform, Dropbox, and Microsoft. Patreon Video is a very long-awaited feature for creators. So I'm here to share this with all of you, and let's get started with Mimi Xu on Backstage with Patreon. Tell creators, why was it important for Patreon to build our own video hosting. Why does that matter for creators?

Mimi Xu:
Hi, creators. This is Mimi, as Brian said, Product Manager here at Patreon. Super excited to be meeting with y'all today. But yeah. Patreon Video really came a long way. So obviously, Patreon is very connected with creators. We all know that creators have been wanting this feature for a very long time. So historically, Patreon didn't really have its own video hosting feature, and lots of our creators relied on third-party video hosting, such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc, to be able to share a lot of these content with their fans on Patreon.

Now, the issue with that is, obviously, one, there's a ton of unnecessary additional workflows that creators need to go through. Why have creators make so many additional clicks and put their videos up elsewhere before them being able to share with their patron? That's, first, we just wanted to make it much easier for creators to be able to share this content, and two, we felt we weren't completely giving creators the control and the direct-to-fan relationship We really wanted to enable.

Obviously, other third-party video hosting platforms, creators tend to be restricted on various tiers, pricing, hosting, how they host, what types of security they can place on the video, for example, unlisted. You just never know if the link leaks to folks who are outside of your patron base. We just didn't want that. We wanted to give creators full control. We want them to be able to take this feature and take the content that they're creating and all these creativity and directly give it to their fans in the way that they are confident about on Patreon. So that's why we built this feature.

Obviously, as Brian and I, well, kind of continue to talk a little bit about Patreon Video's other features, you'll also learn that we were super excited to build this so we can give additional growth tools for creators to be able to grow their membership more deeply, engage their fans if we had a video on Patreon.

Brian Keller:
Then, are we envisioning that this is a tool, really, just for folks who consider themselves video creators, making YouTube and that? How much do we see this native and Patreon-hosted video as actually a tool across different types of creators?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. It's a really good question. I think, needless for me to say, creators all know that videos as well as audios, actually, more and more, are becoming such universal formats that no matter what types of creators you are, whether you're a digital artist or you are sort of making music, et cetera, video is just such an important format. So really, Patreon video is made for creators who are already creating videos.

It's also made for creators who are sort of like, "Oh. Maybe I should create some videos for my patrons, or maybe I already have some videos that I didn't quite feel comfortable posting elsewhere. But now that I have my closest and most dedicated fans, I do actually want to post some of these behind the scenes, et cetera for my fans." You will find that for video, we are sort of supporting overall upload of longer video forms, which is what a lot of the Patreon video creators post. But we are also enabling mobile video creation, which is great for a lot of, maybe, what you say, non-video creators to share some behind the scenes and life updates and whatnot.

Brian Keller:
All right, and so do you have some examples of a creator who's actually using Patreon Video, could be around some way they're promoting or some way they're releasing new content to their audience, seeking advantage of the new feature?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. For sure. So one of my very beloved digital artists named Loish, she's actually on Patreon and one of the sort of early adopters of Patreon Video. I was super happy when she kind of got on Patreon Video so I could follow her and see how she's using things. So she's a digital artist, and she releases a lot of digital paintings, behind the scenes on how she sort of exactly paints those paintings, and she also does a lot of updates on her life and that kind of stuff.

So it's been really fun to follow her along, and what she uses Patreon Video for are those behind-the-scene videos. She'll actually go through how she does a digital painting end to end, and she will voice over and talk through different techniques or different tools and materials that she's using. Because a lot of her fans are very interested in digital painting, and they do stuff like digital painting contests in their community, as well. Also, super excited about sort of this preview feature we built into Video. It's essentially the ability to generate a snippet of teaser for the video that you're uploading.

Brian Keller:
Yeah. Let's talk more about that. So for creators who haven't seen it yet, talk a little bit about, how does that work? They're uploading their main video. How do they actually create a teaser of this type, and what's the way that they can use that, then, to promote their page?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. Absolutely. So as Patreon creators are all familiar, when you make a post, historically, you can upload sort of, or you can embed video. So now, obviously, with native video, you can directly upload your video onto Patreon, and you can set up all the context around it, like what you want to say, your titles, et cetera, which tier you want the video to be accessible to. Then, you can post it. Now, on top of that, you can actually turn on the preview feature, which is a automatic 30-second long snippet of your video that you can then choose to adjust the length and exactly where the teaser sits.

So, for example, if I am releasing a 30-minute long episode, I can actually choose to take the, say, first 15 seconds, or I can choose to take, say, the 30 seconds in the middle where a really funny callback was shared, or maybe it gives a sneak peek to patrons who don't have access to that video, the collaborator that you are talking to or maybe the folks that you're interviewing to just kind of give the folks who don't yet have access to that piece of content some like, "Hey. This is a really cool piece of content. Maybe you should upgrade your tier to get access to this content, or maybe you should become a patron if you're not yet one."

