Twitch is giving parents more control over how their children are using the streaming platform, including the ability to block them from broadcasting entirely. Parental controls are now available that allow guardians to link Twitch accounts with their 13- to 17-year-old children, providing account management features and a weekly email summarizing their teen's activity, including channels and hours watched.

The controls can be used to prevent teens from livestreaming their own content and disabling Whispers, Twitch's private messaging feature. This includes blocking minors from sending or receiving DMs. Parents can also set flexible daily t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

We’ve got a special Decoder today — I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I know, it’s a hard gig, but I do it for you.

Amy has been on Decoder three times now, and she’s one of my favorite people to chat with — she is clear-eyed about what the advertising industry really is and does for brands and what all the money sloshing around the ad-supported internet really accomplishes. You’ll hear her say that she thinks the traditional chief marketing officer role is done for and that her job is driving business results using data and analytics. 

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.

That might sound straightforward, but it was a shocking statement at Cannes, which is where the entire advertising industry gathers every year, drinks rosé, and convinces itself of outrageous nonsense. This year, the big trends were creators, and, of course, AI. And Amy, alongside her parent company Publicis, aren’t holding back when it comes to calling out the AI nonsense for what it is.

Publicis actually put out an ad before Cannes listing all the false promises being made about AI when it comes to advertising, so I asked Amy about that, and what AI might actually be good for, beyond just generating slop and slop headlines. After all, Meta and the rest of the big platforms were all at Cannes talking about generating more and more ads with AI — something that threatens almost every other company in the industry. 

Of course, we also talked about the creator economy and how all the creators at Cannes were openly calling themselves marketers — essentially turning themselves into small ad agencies of their own. On top of that, the biggest creators in the world almost all launch their own products — something Amy and Digitas see as an opportunity, as those companies will need operational scale and excellence if they’re going to be successful over time.

There’s a lot in this one — like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the money really works.

Okay: Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, live at Cannes. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Hello everybody. I’m Nilay Patel. I’m the editor in chief of The Verge and the host of Decoder.

Hi. Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas, part of Publicis Groupe.

I’m very excited to be here with Amy. Amy, we have to stop meeting like this. We only talk during Decoder podcasts.

I know. We do. We have to do this more. We both live in New York. We should get together more IRL.

Yeah. We only travel long ways to talk to each other in front of live audiences, which is wonderful. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Uber for having us. I have a lot to talk to you about. It seems like every year we hang out and the entire advertising industry is in a new form of chaos. And that chaos doesn’t really get resolved. We just move on to the next form of chaos. This year, it’s AI.

Yes.

I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone in this room. Everywhere here at Cannes, the conversation is about AI. Let’s just get started.

Publicis put out what you would call a fake ad, a documentary ad. It’s called “The Wrong Promises” and it is basically just a series of vignettes of promises people are making in pitches, including “you don’t have to pay us until you win a Lion,” which is incredible. And it says “this is real” at the bottom.

Yes.

Tell me about what you are hearing in these rooms that are leading to these crazy AI promises getting made.

Thank you for bringing up our fun video. It was really designed to stimulate conversations like this. In the business right now, it’s crazy. I’ve been in this business for a long time and we are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process. 

It’s different than it’s been before, whether it’s all the things that were, of course, hyped in that video, but also just insane commercial deals that are just generally bad for people and the business. And they’re coming in all different types — whether it’s about free AI, free platform, free whatever — that are creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry. Because we all need to work together. It is a people business and all of those things really, long-term, create a people problem.

Not to get all Toy Story 5 here, but the conversation that you and I are constantly having is about the pressure of the tech platforms on the media ecosystem, whether that’s publishers, whether that’s agencies, whether that’s creators at some point. We’ll come to that.

But the idea that the platforms have enough scale to promise you business results and then deliver them — whether or not that happens, but they certainly can make those promises — is leading to some of these outcomes. And some of these promises about AI and what it might be able to do, is there any reality to that? Or is that just a reaction to the pressure the platforms are putting on the ecosystem?

Whenever this conversation comes about, the promise of AI, I always go back to the promise of programmatic. How many of you remember when programmatic was a thing? No more people, it was all going to magically—

No one in this room admitted that they remembered that programmatic advertising was a thing.

Yes, right, exactly. And that was a time when it was all just going to magically happen and it magically still needs people, still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace and all of the things that we do to define our partnerships and what are going to be game changers. I go back to that because I feel like the AI story is the new programmatic story, with the promise of everything just being absolutely automated, and that absolutely did not happen.

When programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well and now we are living that. But what is different here is it’s coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners. It creates a different chaos to where you started.

Publicis and Digitas also have huge investments here. You were early, right? You bought Influential in 2024 to do analysis of how the creator ecosystem was doing. You have Digitas AI, and it’s been two years that you’ve been into that. How do you think about those products and those platforms in an ecosystem that is full of these promises?

For me — and I’ll talk about Digitas AI in particular — we started to make our people better unicorns, as we talked about the last time we met. It was really to say, “Okay, everyone look at what’s on your desk, what’s in your day, and think about what you absolutely could build an agent to do and that way we free up our time to do this.” That’s where we started. And then what was fascinating is the magical things that were able to be built by the young talent in the industry that is solving a working problem but eventually a business problem.

That still holds because every day, as a Gen Xer, I always say, “Hackers wanted.” If you have a hacking mentality and you’re curious, you can actually do better things than I did when I was a hacker in that age. It enables us to use our agents, use our data to get to better ideas, better workflows that are more of a surprise and delight to clients than what you might have brought in the first round. Because you can do many rounds before you actually get to the final product and that’s how you get to the unique outcome.

You can tell that Amy is a Decoder pro because she has led directly to the Decoder questions. I’m very curious if AI, at least in the enterprise context, is a top-down or bottom-up change agent. You just restructured Digitas, right? You put in a bunch of new roles. You have a new chief intelligence officer, a new chief systems officer, and my favorite, a chief transformation officer. He turns into a robot. What are these roles?

[Laughs] I hope he hears this because that’s going to make him laugh. Anyway.

It’s very exciting. The toy line is going to be great. What are these roles for? How are you changing the structure of Digitas?

You’ve always inspired me by asking “how do you structure yourself” and “how do you make decisions?” The first time we talked about it, I had been in this role for just a little bit of time and we had set our culture, which is, “We’re fearless, inventive and generous.” That still holds on how we make decisions.

Org structure-wise, we needed to figure out exactly what you just said: how do we do things in the underpinning of the agency that will enable all of our different practices to be able to scale faster? To leverage intelligence — and, of course, intelligence is code for AI in this story. We are moving — so that’s why we have our chief intelligence officer, which was a pickup from data and analytics — into liberating that into an intelligent platform that all of our agents are built on and then also all of our employees use.

The second is systems thinking. We took the traditional COO role, turned that into a chief systems officer role and really redefined both of those roles because all of our client conversations are really about marketing systems. You need to have someone who can come in and understand that and meet them where they are. Then we think about the marketing flows that we’ll marry to the system that works within some of their tech choices, et cetera, as two examples. The third, the chief transformation officer is — and this is a big conversation here — around clients wanting to transform, particularly CMOs transforming into CGOs.

What is a CGO?

Chief growth officer.

Okay.

Did you not know that? 

I’m a journalist. My job is not to innovate. It’s unfortunate.

[Laughs] Okay.

I just ask the questions. 

That’s why we’re good friends. I make up a lot of things.

Yeah.

I was just coming from the Forbes CMO Council thing and there was a whole conversation on the rise of the CGO. What that means is CMOs, formerly, were really responsible for making marketing magic. Campaigns and media investment. Now they’re responsible for building capabilities and they need a partner to help transform their solutions, so it’s a people problem as well as a tech problem. That’s why we have that discreet chief transformation officer role.

You are a data person, you’ve always been a data person. I’m really curious about that. The idea that the marketing function is now so directly tied to business results, I see it on the tech platforms all the time. You and I have talked about this before.

Mark Zuckerberg will just look every single one of you in the eyes and say, “I’m going to kill you.” He does it without remorse. His vision is that you will just pay Meta and it will make creative for you, it will find the audience for you and they will deliver you business results and almost everything in the middle, from money in to money out, gets automated away by Meta’s intelligence stack.

