Data Science at Patreon

In this week’s episode of Data Skeptic, host Kyle Polich talks with guest Maura Church, Patreon’s data science manager. Patreon is a fast-growing crowdfunding platform that allows artists and creators of all kinds build their own subscription content service. The platform allows fans to become patrons of their favorite artists— an idea similar the Renaissance times, when musicians would rely on benefactors to become their patrons so they could make more art. At Patreon, Maura’s data science team strives to provide creators with insight, information, and tools, so that creators can focus on what they do best-- making art.

On the show, Maura talks about some of her projects with the data science team at Patreon . Among the several topics discussed during the episode include: optical music recognition (OMR) to translate musical scores to electronic format, network analysis to understand the connection between creators and patrons, growth forecasting and modeling in a new market, and churn modeling to determine predictors of long time support.

A more detailed explanation of Patreon’s A/B testing framework can be found here

Other useful links to topics mentioned during the show:

OMR research

Patreon blog

Patreon HQ blog

Amanda Palmer

Fran Meneses