Now, the cool thing about this is you can also take that post and actually share it on your social. You can post it to your Twitter. You can post it on your Instagram, and the folks will be able to access that teaser. Then, it's a really, really great mechanism to essentially invite those audiences who are not currently your patrons on Patreon to come in, have a sneak peek, and then maybe become a patron.

Brian Keller:
Yeah. I'm really excited for that, because that's a lot of the advice we give to creators who my team is working with, that they need more ways to promote and talk about Patreon, and it can be tough. It feels like, "Oh. I'm always having the same message. It's all about join me in my membership." But to be able to say, "Here's real content. Here's a sneak peek of it. Here's a piece of it," I think, definitely, creators are really looking for. Are we actually seeing that in some of the data, where creators, are they using this preview kind of feature? Does it seem like creators are actually embracing that as a tool?

Mimi Xu:
Oh. Absolutely. As far as we know, 80% of our creators who are using video natively on Patreon actually have the preview feature on, and it's quite cool. I think we're also planning on doing tons around the sharing and, obviously, with much more creator tools and insights to come, as well, which, overall, it's just this great initial step towards helping creators gain more patrons, and kind of find their most dedicated audiences, and make sure that they can have a sustainable financial future.

Brian Keller:
Yeah. I imagine there were a lot of choices and options going into our structure for the Patreon video feature here, and how did we incorporate creator input, creator feedback along the way to make sure it was really well-calibrated for what they were looking for?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. It's a really good question. So, obviously, since the beginning of this entire project and feature, the reason why we initially started on this whole thing is because creators asked for it. So we really had no shortage of really passionate creators who kind of helped us along the way. So one really interesting thing that we did with Patreon Video is we actually were in beta for quite a while. So even though for some creators, now they have access to video, over the entire last year, we slowly onboarded various creators and got feedback along the way.

So, for example, preview was actually not in the initial product. That, we eventually added because we got so much positive feedback from creators. Other things like insights and a lot of the additional video tweaks on the user experience, performance, all that kind of stuff, we worked with a lot of creators who were early adopters who constantly provided us and also, obviously, Brian, you know this. You're a team with so many great pieces of feedback that we incorporated. We are still actually, now that it's sort of shipped to a large portion of creators, we're still monitoring a lot of feedback. For example, we know things like closed captions are very, very high on creators' want list, and those are the things that we're working on.

Brian Keller:
Yeah, and I know the team really prides itself on putting a high level of craft, kind of a fit and finish in the look and feel of it. Is there anything that stands out to you of where we really put a ton of effort to make sure every aspect of the experience, both for the creators and the viewers, was going to be great, maybe even delightful in a certain way?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. Oh man. There are so many fun, or maybe, in the moment, challenging examples to share. I would say, for example, I don't know if folks are noticing sort of the change. The controls on Video compared to the initial for folks who were early adopters of Video, it feels very different now compared to a couple months ago when we were first going out with Video. Instead of settling sort of for the default system controls, we designed our own custom controls just so we could get rid of all the experiences that's not necessary, make sure that all of our, even the play button, the scrubber on the video feels super smooth and super minimal so that it does not take away from any of the creative experience that the creators are really trying to give.

Another example, the amount of time that we spent debating how the preview button should look on the screen just to make sure it wasn't taking away from anything that the creator is trying to present, but at the same time give potential patrons a way to understand, "Oh. This is a preview. There's more to it, and I could upgrade to get more," was something the team debated a ton, and went back and forth, and eventually settled on the current design.

Brian Keller:
Yeah. Those are great examples. My favorite one is for the mobile viewing experience, it's really, really smart about figuring out when to autoplay. As soon as a video fully pops up, it starts playing for you, but if you keep scrolling away, it pauses. It knows that you've moved away from that and can come back. I think there's so many little details that show that we're paying attention, we're really thinking about that experience for creators and their members.

Mimi Xu:
Absolutely. I think one interesting thing here is also the choice, too. At the end of the day, Patreon is not a place where we are trying to maximize patrons seeing as many videos and scrolling for as long as possible. That is not the thing we're aiming for. So that gave us a lot of interesting sort of philosophical backings almost to the decisions that we were making. Things like autoplay, we did not want people to be scrolling and things just started to autoplay. We want every single consumption experience to be really intentional. We also don't want to be the platform that almost like traps the viewers for multiple hours without them meaningfully actively engaging with the creator and their content. So it's definitely a super, super cool experience.

Brian Keller:
Can you say more about that? How are we trying to get the member and the creator interacting more, that level of engagement like you talked about? Because we really do want the exclusive content to be sort of the star of the show and what is really compelling, not just, yeah, clicking over to the next video.

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. I think a lot of it comes to, even within Patreon Video itself, there are definitely decisions that we've made, things like not, for example, autoplaying, unless if we sense really strong intent, things like wanting to make sure the consumption experience is excellent without immediately directing people away from the current video to, "Oh. Here's another seven that you can watch. Why don't you look at them as you're watching this video?" which is just a very distracting experience.