The idea of the chief growth officer feels of a piece with that. That the marketing function is now a business function and it needs a data layer, it needs all these things. Where do you see the creative fitting into it? Where do you see the classic form of brand building?

It’s a fundamental part of that capability that needs to live, like the marketing capability now, as a system. Brand building and the fundamentals matter more than anything. What you stand for and how you show up, what you’re the answer for, especially with LLMs, is really important and it has to be authentic for the brands to grow.

That’s still the case. You just can’t stop there. It needs to be attached to a system and ideally, you have some data intelligence layer so I’m learning more and more about you and I can then redefine my marketing stories to reshape how I’m showing up if it’s not working, if it’s not selling more candy, if it’s not selling more cars.

How we change faster versus the CMO being responsible for building these campaigns and then moving on — that role is a dying role and it should be. It should be that marketing drives commercial value, marketing drives shareholder value.

You heard it here first, CMO is a dying role.

The previous version of the CMO. Sure. Just like the whole, we are in a chaotic world. We’re in an area of convergence. If you are a CMO and you’re not thinking about your data layer, you’re not thinking about your full stacks, [you’re not thinking about how] you can get closer to the consumer and get to better creative, better use of creators, you are not going to be doing well in the future. Whether it’s CMO 2.0 or you’re moving into that CGO role, that’s really the future of that type of function in an organization.

The audience here at Cannes knows this, but for the Decoder audience in their cars listening to this, the conventional wisdom was that CMOs only ever had two years on the job, maybe less. You were dead the moment you showed up, you got to execute one big campaign, you found the bathroom and then you were out.

[Laughs] Yes.

I hope you heard everyone in this room laugh.

I did.

That was the most knowing laugh in the world. This seems like a much longer-term role. If you show up as the new CMO and your job is to transform the entire business from the bottom up over and over again, it’s a lot of instability. Do you think these are longer term roles?

If you do this right and you create a marketing system, you will be able to live beyond the two years path, because you’re creating a growth engine. If you only want to do two tent pole marketing campaigns, that’s probably not going to go well after two years.

I basically have two themes that I want to talk about. One is data in scale and one is creators. This sits right in the middle of them. And I just keep thinking about this phrase that I’ve heard Meta use the most, but the other platforms use it a lot too, and it’s “creative is the new targeting.”

I hear that and I don’t make ads. We make two podcasts a week. We don’t do scale at that level, but I hear “creative is the new targeting” and I think that is a demand for output like no one has ever heard before — “We’re going to find your customer for you; you just feed the machine with as much as you can.” 

It seems obvious to me that you have two choices in that world of “creative is new targeting.” Meta’s Andromeda system is the biggest example of this, and it’s that you’re going to feed it with AI creative and you’re going to let them do it, or you’re going to have your own AI creative system or you’re going to let a million creators and influencers do it for you. How do you plug a growth engine into a world where that’s what the platforms are all saying?

The closer you are to your consumers and all the places they’re spending time from a data identity, however you’re systematically doing that, is the most important thing so you can see how they are reacting to… what did you say?

Creative is new targeting.

I’ve never heard this phrase. I don’t like it.

Yeah. I figured you wouldn’t.

It’s terrible, right? It’s terrible for our business — “creative is targeting.” Only because it sounds horrible. Creative is emotional and lovely and magical. How can it be emotional and magical if it’s targeting you? Those are two words that don’t go together.

The brands that are doing really well are deciding not to do that or to do it in a way that feels so contextually relevant because they know so much about Gen Z on [Meta’s products], that they’ve decided that they need to do this to be able to drive velocity for a certain type of brand that feels fit for that brand.

But we are not in a world where we need more content. Does anyone want more content? We are not in a world where we need more content. That idea, creative targeting, assumes that we have endless amounts of content and impressions as a concept. Those are two worlds that still need to be decoupled, but when they’re put together, it needs to be in a way that you are constantly learning. “How did that do? Did I gain more attention from a certain type of growth audience I’m trying to get to?”

Can I push you on this? Not to support Meta’s ideas here. 

Yes, yes.  

Let me just make the argument because you and I have talked about it before. The way, in particular, Mark Zuckerberg talks about it is at some point they know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody, or they want to know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody, and they will just deliver the right creative to that person at the right moment.

This is the same argument as programmatic. Only now they have acres of GPUs with which to do it. The argument there is yes, the army of unpaid teenagers will make the fun stuff that you watch and the advertising will just show up magically in the platform and find the right person at the right time.

Again, I read that as, “You should just let Meta make the creative for you.” You just give them a picture of the shampoo bottle and they will put it in the right place, on the right background. For me, it will be pictures of trucks jumping over things and exploding and then shampoo will appear at the end. They’re like, “That’s shampoo for me.” It would work. If any of you need an idea to target me specifically, that would work.

[Laughs] Don’t.

No agency is ever going to make something that niche, but for example, Publicis just bought LiveRamp to take all that data out—

It’s still in the situation.

Oh no.

Yeah. I mean, it’s out there, but the deal is not done.

Presumably the goal of buying LiveRamp, which is a giant data platform, is to lever up against Meta and say, “Actually, we know as much about these customers as you do. We can distill information across all the platforms and we will actually do a better job for our clients of placing the creative in the right place at the right time.” This implies that Meta will participate. Why would they do that?

Because people are complicated. And today, look at how often on this beach there are different players on the beach. Everyone doesn’t stay in this position forever and people are complicated. I would offer that if I started seeing your wonderful ad 50 times, I would say, “I don’t want to see this anymore and I actually don’t like that shampoo.”

That’s what happens when it’s just left to go on its own without someone thinking about suppressing messaging, without understanding consumers better because you actually win hearts and minds when you’re doing something that’s not as expected. Because people are complicated.

It’s like we say to our clients, “You need to work with all of them because all of us spend time in all these different places for different reasons. Why does someone choose to spend time on Pinterest versus [a Meta product] versus Amazon versus Walmart Connect? All of them are different roles, in terms of how the platforms work for you and your life. So why would you put all of your dollars in one place?”

For me, those players are shifting in and out depending on what we think that growth audience is doing and how they’re thinking about intersecting with that category.

Are they good at participating in an ecosystem in that way? This is something that strikes me every time.

Some of them are and some of them are not. The more they start to see headwinds, they lean more into participating. Ideally we want to do data collaboration with these partners because it’s better for our clients that we can say, “We knew more about this growth audience on the platform — I’m not going to say X because I’m not saying X —- on platform Y. We know more about them and this is—”

No one knows anything about X.

Right. “And this is how we’re going to grow your brand.” That’s a good joint story for a platform and an agency partner to come in to talk about because we’ve been able to actually share data and look at that in a way that’s beneficial for the consumer in the end.

There are only two business models, right? Bundling and unbundling. In the agency world, there’s a lot of bundling going on right now, right?

There’s a lot of bundling going on.

Obviously Publicis is huge. Omnicom just bought IPG. CAA is out here saying they’ve invented creators this year. I don’t know if anyone heard. They’re very proud of themselves, but they have a $250 million fund to take stakes indirectly in creator businesses.

There’s a lot of scale. There’s a lot of bundling going on. What do you think is driving that?

It’s the desired state of a system. Hence why we have a chief systems officer and there are capabilities that we built. Last time or two we met, I talked about building the commerce capability and the acquisition of Profitero that I led. That was really to get to a unique set of data so we could build a better commerce capability and advise our clients on how they should be investing in some of these retail media partner spaces at the time. How to win the digital shelf was really the business problem to solve when we made that acquisition.

That holds true for the acquisition of Influential. How do we create “creator” as a channel? How do we harness the creator in a way that’s also easier for clients? If you don’t bring those things into a bundled offer, it’s actually really hard for clients because there are seven different versions of Profitero calling on them. There are seven different Influential partners, or those types of partners that are calling on them, and then you’re looking at a decentralized set of technology, and it’s, again, ideally not tied into a single data identity spine.

The more you have them connected, the more you can actually say, “Did this really work? Did it really drive someone to buy more things?” That’s the reason why the capabilities are now being bundled. Think about them as capabilities versus assets in this conversation.

Talk more about Influential. That was a big acquisition two years ago. I’m assuming it’s been integrated. That was the big creator play for you. I know you were instrumental in that acquisition.

