December Archive Highlight - Pay Up - Part 3 (Patreon)

Pay Up - pt 3; “Pay If/As You Wish/Like/Feel”

This is the third in a series of posts about my experimental Payment Systems across my projects: The Telelibrary, Fair Trade, and Undersigned. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading at least the first entry, and possibly the second entry on Undersigned before you begin. That said, I also believe you should never let anyone command what you read, so do your thing

The Telelibrary is a telephone experience for an audience of one, performed live by one performer (spoiler: it’s me—I’m the performer). It lasts approximately 50 minutes, with one of the playable options being the ability to extend a call up to 5 additional minutes. The piece is accessed in a few different ways: the vast majority of calls are released publicly, by means of a Wait List; next, between 70-80 calls are distributed to Patreon Supporters in exchange for their support; a variable number of calls are released through collaborations with festivals, universities, and other organizations; finally, a limited number of sessions are available by request for private bookings.

Public Performances of The Telelibrary are reserved with no up-front payment; instead, participants are asked to make and set the amount of their contribution after the experience is complete. While my business very much depends on blending these different modes of access, in our ongoing reflection on Payment Structures, I’d like to focus on those Public calls in order to consider how sustainable a model paying after the experience is—and how far it addresses the considerations we’ve been exploring across this series.

To do so, I analyzed 1185 Public calls1 to see what patterns emerged, and to consider what that might tell us about this particular invitation to assessing and experiencing the value of performance. It’s a massive amount of data over a large period of time, and yet in crunching these numbers I was most struck by what information I don’t have. There are countless confounding variables that prevent us from making declarative statements from this analysis; in many ways, the Telelibrary is the ultimate n=1 experiment, with very little Control exerted from iteration to iteration. However, as we’ve done in the rest of this series, we’ll look at the results through the lens of the four goals we outlined at the beginning of this series, and see what we learn—or at least, what we begin to wonder.

NOTE: Predictably to everyone but me, this proved to be a massive undertaking; we’re going to focus on the first two Goals this month, and then finish out our investigation on the Telelibrary next month.

Goal #1 - Payment as a Lowered-Obstacle to Accessibility

The Telelibrary began as a “Pay-If-You-Wish” experiment, in acknowledgement of a seismic, global upheaval of the professional and personal lives of nearly everyone on the planet. Almost 3 years later, The Telelibrary remains, and in many ways, the upheaval does too. Over those years, many institutions who made urgent adjustments or radically removed barriers to access faced a challenge to their ideals as they considered when or if they would change back to their old practice: when is an emergency ‘over?’ This is not a question I ultimately had to confront, because (as outlined in my previous post and below) I found that allowing Users to determine their own contribution after their experience was complete was interesting for me for reasons beyond mere triage. But I do think it’s worth looking at the pattern of payments and seeing how far it suggests that this system has created accessibility (and whether other systems may be able to do the same more successfully).

Here, you can see the distribution of payments across the calls assessed:

Immediately, it’s clear that a large number of participants do not pay for their experience. Indeed, in conversation, I’ve often shared the statistic that a little under 20% (currently 19.82%) of participants make no contribution at all. However, that number comes from assessing a larger number of calls, including some which have been prepaid or gifted by others—in which case, the person experiencing the piece is not the one who decided on the payment. When I pulled these numbers, I set out to answer a more specific question: when presented with the choice, how often did someone who registered from the public site make no contribution at all? The answer: in 23.06% of calls in the survey. That’s a pretty staggering number, at very nearly a quarter of all Public Calls. But it can’t tell us the intention behind the contribution (or stinging lack thereof). We’ll ponder more on that in the next point, when we discuss the idea of this System as a method for feedback, but before we do, we’ll peer into the black box one more time to see if we can glean anything. Specifically, I wonder — are all of those people paying nothing at all doing so out of financial necessity? For some, is it a comment on the quality of the piece? How many didn’t contribute simply because they forgot?

