The promise of Patreon, the membership platform for independent artists and creators, has always been simple: If your fans like your work, they will pay you for it. No need to slough off cash from advertisers, or make shady deals with brands. It's just you, your fans, and the stuff you make for them.

Patreon has slowly introduced new ways for creators to milk the most out of these fan relationships. They can give subscribers (called "patrons") a peek into their lives behind-the-scenes with Patreon Lens, a Snapchat dupe specifically for creators. They can host live Q&As with fans on Discord, the voice-and-text chat app. Now, Patreon has another trick up its sleeve: It's announcing an integration with Reddit, aimed at bringing creators closer than ever to the fan networks that support them.

Patreon/Reddit

Many of Patreon's 100,000 creators and 2 million patrons already have a presence on Reddit. Fans have made subreddits to discuss episodes of the German talk show Kurzgesagt, which relies on funds from fans, or the Patreon-supported podcast Chapo Trap House. The new partnership makes these fan enclaves official, adding a special flair to denote paying patrons and adding a widget to invite fans to give money.

“It seemed like a very natural partnership,” says Alex Riccomini, Reddit's director of business development and media partnerships. “We are the community specialists. They are the creator specialists.”

By teaming up with Reddit, Patreon hopes it can convert more Redditors into patrons, helping them discover, connect to, and financially support creators on the platform. It also hopes to build up the communities that surround these creators, inviting fans to connect to each other and offering a direct line of communication to artists. For those outside of the creator space, the new integration may seem only r/mildlyinteresting. But for creators, it could be another reason to resist joining the larger platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, and to remain within the creator ecosystem that Patreon hopes to reinvent.

Pay Your Dues

When the integration rolls out later this month, creators with existing communities on Reddit can indicate that they have a Patreon, then add a widget in the sidebar of their community. “That allows them to capture users who may not know they have a Patreon account, so they can start donating,” says Lei Gong, the product manager at Reddit in charge of the Patreon integration. Redditors who have contributed to a creator's Patreon will see flair—a short bit of text that says “patron”—show up next to their username.