It feels like the creator economy has taken on a new shape this year. We are hearing more and more about the biggest creators in the world and the biggest platforms. Influential was much more of a scale play, right? It had an idea that you could go and do a lot of analysis of what was happening on these platforms at massive scale. How’s that working out?

It’s working out very well because we have taken their technology and connected it to our identity so that I can now see you, I can see who you follow, and then I can understand how to get closer to you or have either the type of right creator choice or right creative decisions that can get you to feel an emotional connection to my brand.

It’s also really that the creator as a channel is also super efficient. You can also have creators talk in a way that is a little more authentic to the audiences, where a brand maybe can’t go out with that message. But it’s very complicated. Before we had Influential, it was very hard. Every different brand partner had a different creator solution. We still are interoperable. We work with other ones that are out there like CreatorIQ, but it is easier for us if it’s connected into our system because then we can get to see if it actually worked faster.

What’s the step after the creator interaction? You open one of these platforms, you scroll some videos, you see some creator telling you to buy some product. Is it then to go search? Is it then to go open a retail app directly?

You mean for the consumer?

Yeah.

I mean, it depends. One of the hottest topics we’re getting right now is TikTok shops, which is another interesting topic we can have another day and that’s because creators are saying, “Don’t you want to buy this thing?” It’s a one-click opportunity to go get it.

For us, when some brands that are more used to selling through traditional retail channels, it’s a pretty big lift to build that out. It still is. But the desired state is, “I want to buy your kit of parts, whatever you’re talking to me about in your creator video, and I want to be able to buy it and do it then.” That’s a move we’re starting to see. We also just see “follow me and learn more about me as a creator.” It’s actually a cheat for CRM because if I’m a brand and you’re one of my power influencers and I want to really have an owned relationship with you, this is a way for us to get closer to you as a brand.

The reason I ask that question is I’ve run around the past two or three years asking every web host and web company why anyone should make a website now. If I was a new creative and I was starting The Verge over again in 2026, I would not make a giant fancy desktop website. I would probably be a TikToker. My dancing is pretty good. It’s not great, but I would probably start there.

The answer from all the web companies I’ve gotten is, “Oh, because you want to do retail and you want to escape fees on platforms. You want a different fee structure.” The best answer I ever got was from the CEO of Squarespace, who said, “A lot of people start websites with us just for the appearance of legitimacy.” Having the dot com — or I guess the dot ai now — gives you an appearance of legitimacy that a customer will go and transact against versus just dropping a TikTok shop and who knows what sort of Temu product you’re going to get.

I look at that and I say, “Okay, you’re going to go to the web.” That’s a move everybody wants you to do and the web is fundamentally under threat by agentic search, by AI overviews — everything everyone knows about. Do you see that changing in your funnels?

Interestingly, we are seeing more and more briefs for revising websites.

To do generative engine optimization (GEO)? 

Yes and no. It’s actually pretty interesting. This is something that the market talks to you, clients come in, they look for new things. Who would have thought, if you asked me at the end of last year, “Are you going to do a lot of website work?” I would have said no. We’ve seen a lot of it for two reasons. One, the future of websites is knowledge sites. Websites were built to contain a bunch of random information that didn’t really enable you to show up well in a single response to an LLM’s prompt.

So part of it is that, but also if you’re going to be a real brand and it’s literally your legitimacy point, you really need to have your own assets. You want to own that and eventually you don’t always want to have to funnel everything like packaged goods through a retail partner. You want to be able to have your own relationship. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to buy from that site, but the idea is that it is a site that, one, does its job of feeding the LLMs but also builds your brand and gives information, too. Old websites pretty much weren’t really built in a way that makes sense for modern consumers.

Who are you giving information to? Is it consumers? Is it AI agents?

Both.

Is it just Google?

No. I mean, yes. If you have to build, we build for machines and humans.

What do you think happens? Every time I go to Google I/O, I sit down with CEO Sundar Pichai and I ask him. Every single demo of search for years now has ended in a transaction. I don’t know if you have noticed this.

Every Apple demo ends with trip planning. Every Google demo ends with trip planning that ends in buying shoes. You realize the audience is partially Verge readers who just love tech and partially it’s other developers. And then a huge part of it is industry analysts and their investors and they want to see the revenue return on every single feature that Google announces and so they all end in transactions.

Over time, those transactions have taken place closer and closer to Google’s core platform. This year they announced intelligent shopping carts that are just going to track prices and execute a purchase for you. You’re talking about rebuilding websites. There’s a world in which the website is just the backend database for a very complicated Google system that is doing all of the things that you’re talking about. Is there a hedge against that or is that train just on the tracks?

It’s a little bit of a hedge against that. I would say that for many of our packaged goods friends, one of their biggest threats is Amazon. That is the Google in this story because if you are so dependent on a partner like Amazon that also can — and we like our partnership with Amazon — but they also are a place where, because of the size of their marketplace, if you’ve built a brand that has a story, is a known brand, some of these marketplace brands can immediately win because of how you’ve invested and built the category.

So you need to have your own assets to be able to think about what is your next story, what is your next move so that you don’t get commoditized. That applies to both Amazon and Google, to a degree.

Do you think they’re competitors in this space in that way? 

I don’t know. I don’t do any shopping on Google, so I don’t know if I would compare them to that. 

Have you ever planned a hiking trip on Google? They’re great at it.

[Laughs] Actually, no. I use this thing called Mindtrip. It’s my favorite. I learned about it in The New York Times. You go to Mindtrip and it’ll magically plan your trip. It’s pretty good. It can do most things and then it breaks in certain areas.

But this idea that you’re going to have a bunch of agents just planning the trips for you, buying all of the gear that you might want, or tracking prices for you, which is another big promise that everyone has. And then the brands might pay for preferred results in all of those spaces. That does seem like a more direct competitor to Amazon than not, right?

Absolutely, it does. I just think there’s the planning part and the transaction part. Those are two different things. I think on the planning, you’re competing. Amazon is trying to get up. They’re going to get added transaction into that planning component — when you think about all the things that they’re doing with their own creators and even just their move on full funnel and content, that’s really to make Amazon your total destination. But I think in the agent-to-agent buying space, the concept of trust is still very important. What you’re willing to do and not to do, I think as a consumer is still TBD.

Here’s my wonkiest tech question for you. Google is very, very proud —

[Laughs] This is hard. Oh, Lord.

I got it. It’s fine. Because again, is AI top-down or bottom-up? I understand how it’s bottom-up. We’re going to empower all of our smartest people to do agentic things in our workplaces. And then there’s top-down, which is that Google is very proud of its universal cart standard, where agents are going to be able to access carts across domains and compare prices and do all that stuff.

That’s a corporate decision. That’s a strategy decision and they’re pretty proud that everyone’s on board. Their argument to me is, “Well, we just needed something. And this is the something.” I hear the tech industry say, “We just needed something.” And I think, well, of course, but it’s this something that you control and everyone might need something, but no one is thinking it through.

At the end of this, one player will control it. When your clients and partners think about, “We’re going to adopt these standards for agentic workflows, for how commerce will be done in the future,” is there any pause to say, “Google’s going to control the standards again?”

Yes and no. The clients I speak with today are not as worried about Google as a commerce partner as they are about the transformation of their more traditional partners, like Amazon or other retailers, that have transformed from being a retail partner to being media partners.

That transformation is occurring over there, their media partners —

It’s changed this dynamic of what a retailer does and what a supplier or manufactured brand does. That dynamic has changed and that makes the negotiation between them such that they need each other to grow. When they’ve transformed into media partners, this changes that equation significantly. This is the whole retail media conversation. “Are they a media partner or are they our retail partner?”

Yeah.

That’s still much more the conversation. 

Has AI changed the dynamic of that at all?

Yes, because the more AI-oriented products they have, the more it puts focus on media investments with them because of these magical products. It’s not necessarily solving a core shopping problem.

So let me flip to the other side of this, because so far we’ve talked about tech and data and scale, and I think that is the promise of AI. “We’re going to automate everything. It is going to be magic. We’re going to do programmatic again.” All you need is data and they need your money.

The other side of this — and I’m just walking around here at Cannes — is creators everywhere. Something vastly more human, vastly more bespoke. My theory — and I was just wrong on this, so I’ll cop to it — I thought creator rates would fall drastically this year, as there was more AI content, as the platforms got more and more punishing about what would work on their algorithms, as they started doing their own content.