So there's lots of minor decisions that we made within the video product itself, but, obviously, more across Patreon as a whole, I think this focus on, we want creators to own their relationship with the fans, and we want those relationships to actually mean something instead of infinite scroll. I think a lot of what, hopefully, the creators are excited to see in the upcoming year will be heavily focused on that piece, as well. How do we help creators build these relationships? How do we help them engage? How do we make sure they are satisfying the needs of their most dedicated fans on Patreon? That's sort of the key focus of the company, as well.

Brian Keller:
So we know some creators might be not using video at all, and this is a good chance do that behind the scenes. It's so easy to use. You can do previews and all that. We've talked about some creators maybe using other paid hosting services and the fact, hey, this can be part of what you're doing with Patreon, part of the plan that you have there. It's hopefully really compelling. For creators that are using unlisted links, usually from YouTube, there's tons of creators that, hey, that's an easy way to get started, hopefully it's a better user experience. But also, talk a little bit about the benefits, really, from protecting your content, how that might be shared externally. What's better about Patreon Video for that kind of use case?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. For sure. I mean, so prior to Patreon Video becoming a feature, most of the video creators on Patreon, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of them use unlisted YouTube video. The issue with that is you definitely see examples of link accidentally being leaked, as bad as even being on Reddit somewhere. We've definitely seen that kind of examples. There are also just sort of like patrons who are patrons and kind of going back and taking all the links and then immediately downgrading or not being a patron anymore, even though now they have access to all the links.

Another thing that we have seen is a lot of creators, in order to avoid this type of content leaking issue, they go, one by one, to all of their patrons who are in a specific tier and directly message those unlisted links to those patrons, which is, that is insane to me. It's such a strange user experience that we kind of forced creators to do over the past couple years, and it just, it doesn't work for them. They have so much to do. Why add that burden onto them?

This is why sort of Patreon Video is so helpful. You post it. You choose a tier. Everybody gets access to it. You can choose or not to notify them as you want, notify the patrons as you want. Obviously, the patrons will have access to the videos, and the non-patrons won't, so not just for sort of gathering more interest, using preview to grow your base. The bottom line here is really make it easier for creators and make it so that they're not losing their content to folks who are kind of just taking their content for granted on the internet.

Brian Keller:
Yeah. Well, let's turn our attention to the future, as well. So imagine Patron Video keeps taking off. It's got great adoption. What are you hoping it can offer for creators a year down the line, long-term in the future?

Mimi Xu:
Yeah. I mean, video is definitely one of the key formats that is the basis of Patreon. We definitely want to continue to invest in it. I think easy to say that a lot of the baseline things that creators are hoping for, things like what I mentioned, closed captions, 4K resolution, a lot of those kind of stuff, we want to make the video product better and better and better so that creators don't have to sort of think before they use it and it will be the best video solution for them to directly get to their fans. That's like the baseline.

Then, beyond that, I think there's a couple of really exciting things that videos can help Patreon overall and Patreon creators do. So as Patreon becomes more and more sort of investing in these creator tools to help creators grow their patron base and help them maximize the value of their content instead of them having to be on this content treadmill, I think having these format, for example, video players, as a baseline is so helpful.

Preview is one example of what we can do. There are additional things. You can imagine helping even podcast creators link a lot of their videos and podcasts and helping creators organize their content better in story forms, which is something that we know a lot of creators are also super excited about and we're working on.

Brian Keller:
All right. Well, that's a good place to wrap up. Mimi, thanks so much for sharing a little bit of a sneak peek on what's coming up with Patreon Video as well as what are the use cases that it's for, what are some of the reasons a creator would get started with it, including the good protection that they're getting on the content here, and also ways creators are using Patreon video to promote and bring more members over to their page. So thanks so much for sharing all this with creators on Backstage with Patreon.

Mimi Xu:
Of course. Thanks for having me.

Brian Keller:
Tune in next week to Backstage with Patreon, when we have an interview with Colin Moriarty, the founder of Last Stand Media, a collection of podcasts and video series that celebrates video games from upcoming releases back to the classics. Colin has made Patreon the core of his creative business as he's launched new shows and expanded his team, studio space, and revenue streams, and we'll dig into how he manages all of that growth.

To catch every episode of Backstage with Patreon, follow or subscribe in your podcast app and leave us a review. We also have transcripts available at patreon.com/backstage. You're growing as a creator by listening to the show, so why not share the insights from this episode with another creator on Patreon or who is running a creative business. We'd love to have you as an active collaborator with Backstage with Patreon. Come join the discussion in the Patreon Creator Discord. Follow the link in the episode notes, and you can get answers to your follow-up questions directly from the guests and weigh in on what topics we'll be covering next. Editing by Tyler Morrisette. I'm Brian Keller. See you next time, Backstage.