One telling number for me is the rarity of contributions in the $1-9 range. From my own experiences being broke and abusing “pay what you wish” systems, I would expect more contributions of $1, or even 1 cent (I personally never had the audacity to slip a penny to the cashier at the Met Museum, but I’ve sheepishly handed over a few wrinkled $1 bills as a student). And yet in the 1185 calls I examined, I could only find one instance of a $1 contribution, and only 27 instances of a contribution between $1-$9; compare that to 51 instances of payments north of $100. Indeed, while the chart above suggests that payments (if made at all) tend to exist between $10-$60, when we look more closely at the distribution of contributions under $100, we see concentrations among a few key amounts:

See those spikes at $10, $15, $20, $25, $30, $40, and $50? To me, that represents people rounding to clean and familiar numbers - and the relative absence of those below $10 (just a baby bump at $5, and nothing too impressive at $10) suggests to me that it’s possible many inclined to make a ‘nominal’ contribution are just making no contribution at all. To the untrained eye (read: mine), I look at a distribution like this and see strong evidence that “Payment Tiers” can be a welcome and intuitive way for experience designers to build in nuanced availability.

In theory, the trade off is losing some of the subtle gradations of feedback. But how much feedback are we getting here?

#2 - Payment as a Form of Direct Feedback & Gathering Data

Occasionally I receive some anecdotal evidence in the form of comments on Venmo/Paypal payments:

“though you deserve so much more!”

“Thank you Herb! 🌿 - I wish I could give more, this experience was transcendent"

“Unfortunately I just lost my job, so it can’t be much this time”

But the overwhelming majority of the time, there’s no commentary, just a payment, occasionally labeled “Telelibrary” (and very often displaying the surprising range of book and phone emojis that exist). That’s a challenge, as almost immediately, I found that what I wanted to invite people to do was not to consider payment optional, but rather to take a moment to consider what they choose to pay, and why. Because of the nature of our exchange (and how strenuous an ask that consideration is), I don’t expect to get to gather much of the nuance of those inner-conversations. But I can hope to inspire them, and can be thoughtful (read: borderline neurotic) about the invitation I make.

Over the years, I’ve used several different drafts of the “post show language” to try to better capture the spirit of what I’m offering

Draft 1 - The Original
The Telelibrary is a Pay-if-you-wish performance; if you're able, you can send whatever amount seems fair to you via Venmo to @YannickJan, (last 4 digits 1071) or on Paypal at paypal.me/YannickTOB .

If you are hard up and have to decide between paying for this and another performance or cause, pay them instead; there are a lot of artists and service industry workers out there who could use your support. Similarly, if you are able, your contributions will help ensure the Telelibrary remains available for all Users.

These next two edits reflect my settling into the longevity of the project, and an exit from the “triage” mindset that informed initial communication. It’s very important to me that I don’t give Users the option to pay nothing unless I welcome the chance they might take it — at the same time, after a year it was clear I had transitioned to this being an experiment to a full time job, and for my livelihood and sanity (if you’ve never “passed the hat” and had it come back empty, I can’t recommend the feeling), I felt it was long-past time I ensured that my urge to accommodate those who needed the option wasn’t inclining everyone else towards the option.

Draft 2

The Telelibrary is a Pay-if-you-wish performance; if you're able, you can send whatever amount seems fair to you via Venmo to @YannickJan, (last 4 digits 1071) or on Paypal at paypal.me/YannickTOB .

Every contribution of any size helps ensure the Telelibrary remains available for all Users.

You can follow the Telelibrary on Instagram @thetelelibrary, and the artist @lil.janjohn, or at patreon.com/yannicktob

Draft 3

In an effort to remain available to all, The Telelibrary is offered as a Pay-as-you-wish performance; if you're able, you can send whatever amount seems fair to you via Venmo to @YannickJan, (last 4 digits 1071) or on Paypal at paypal.me/YannickTOB .

Every contribution of any size helps ensure the Telelibrary remains available for all Users.

And the result? Non-paying Participants jumped to about 29% for the rest of 2021. Again, it’s impossible to say that this language shift is the cause of that (confounding variables are too endless to count, but there), but based on initial analyses, it seems like 2021 was a strange year in this regard; stay tuned for the next part in this series, when I tackle our remaining two goals and try to see what factors (if any) we can flag as definitely having an effect on payment. But does this mean my intention wasn’t coming through?

Speaking again anecdotally, I know this has had mixed results, as even very frequent and support Users would (and still do) occasionally tell me things like “it’s so great that you still do this piece for free!”