Instead, I look around and everyone here at Cannes is just so proud about how the cost per minute of video is skyrocketing again. What’s going on?

Again, it’s all about supply and demand. Once creators start moving into a more famous space, then suddenly they’re worth more. Last time we talked about this, we talked about the difference between a creator, an influencer, and a celebrity. I still think that holds true. 

Unilever went out, probably this time last year, saying that they were going to spend 50 percent of their dollars with all creators versus creative. To me, an interesting conversation is, “What is creative now?” If you’re putting it all in the hands of a creator, what does it mean to be a brand that delivers creative and how do you make those things work together?

Because we can’t have another thing that also prices us out of the market and you get to a point where you’re ceding so much control to the voice of the creator that that’s probably not going to build your brand over time.

The creators see themselves as marketers, at least the very best ones here. I mean they’re here at Cannes.

Small business owners.

They’re all small media businesses of their own. Some of them are very large media businesses of their own and they’re very open that what they do is marketing for brands. That comes right up against agencies. It comes right up against your creatives. All the creators know they want more control. They want the brief from the brand. They want business results. And they say, “Leave me alone to do it. I’m just going to do it however I want to do it.” What’s that dynamic like as you start working with the bigger and bigger creators?

We still hold true to brand fundamentals. Strategy matters. What the consumer insight is for that brand has to be something that’s an exchange between a brand and a creator in order for the creator’s work to really build what’s unique about that brand. It’s still the idea of freedom and a framework that that creator is briefed on. They control how they’re going to do it, but there are some tone and voice and things that, if a creator’s actually going to buy into this, they need to buy into that. That still is really the exchange. That’s always been the exchange. Do you remember when UGC started in Tongal? Do you remember that whole thing?

It was the same thing. I was working on Johnson’s Baby and we were trying to figure out how to really create authentic first-time expectant mom stories. We had this great debate about how we’re going to get the new creators — like mom bloggers, was the language — to get them to tell these stories. So we had this: this is what the brand stands for, here are some things, but you need to buy into this and believe in it. That exchange still exists. We just call them creators now. And then you can do it in a more scaled way, through a system like Influential.

I guess maybe my new prediction is that we’ll see a more barbell shaped creator economy, where the biggest creators are making more and more money than ever and the middle gets squeezed. Either you’ve got to get big, you’ve got to be able to command rates because you’re a celebrity, or you end up towards those UGC rates, where you’re just doing infomercials on TikTok and that’s the business. What’s left for the middle?

It’s a really good question. I don’t know the answer to that. I do think there’s so much demand for this space and there’s a lot of demand for the middle. So you could use it as a way to eventually launch yourself into this upper echelon of creators. Someone said to me that creators are daytime stars from soap operas, which I thought, “This is pretty interesting.”

Because they’re in your house?

Because they’re just so on. It’s not noise but they keep you company, they keep you busy and then all of a sudden, one of those people becomes a movie star. Which, to me, is a little bit of that middle of what you just articulated, where we know the creators. I’ve watched my daughter over the years, and I’ve watched all of her creators [grow]. Emma Chamberlain was a creator on YouTube who’s now a star, doing Estee Lauder ads or whatever she’s doing. She’s really a celebrity now, but she started as a tiny creator making adorable shows on YouTube.

One of the things that you and I were briefly talking about before we came onstage was at some point creators hit a scale where their businesses need to be businesses. That’s where you might need an agency to come in and actually operate your business. That scale is still pretty huge. It might just be MrBeast at that scale, and he needs to operate a full business.

But I see lots of creators. I think it’s fascinating that the creative economy is the only one where people routinely transition from selling bits to selling atoms. It’s crazy to me that the Paul brothers are like, “Bottled water is a good business to be in.” Historically not a great business to be in. Shipping water around the world is vastly more expensive than just making one more video, but there’s no business in making one more video that scales.

You have to make physical products and sell them to people and that scales. Is that becoming a bigger and bigger line for you? “We’re going to go find the biggest creators and make them products and scale that up”?

The last time or two we met, I had predicted that, at some point, there are going to be these creators that become enterprises, let’s say a MrBeast that actually needs an agency, and it has happened. We are now starting to see briefs from these scaled, started-as-a-creator businesses that have now turned into enterprise businesses, where they need an agency partner and they also need someone to help them to figure out how to invest their media so they can grow. They’re like real brands. 

MrBeast himself cannot flip over the bars at Walmart. 

I just think people need consultants. You need someone to help you.

No one has ever looked me in the eye and said, “People need consultants,” before.

[Laughs] I call myself a consultant. Look me in the eye. Yes.

I have here Accenture just bought Whalar, which is like an all time nonsense Decoder phrase, but okay.

Yes. You, as an enterprise owner or as an owner of a company, you need help to figure out how you’re going to get to your next growth path. This is what’s happening with some of these businesses. 

These creators that have turned into an enterprise who are wondering, “What is next? Gee, it’s expensive to ship water all over the world. What do I do? How do I do this? What types of partners do I go to? How do I figure out ways to grow my brand in unowned ecosystems?” Because that’s the quickest way to grow your brand, not just in your own channels.

There’s this term that I’ve been hearing called the influencer cliff. I want to give credit. The TikToker who came up with it is named Carmen Vicente. I’m only giving her credit because no one gives me credit for Google Zero. 

[Laughs] I do.

I’m trying to reinitiate karma into this world. It’s her term. It’s great. If you’re listening to this, we’ll put the video in the show notes. But her thesis is that creators can do the branded content because the audiences are there for the real content and they will tolerate the ads in support of the work that they’re there to see. And then when the creator transitions to selling their own product, this misaligns the audience from the creator, and when the brand integrations get too overpowering, it misaligns everybody, and then the creators have to issue apologies and they’ve fallen off the cliff. I see this all over the place.

I see this with tech creators. I see this with fashion creators. Once you start shilling the product directly, your relationship changes, something goes horribly wrong, maybe you backtrack all the way. There’s some class of creators that’s able to do it, that makes the transition to selling products directly. You’ve seen a lot of these now, you’ve seen the briefs. What qualities let you take that next step?

I think a unique product is really important, versus a me-too product that a creator has decided they wanted to sell. That’s important. You’ve seen some creators where it’s that they’re into sports or they’re an athlete, and they’re moving into a space that they feel like this is something that made them a better athlete and is a unique part of the market.

If someone’s following for that, then that makes sense that you would buy into that. When it feels like someone woke up and wanted to just put their persona on a certain brand and it doesn’t feel like it’s been their talk track to you as your friend, then it doesn’t work.

Do you see any particular products that are going to change categories?

One of the things that I think that has been really interesting but is not talked about, is actually a unique example and more of a celebrity example, are brands like Fabletics, Kate Hudson’s brand. It’s super interesting. It’s right in her lifestyle play and her desire to be healthy and all of that. And it was really her launching Fabletics, not her endorsing Fabletics. That’s not really a good creator example. I have to think more about that one.

I’m very curious because I think that’s coming.

Yes.

As particular rates at the top end of the curve go up, the idea that you can just launch your own brand and collect those margins directly, I get it. It makes rational economic sense. But I’m wondering if the audiences are going to take that at scale.

Even if you just look at traditional brands that are trying to scale DTC-like brands, it is very hard to do because it’s very hard to be found and the distribution part is very expensive. There is a reason why Walmart is incredibly successful, because they’ve solved the route to the consumer. And that is very challenging and expensive to try to build that out, even if the product is incredible.

You mean distribution of product out in the channel?

Yeah, of product.

Because I was going to ask about that. You talked a lot to the web. I feel like I have to ask you because I brought up Google Zero. Is that true in your world as well? It’s definitely true on the publisher side that traffic from Google is going down. Is discovery traffic to all those websites going down as well?

To publisher websites, yes. We are definitely seeing a change in partnerships from our publishers that are trying to understand how they can create custom content that is not as dependent on search, but it’s definitely something that is a big conversation that’s happening here.

I would say in this case, if you are a publisher and you really have an authentic, true voice, people will follow you. They’ll come find you. Versus if you’re trying to fight it out in search, that’s going to be very difficult.

All right. Well, I’ll be in the bar at the Carlton later, if you want to find me. Okay. We’ve got a few minutes left and then we’re going to do some audience questions. But I have a lightning round for you.

[Laughs] Okay. This hasn’t been a lightning round? Oh my gosh.

This hasn’t. No, this is the depth. All right. I have talked to a lot of tech CEOs and AI CEOs over the past year, and there’s a furious debate over whether AI has a marketing problem. Sam Altman will say, “We got to do better marketing. We got to buy a podcast for $200 million.” Great haircuts from those guys. I think about them every single day.

I don’t mean this as an insult. Those are some of the best haircuts in the world. I’m working on it. I don’t know if $200 million of podcast haircuts is going to fix it for OpenAI. Sundar Pichai will tell you it’s not a marketing problem. Satya Nadella will say we have to earn social permission. Do you think AI has a marketing problem?

I think AI is misunderstood. It’s a marketing problem and the problem it’s solving. I’ll say that one of my favorite people to follow who talks about AI — my friends here are going to know what I’m going to say — is Shelly Palmer. If you follow Shelly Palmer, he published something recently about AI being electricity and how electricity is really what fundamentally changed the industrial revolution. 

The companies that were fast — and he referenced Ford in this — to really reshape how they work and were able to get to more efficient production as well as speed to market, will win. I think that’s the lost conversation on AI, which is, for me, all of us have too much to do on our computers and our desktops, if you think about it. You can use AI to do those things, and you don’t call me because you’re like, “Hey, did you clean out your email box?” Things like that are not necessarily game changers that are advancing all of us. 

Also we have a lot of busywork because all of the work is distributed everywhere. The more we can use AI to connect those things and get those things done enables us to do more things like this. Once we use AI to transform the way we work and to be more efficient in how we’re getting to the outcomes, it’ll then make time in all of our lives to do the things that are going to be game changers. It’s a marketing problem and a misunderstood problem.

Is that going to stop the kids from booing at college graduation ceremonies?

I think so. Right now — and my daughter’s a third-year — they’re worried about their jobs because all they hear, to your point about a press problem or PR problem versus marketing problem, is that AI is going to be the thing that replaces all of them. I would say we want new young talent because if I watch my 12-year-old, he’s been doing Google Slides since he was eight, because of COVID.

All of them got right into Google Classroom and they all learned how to co-work and use many different apps at once and produce presentations easily. Anyone that’s coming out of school we want — we want bright, curious hackers. We’re not not hiring them because we need them. We need people as the lifeblood of our business.

Do you think AI creative is going to get good enough?

I do not.

No? Ever?

I do not. I think the minds and complexity of humans make great stories that you are attracted to. I’m not using the word creative. I’m using stories. I think AI enables you to be able to get to those concepts faster or to get to higher production more efficiently.

I went to an event and it was fantastic. It was a case for Virgin Cruises and they were talking about building these beautiful long-form content stories. The creatives were talking about how they used AI to be able to get to the concepts faster, curate from static art to digital art to really make these beautiful, multimodal boards, to bring this to life faster. But it wasn’t the core of the idea. They had thought, they had used their brains to come up with the idea.

It’s interesting. In our newsroom, we do a lot of first drafts now with AI — of art, not writing — because it lowers the stakes on saying things are good ideas or bad ideas and just that has empowered people to have more ideas. I see a lot of that. I would challenge you: I think at some point the bottom end of the creative, the UGC world, that stuff gets taken over.

For everyday creative, I’ll give you an example: product display pages that are when you search on Walmart or Amazon and that page gives you all this information. If it’s not done with robots, you’re not doing it right because that’s like looking at the back of a packaging.

If you really do it right, you can make it dynamic. It knows what you bought the last time and it can be magical, but that’s like everyday creative that we need in order to get to personalization. We should be using those tools to be able to do that versus someone making those in an analog world, which is where we all started on that. For some things. When I think about big creative and storytelling, it still needs humans.

I’ve asked you about GEO several times. I’m asking you now in lightning round format. Is this just another wild goose chase?

GEO?

Yeah.

No, I think for certain platforms, it’s a recast of search. We’re seeing this happening, where you need to be, instead of being found, you need to be known for, so that’s the GEO response. But I also think it’s a better curation of information.

I think it’s harder work for marketers because you need to be figuring out how you are leveraging Reddit or all these other different places so that you are showing up in a positive way with the LLMs. But I do think, if we’ve all been talking about the concept of personalization at scale, we should be delivering on that. GEO allows us to do that.

Have you had to change your SEO practice to account for that?

Talk about a practice that you thought was not going to be big. When you look at the capabilities you have and what you don’t think is going to be a high growth engine, our SEO team has exploded. In addition to new websites, this is a big one and that is really a conversation around influence. It’s how you’re showing up and how you’re also influencing LLMs when you actually get into that.

Is that something you can measure? I worry that LLMs are inherently non-deterministic. Every result is different. Do you have a system of measuring those?

We do. We do have an audit format to see what is your share of voice within that, so you can identify where you are in the moment, but it’s a movable feast in comparison to share of voice for search. It is something that we audit so we can start to see what the different levers we need to be pulling are. 

By the way, the LLMs are also fed by different things. Recently, one of the new ones is longform YouTube content. That makes sense — that tracks.

Why do you think we all make podcasts now? 

[Laughs] Right.

Everyone’s just trying to get to three hours of YouTube content. I don’t know if you can have a lightning round question that starts from a place of existential dread, but here we go. I feel like we’re all here. 

Did you all see Adam Mosseri’s post about customizing the Instagram algorithm two weeks ago? This is maybe one of the most important posts in the history of media. I’m not kidding. And of course, he issued it as an Instagram carousel, one of the least consumable forms of media that you can possibly have. It’s also on Threads. If your brain is broken and you use Threads, you can go look at it there.

It’s very long and it’s about how offering the ability to customize the algorithm was previously impossible because no one could describe the series of matrix multiplication equations that led to your algorithm showing you a piece of content, except LLMs can now. It can tell you why you’re seeing content in a very direct way. And then you can talk to the LLM and it can customize the algorithm for you. 

He said, “This is great and we think this will give people a sense of agency.” And then he went on and said, “Soon I will customize all of Instagram for you and the app will be different for every single person. Some of the experiences will be interactive. Some of the UI controls will literally be different. How we organize everything will be different. And you can see how this is the obvious future for us.”

He went on again and he said, “This might be bad. This might ruin the shared fabric of truth that we all rely on every single day,” which for a Meta executive is remarkably prescient, but he didn’t say he was going to do anything about it. He was just like, “Here’s what I’m going to do to you.”

I look at all of Cannes and I look at all of our talk about the creator economy, about measuring the data and I think, “Adam Mosseri is going to make Instagram different for every single person. That is his stated goal. He said it two weeks ago and he knows that this might distort literally our shared sense of reality, the media experiences we all have.” This is the lightning round question. It was a big buildup to a lightning round question. Is that good?

It’s terrible.

Okay. Is there anything we can do about that?

Not engage in it.

How do you not engage with Instagram?

If I told you about my oldest stepson, who is absolutely analog, that’s why. I think we are seeing more and more consumers [like that]. Think about it. If you sat down in front of your TV and it was like, “We’ve made all these decisions about you and you’re only allowed to do this based on…” It feels like Black Mirror.

If that happens to you, you would say, “I’m not going to engage in this anymore. I’m going to go read a book.” It’s also counter to the value proposition of a social platform around community. It was designed to make this connected world. So that’s the most disconnected world.

People are lonely and isolated. The more you’re just in your doomscroll, it will be terrible. We need shared community. One of the things that’s really interesting and a bright spot about creators is creators show up and they have a community, and they listen to their communities. They’re not influencing, they’re talking to their communities, in a way. Brands that do this right are really bringing the community along. It’s why we’re seeing the rise of IRL. People want to get together and talk about things.

Is it just going to be that competitive pressure that keeps them honest? I look at the creator economy and Instagram is a load-bearing part of the creator economy. Disrupting that, maybe you break the whole thing. What keeps them honest? What keeps them from going down this path that they’ve very clearly said they want to go down? Is it just people switching away?

I think it’s people switching away. When brands stop putting media dollars there, and all of those things come together, you might realize, “Wow, they’re not buying what I’m selling and this is not going to work for me.” There are plenty of platforms that are no longer [prominent], if you think about it.