I made a go at formatting the language better for the first half of 2022:

Draft 4

"The Telelibrary" is a Pay-as-you-wish performance; all contributions are appreciated, and go towards keeping the Telelibrary accessible for all. Please send whatever amount seems fair to you via Venmo to @YannickJan (venmo.com/YannickJan) (last 4 digits 1071), or on Paypal at paypal.me/YannickTOB.

You can follow the Telelibrary on Instagram @thetelelibrary, and the artist @lil.janjohn, or at patreon.com/yannicktob

And then this summer, made a more serious attempt to refine my language again:

Draft 5

The Telelibrary is performed for one caller at a time, and each caller creates their own experience. You are requested to make the contribution you think is fair based on your experience, your support for the project, or your ability. All contributions are appreciated, and go towards keeping the Telelibrary accessible for all.

Please send whatever amount seems fair to you via Venmo to @YannickJan (venmo.com/YannickJan) (last 4 digits 1071), or on Paypal at paypal.me/YannickTOB.

You can follow the Telelibrary on Instagram @thetelelibrary, and the artist @lil.janjohn, or at patreon.com/yannicktob

Here finally we do seem to see a nudge - only 18.42%, of Users receiving this language made a $0 contribution, down from 26.13% - but as we’ll see in my next post, other factors of User response were not significantly affected, and other trends likely mattered as much if not more than this language.

So is tracking audience-determined contributions useful at all as a point of feedback? I think this next graph provides some perspective—it also makes me feel comforted and very ill at the same time. This is the average User contribution (in USD) each week for every week the Telelibrary has been in operation:

My three takeaways?

- It’s unproductive (and maddening) to read too much into fluctuations on a show-to-show, week-to-week, or even month-to-month basis.

- Outliers have a pretty significant effect, but oddly can be expected to happen, and are part of the long game. I try not to read too much into them.

- See that faint little trend line? Little by little, it is possible to say that the average value assigned to the piece has increased. I’m no data-scientist, but I think that’s a good sign?

#3 - Payment as a Space for Meaning Making

And here we really come to the place where the numbers can’t tell us much. For me, the ability to offer this piece with flexible payment has been a huge point of learning, an act of resistance against many forces, a startling lesson and daily practice in gentleness, and the entry point to many conversations with many collaborators. But what has it meant to Users?

I wonder if you’d help me find out. I’d love to hear what you have to say, and to aggregate those responses as we finish reflecting on the Telelibrary next month. Would you please take a moment to look at the following questions, and to reply to any/all of them? You can leave comments publicly on this post, or email me directly at yannicktob@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance for your feedback; my hope is to eventually wrangle all of the posts in this series into a more navigable, comprehensible document that can prove a resource for other creators. Your answers are crucial to establishing any kind of accountability for the goals I’ve tried to reach for — and to building better solutions.

We’ll take a look at your responses next month, and finally dive into the fourth and final goal:

• What has been your experience deciding on what contribution to make after a Telelibrary session? How has it felt?
• How challenging a task is deciding on the "cost" of a 'Pay-What-You-Choose' experience? Is that more or less difficult for you after the experience than before?
• How far do you associate The Telelibrary with this payment System?
• What might it mean to you to have more/less opportunities to set your own payment amount for experiences and other content?

#4 - Payment as a Path to Profit (?)

That “?” contains many questions, including examining repeat Users vs 1-time-Users, seasonality of contributions, factoring in no-shows and last minute cancellations, and more. Expect the nitty-gritty on the nickels and dimes, which have admittedly never been the primary focus of this piece, but are also admittedly the thing I use to eat and pay rent.

See you next post/year!

Yannick

~

[1] Some notes on Methodology here:

Out of 1466 total at the time of this publication, I arrived at this sample set of 1185 calls by pulling every documented call from March 23, 2020 until December 29th, 2022 (in some rare cases, notes have been lost/abridged due to technical malfunctions and/or pages falling out of notebooks), then removing all of the calls made for/by private bookings, external producers venues (film festivals, universities, etc.), along with all of the calls released through the smaller “Patreon Shortlist.”

Finally, this list only includes completed calls, and thus does not reflect missed appointments. In light of all of this, it is important to remember that the analysis here does not speak definitively for every Telelibrary call, nor describe entirely The Telelibrary as an enterprise. What it does do is give us an interesting picture of the largest aspect of that practice, and invite us to consider its viability.