Big blue Facebook. It’s there for my parents. It’s even on their own platform. Okay. Last question for you and then I think we’re going to take some questions. This one’s really easy. What’s next for Digitas? What should we be looking for this year?

What’s next for Digitas? We are very much focused on marketing systems and how we are helping brands build out their growth engines so that it’s not just about your media needs, your creative needs, your CRM needs. It’s how we can really make all of those different capabilities work together so that it’s easier for our brands to grow.

Great. Well, thank you so much, Amy. 

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 make all your credit card payments through X?

You’re describing a very different company. That means you obviously have had to restructure and refactor the company. How many people work at Patreon? How have you organized them today?

There are hundreds of people that work at Patreon now.Technically, by manager, we’re organized by function. We’re a functionally organized company. The people who report to me run functions, which, ironically, comes with all kinds of dysfunction. To solve for that, the way that we’re actually organized is by objective.

When you look at how we talk and what the company works on, it’s working on objectives. Teams are cross-functional and collaborative, and all the work ladders up into those objectives. When we run an all-hands meeting, which I did this morning, or when we celebrate work that’s happening, or when we do company planning, all of that is not thought of in the silo of a function. It’s thought of cross-functionally under any given objective. And that helps solve some of the problems associated with sort of organizing functionally, but not all of them.

That’s been one of the biggest changes over the last maybe five years is organizing by objective. That has been the most transformational for Patreon. Because if you don’t do that, then you have a marketing function with one set of goals, and an engineering team with a different set of goals, and that’s totally dysfunctional.

You’re describing kind of the classic Google-style “objectives and key results” framework, or is it something different than that?

We do use some of that framework. It’s not a perfect copy of objectives and key results. We have company-level objectives, and those have very clear key results associated with them, but I would say our system is different. 

Let me give you an example. One of our objectives is to improve core experiences on Patreon. Our product is very wide. We’ve made this shift from being a membership platform and bottom-of-funnel payments processing suite to being this top-of-funnel network and community and media product. 

When you do that, everything breaks — everything. You have to rebuild the entire product from the ground up, like architecturally, all the systems, with new infrastructure. And literally everything breaks: navigation, you have to build new privacy policies, you have to build everything. So part of our work is chipping away at all those things one by one.

Making the core experiences fit into the current vision and product that we want is a really important objective for us. We have 10 fixes every quarter that we chip away at, and by the end of the quarter, we want to have shipped eight of them. There are tons of cross-functional teams that are working on that across the company. It’s a little different from OKRs, but the spirit of it is the same.

The other question I ask everybody on Decoder is about decisions. You’re describing a very big decision. You’re describing an existential change to the nature of Patreon, and what your relationship to consumers should be. In many ways, you turned into a social network, which is a thing you’ve been fighting against.

Tell me about your framework for making decisions, and explain how you brought it to bear on that choice.

Sure. But before that, I have to combat the social network idea. I don’t call it that internally. I don’t say we’re building a social media app. That’s effectively, in my opinion, like saying, “Hey, we’re building better cigarettes.” Nobody wants better cigarettes.

I mean, some people really want better cigarettes.

Okay, fine.

They’re very popular.

Fair enough. But I don’t want to make better cigarettes. That’s not how I want to roll into my grave. I don’t want to do that. 

Also, I think, spiritually, it’s important, because if we go out and say, “Hey, we’re a social media app, what are we going to do?,” then our teams are going to look at what happens on Instagram and what happens on Facebook and we’re going to copypasta a bunch of features and it’s not going to make sense for our systems. 

Our optimization function is really different for everything in the product. Our algorithms that provide creators with discovery and distribution are not optimizing for watch time. Actually, Nilay, I don’t know what session time is on Patreon. If you were to ask me questions like, “What’s the average session time for users, for creators?” I don’t know. We don’t track it. We don’t A/B test against it. That is not what we’re doing. It’s not our optimization function.

So, grouping us into social media is just not true. We’re trying to build a fundamentally different system with different bones. Instead of looking at things like session time, we’re looking at deterministic reach. Are you able to build long-term relationships with the people that follow you? Are you able to reach those people? Are you getting connected pieces of media, as opposed to unconnected pieces of media? Are we giving creators and fans agency in their experience, or are we hacking their limbic systems, which is what it feels like on social media right now? I feel like I’m a lab rat. Are we optimizing for creator payments, which the platforms are not optimizing for? 

There are going to be some primitives that look like social media, but at the end of the day, the bones are different, and it’s really important, at least for me, to acknowledge that. Let me answer your second question around decisions, though.

I was very bad at making decisions, and I don’t want to say I’ve figured it out, because I think that’s a kind of thing we’re always learning. But there have been a lot of little things that I’ve learned that I’d love to share.

I hear a lot of heuristics that sound really great for decision making. There’s like, “Listen, decide, communicate.” There’s all these simple things. That’s not what’s been effective for me in making better decisions. Let me just give you a bunch of really tactical, specific things that have helped me make better decisions over time.

The first is, when we start a meeting where we’re supposed to make a decision, one thing I like to ask is, “Hey, does anybody have a strong opinion? Off the bat, are there any strong opinions in the room? Does anybody disagree with the recommendation?” Sometimes the answer is no, but sometimes somebody right out of the gate says like, “Yeah, I really disagree with the recommendation, and here’s why.” You just saved yourself half an hour of fluffy discussion at the top of a meeting. You cut right to the chase.

If you really press somebody with, “Why do you disagree?,” you hear three or four maybe genuinely good points, and then we can debate the merits of those good points. The whole room gets informed as you’re making a decision like that. I like to put some pressure at the beginning of the meeting to cut right to the chase.

The second thing is I no longer trust the framing of the decision. Sometimes the decision will come to the group and it’ll be, “Okay, here’s path A, here’s path B. Let’s choose.” What I’ve found is, more often than not, it’s not actually path A or path B, and sometimes it’s not even a decision. There’s literally just four or five action items that we can discover as a group, and march through those things, and solve the underlying problem that the decision was attempting to solve. It’s just having a discussion where we get clear on what the next steps are. Sometimes it seems like half of path A and half of path B, but actually, it’s a more bespoke solution that is a better solution to a complex problem.

Another thing is really great pre-reads. Man, you can spend 45 minutes just context-sharing. I feel very strongly about this. Meetings are not for information transfer. They are for debate and discussion. If we find ourselves spending 45 minutes in a meeting literally sharing context with each other, that’s wasted time, and we’re going to make bad decisions if people have information asymmetry. No wonder one person thinks we should take path A and another person thinks we should take path B. That’s because we don’t have shared context. Getting everybody to have shared context is huge, and pre-reads are a great way to do that.

Okay, let me give you a couple more. Naming that there should be a decision-maker. Oh my God, I’m still learning how to be better at this. Sometimes I find myself in a meeting where we’re all just arguing with each other, and then it’s like, “Hey, who is the decision-maker here? Who’s actually making this?” Having clarity around who the DRI is for that decision can be really helpful.

That stands for directly responsible individual.

Right, exactly. 

And then let me give you one more. About halfway through a meeting, if I find myself starting to be swayed in one direction or another, I just name that, and I say, “Hey, team, here’s what I’m thinking so far. Here’s where I think we should go based on the conversation we’ve had, based on what I know. If you think that’s wrong, tell me why.”

What often happens at that moment is that someone brings up three or four really good points for risks of taking that path that we hadn’t named before, and saying we’re going to go in this direction is what surfaces those extra risks and that extra click down in the debate, because it starts to become visceral if people feel like, “Oh, we are going in that direction.”

Then we can spend the next 30 minutes talking through those items and realizing things like, “Okay, do we want to build mitigation plans for those risks, or do we want to choose path B instead?” Just telling the team where I’m thinking and where I’m leaning in real time has created a little bit of pressure to get the real conversation out, and to identify more problems with the path as we go.

I have a bunch more lessons that I’ve learned over the years, which I’d be happy to share, but honestly, I keep these lessons like at the top of a doc when I’m having a meeting, so that I can just remind myself like, “Hey, do these things in a meeting to help drive it to conclusion.” And it’s been really helpful for me to just do that.

This is great. I have a Decoder book coming out, and we’re going to give you a whole chapter.

[Laughs] I’ll take it.

What I like about this, what I’m curious about, is there’s a lot of Amazon in there. DRIs are a very Amazon kind of idea, that there needs to be a decision-maker, and you need to identify them. And then there’s what I would describe as you paying attention to the emotional tenor of a meeting and making sure that’s driving it forward.

Is that just because you’re in a band and you understand the creative process? Because most of the executives I talk to think about this, I would say, mechanistically.  “We’re going to go from here to here to here, and these are the steps.” You’re very much describing how it feels to be in a meeting and controlling that feeling.

There are benefits of that, and there are drawbacks. I’m a creator. I’m a YouTuber. My background is not as an engineer. I didn’t come from product management. I came from literally making music videos on YouTube. I think it’s fair to say that my job for a long time was transferring my emotions to other people. That’s how I made my living, right? That’s the job of an artist: Can you make somebody feel something that you’ve felt? Can you communicate that feeling to somebody?

I’m very aware of that in a meeting, and I think that can be really helpful because you can add a little bit of pressure and push a conversation forward. It can also be dangerous because I can over-rotate on feelings sometimes. I’m not in the Elon camp that empathy is the curse of all humanity. I’m very opposed to that philosophy. I do not agree with that by any stretch of the imagination. But I do have to be careful that I’m not over-rotating on feelings. I think that the desire to make everybody happy can really drag things down sometimes, so I have to constantly be aware of that tendency in myself.

Put this all into practice for me. You described, instead of needing path A or path B, we’re going to drill down and find just the action items, and actually the decision is already made, and we just need to move forward. I’m curious for a real example of that, and then I want the bigger picture of, “Oh, I need to drastically change what Patreon is.”

lLet me answer your second question first, and along the way, I’m sure I’ll think of a specific example. 

For the bigger decision around this adjustment to Patreon strategy, the truth is, there is some element of top-down decision-making associated with a change like that, and there is some element of emergent strategy that comes from the organization. It’s necessary to embrace and even put some kindling against it to get it to be more holistic and full-bodied.

It started in 2020 probably, with bringing in more of a consumer product leader, who was thinking more about consumer experiences and less of a SaaS-focused organization. So less of the kind of B2B2C go-to-market motions, and more of the consumer product motions and talent and teams and company structures. 

That was a big shift in and of itself, just bringing in that leadership, and honestly, just a lot of learning for me, because this is my first job. I’ve literally never worked at another company before. In some ways, I don’t see the water, I don’t see the air around me. There was a lot of learning for me like, “Okay, how does this look different?”

Then as we were doing that, teams were suggesting things that we wanted to do differently, and a lot of that is coming bottom-up. Before, we were against native video. But then it was like, “Okay, but if we’re going to have discovery for creators, we need to have free accessible media on the platform.” You can’t have identity-based discovery. We’ve run those tests, they don’t work. If you land on a creator’s page, and there’s no free accessible media, you’re not going to pay that creator. You have no reason to. You don’t know who that person is. You have never fallen in love with their work. You need a way to fall in love with their work, which means you need free accessible media on the platform.

That was an emergent piece of the strategy that came from the organization. It wasn’t just like, “Ah, let’s turn on discovery, and put different creator profiles in front of everybody’s page.” We tried that and we tested that. It didn’t lead to conversion. The organization learned. We had systems to make sure that bubbles up to PMs and product leaders and to me and to the executive team. Then you keep chipping away at that flywheel, and over a period of two years, you start to home in on precisely what the right strategy is. There’s some amount of top-down push that comes, and there’s some amount of bottom-up strategic emergence that comes from the organization.

Let me ask you about just building a product in that kind of environment, when it’s the age of AI and you sit right in the middle of a totally polarized debate. 

On the one hand, every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they’ve ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of tokenmaxxing. Then in creator world, the audiences hate it, and they don’t want the slop, and every platform is overrun with slop, even though the audiences don’t want the slop, and something very bad is happening.

How are you bridging that divide? Because it’s obvious that the future of software companies looks AI-enabled in some way, I’m not sure which way it is, but it’s obvious that it’s some way. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all, because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly. 

This has been really challenging, especially in the modern environment of the internet. But I’ll tell you what I did. I just said what I really thought, and I spent a long, long time putting together my full thoughts. The end product is 45 minutes of me talking through these issues. And then I posted that. It is self-conflicting, and I’m holding two opposing beliefs at the same time, and I’m terrified, and I’m excited, and I’m really pissed at how all this has been rolled out and how little agency creators have gotten through this process.

Also, I find the technology magical. As an independent creator, I’ve always been interested in new technologies that help me accomplish my goals. I remember when the first digital audio workstations (DAWs) came out in the late ’90s and 2000s, and tools like Pro Tools where I learned I could record and I could make a record at my house, in my bedroom, and that led to the emergence of Pomplamoose, which was my band. I was obsessed with that.

Now, there were a lot of analog recording engineers at the time who hated the idea of a DAW. They thought it sounded cold, it wasn’t warm, it wasn’t analog gear. You’re not respecting the technology of recording, the skill set, the craft of recording. The same thing happened with YouTube and distribution systems when we started uploading to the internet. There was this whole backlash around that not being the real way to do music.

The real way to do music is to sign a record deal and go on tour, and Pomplamoose didn’t do that. We just distributed our own music through YouTube and sold MP3s on iTunes, and made enough money to buy a house, literally, off of MP3 sales. So, there’s always been this piece of me that embraces new technology.

The truth is that I am holding all of these ideas in my head at once, and I myself feel very conflicted about it. At the end of the day, though, here’s what I think is happening. The algorithms and social media platforms are so good at polarizing humanity, sorting and filtering us into one of two camps on basically every issue, whether it’s politics or news or technology or anything. The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps, and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI. 

I’m not saying there aren’t serious drawbacks and concerns, and that I’m not seriously angry about it. I am, but I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation around these technologies right now. Everything is changing for people, and this is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans. I think we’re at this place where boycotting AI is like boycotting the internet. That’s not a good strategy. 

I don’t like what Instagram has done. I disagree with a lot of their decisions. I still have an Instagram page. I still post and reach my community. I don’t like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year. I really disagree with those decisions. I don’t think they’re fair for creative people. I think they’re hurtful for creative people. And here I am on my iPhone. I don’t like what my federal government is doing right now, on so many dimensions, and I still pay my taxes, and I still live in the United States.

Sure, I get it. I mean, I understand this sort of “yet you live in society” argument, and I find it very frustrating too. I used to read Guitar World when I was a kid, and I’d read the angry screeds from analog recording engineers about Logic being cold. Fine, but I had a cassette four-track at that time, and I was like, “This thing sucks. I would much rather use my computer to record my music.” It was just very obvious. 

But Logic hadn’t stolen all of the music in the world to make Logic. And in fact, it was very obvious that the people behind Pro Tools and Logic and whatever else had a deep and meaningful appreciation for the music industry, and they were trying to make tools for musicians. 

The internet and social media have huge stacks of problems, and maybe they need to be addressed in different ways, but the value exchange of Instagram, I think, is reasonably clear to people. You run a lawn-mowing business, you can go find some customers on Instagram, and you’re good to go. Or if you just want to post dance videos on TikTok and reach an audience, maybe that’s the easiest thing that’s ever been in world history to do.  The value exchange for AI, I think, is so much more diffused that people hate it. 

But you’re a musician. I know tons of musicians who are like, “Look, AI is everywhere. Suno is everywhere in the music industry.” We just had Harvey Mason Jr. on the show, he runs the Recording Academy. He’s like, “It’s everywhere, and our line to give you a Grammy Award is you have to be mostly human.” That is as fuzzy of a line as can possibly exist.

You’re saying you’re sitting in it. I think I have the exact same kind of conundrum as you do. I love new technology. We have an audience of people who love new technology. We’re going to post this clip on the internet, and people are going to tell you, “Of course, it’s clear that you should hate it.” That makes no sense to me, because those same people are probably using it in some way. 

But you’re sitting in it, and you run a software company that services the needs of creatives who hate it. There’s no doubt in my mind that the software company side should be in full embrace of AI, and maybe the creative services part of the company, which is what the software makes, should not. Can you smash those together, or are you just trying to keep those far apart?

No, no, no. You nailed it, and this is the core of our approach. But actually, before I even get into that, let me just say that what ultimately is happening to creative people right now is disgusting. 

Every 10 years, there’s this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology, and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim that, “Well, it’s this new technology, and it’s either fair use, or copyright doesn’t apply because it’s transformative in some capacity.” This was the Google Books case, this was the YouTube case, where Viacom sued YouTube for $1 billion.

Then there’s industry mayhem around that, and that’s where we are now. We’re in the industry mayhem part of this cycle. We should be there. There should be a lot of lawsuits. In my opinion, there should be regulation to prevent this type of thing from happening with regard to AI. What’s essentially happened is these models have Borg’d the entirety of the free creative web from all these creative people, without paying them, without letting them opt out, and without even giving them credit. That is bad, not only for those creators, but it’s bad for society. The reason copyright exists, the reason IP law exists, is to create a societal-level incentive around novelty creation. That is the purpose of those laws. That comes from the Constitution.

Congress was given the power to promote the sciences and the arts. They wrote in “the arts” because it’s important to promote and to protect people who invent within the arts. It’s important for those rights holders to have rights. That’s why they’re called rights holders. So it’s fucking crazy to me that these models are allowed to just use all the work, and then claim transformation, and then have a fair use case, and get around it. All that is terrible.

I think your question is like, “Jack, how do you reconcile that with being a software CEO?” I’ll tell you, it’s a very practical approach. If Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company — and we are ultimately a product and engineering company — and use them to give the power back to creators, we, as a company, will be dead in three years.

Look at what happened with the mobile shift. These platform shifts are material. They have a massive impact on the people who are playing in these ecosystems. And if the companies don’t keep up with these new technologies, they will die. Patreon is much more useful to creators if we are alive, if we are shipping more valuable products at a faster clip that are higher quality. So, we 100 percent are embracing these tools internally. 

I’ve told our creators that we are embracing these tools internally. We are using LLMs to write more features. Our engineers are using LLMs when they code. We’re using LLMs to organize the team. We’re using Notion agents to crawl through pages, our own internal documents, and create summaries and help teammates understand who to talk to for which sorts of problems. We must embrace those tools. That is not a choice that we have, because I want us to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people.

So, what we have done with our product strategy and how we’ve… I don’t know if you want to say resolved the tension, but this is how we’ve thought of it. There are a lot of companies that are going to market loud and proud with, “Now we’re an AI company.” Creators don’t want us to be an AI company, and they don’t need us to be an AI company. We don’t need to build a whole bunch of forward-facing features for creators. If you look at what a feed on Instagram looks like now versus two years ago, it looks pretty much the same. There aren’t a whole bunch of changes because of AI. There’s a consumption experience, and there’s a community experience.

In many ways, Patreon is similar. There are some experiences that are different, and the way we think about where to use AI is to imagine a bullseye diagram. At the center of the bullseye is creators making their creative work. What creators have told us is, “Patreon, get the fuck out of the way. Let me make my work. Don’t give me script ideas. Don’t build me an agent that helps me come up with a video thing. Don’t title my post for me. Let me do the making. Get out of my way.” So, we get out of their way on creators making things.

And then one rung out from that bullseye is the packaging of that material. Now, creators, to us, have been a bit more open to using AI to package their works. What does that mean? Like automated chapter markers and things like that, or cutting long-form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is marketing, so helping a creator with automated email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is business management, and creators have even more openness to using AI tools to help them manage their business.

The best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, “Hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don’t need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet.” And that is our product strategy. Our product strategy is to help creators do their taxes and clean their toilet using AI, but we’re not going out and saying, “We’re Patreon.ai now, and everything is going to be an AI feature.”

I’ve explained all this to our creators in this very long 45-minute video, and I think for the most part, creators understand that Patreon has to keep up and use these tools internally. And also, it’s important for us to be an advocate right now for creative people and fight on their behalf, so that they’re not forgotten about through this new techno-legal cycle that we’re going through.

You published that video. It was a little bit ago, not so long ago. You’ve sat with some feedback. Did you change anything about your strategy? Did anything about the feedback to that video shift your thinking?

Yes. One of the things that came up in that process and a lot of the comments was around, “Okay, but Patreon, how are you going to prevent the platform from being overrun with slop? What are you doing from a policy and trust and safety standpoint to make sure that Patreon just doesn’t get clogged up like other platforms are getting clogged up?”

That was amazing feedback. We had already started thinking about that, but we accelerated those work streams. Actually, I have a meeting next week with a team that has a draft proposal for that. That’s a really hard problem, right? Actually, YouTube made an announcement about that this week, but the problem there is like, what do you label, or do you label?

How do you even detect it?

And how do you detect it? And if you can detect it now, what makes you think you can detect it a year from now? There’s no canonical system. There’s no API you can call and say with certainty whether something is AI-generated or not. That doesn’t exist. And even if it does, somebody’s going to build a tool that breaks that.

Our poor reporter Jess Weatherbed, her beat is AI labeling systems, and she’s like, “What are we doing?” She’s been on the show, and she’s like, “We keep pretending that these are going to work because we have to, but there’s no evidence that they ever will.”

Then there’s the reverse, which is, “Okay, maybe you label human-generated work.” I remember growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when manufacturing shifted to Asia, and there were all these “Made in the USA” stickers, and that became sort of a hallmark of, “Hey, you should buy this thing loud and proud. You’re voting with your dollars here.” 

I can imagine some type of future where something is labeled as human-generated, and that’s a loud-and-proud moment for people. So, that’s another way to solve the problem. Actually, Howtown, cohosted by Joss Fong who used to be at Vox, made an amazing video about this, just like flipping the labeling game on its head by labeling human-made work. There are a bunch of different ways to solve it. We’re thinking through all those problems, and that was a result of feedback that we got from the community as we rolled out some of this thinking.

You have platform competitors who are a little more wide open, with lots of similar features. In particular, I’m thinking of Substack, whose approach to moderation is famously laid out in the show as, “Screw it, do Nazis on Substack.” That’s just their vibe. I assume they’re going to allow tons of slop. There’s already a ton of slop on Substack.

They have the same core set of features, and I realize you don’t want to be called social media, but the features, if you just list them in a bullet-point chart, are all the same. You have a Twitter-like function, you’ve got podcasts, they’re pushing into videos, you’ve got follow features.

Substack’s promise to everyone is, “We’ll take 10 percent of your revenue, but we will deliver you the next new follower.” And they do it in all kinds of ways. I would even describe a lot of ways to do it as just straight-up dark patterns. You subscribe to one newsletter, oops, you’re subscribed to nine more. And some creators have gotten pretty antsy about this, and a bunch of big publications have left, like The Ankler just left, and now they’re on Ben Thompson’s platform, which I believe is called Passport.

You’re sitting in that same zone, right? Is your promise, “We will help you get the next new subscriber” in the same way as Substack, or is it, “People are going to download this app, and we will just surface stuff until you show up”? Substack very clearly makes the promise that they will deliver the next new subscriber to you. Are you making the same promise?

We don’t frame it quite like that, but we absolutely are going out and telling creators now, “Hey, we’re helping you get discovered. We are helping you find and grow your community.” That is a big piece of our value proposition now, and we’re talking about it loud and proud. We are now sending 1.5 million new followers to creators on Patreon per month from our own systems, and 750,000 free followers are becoming paid followers per month on those systems.

One of the big differences between us when we last talked and us now is that audience growth was previously not in our set of value propositions that we talked about, but it must be now. This is the whole point around being your own top of funnel for your own creators. If you rely on Google to do that, if you rely on YouTube for the audience growth, and you provide no audience growth, you are a bottom-of-funnel company that will be Google Zero’d. You just are. Lesson learned the hard way. We don’t want to wait for that.

That said, I think there are good ways to do that, and I think there are bad ways to do that. I’ll go back to Elon’s takeover of Twitter. You wrote that amazing article on how, with social media platforms, the product is the policy. The product is trust and safety. It is content policy, which I think Elon learned the hard way. Now, we see it. SpaceX filed their S-1, and we got to see their revenue cut in half since the purchase. I think he learned very clearly that content policy, trust and safety, is the product.

That’s a big piece of what we do, and that is a big differentiator for us versus Substack. We don’t allow Nazis. We don’t allow that. We have much more thoughtful moderation. There are some people who think that your content policy should be the First Amendment. That’s not how we think about it. There are things on Patreon that we think are good for the mission. There are things on Patreon that are not good for the mission.

I’m very proud of our content policy. I wrote the first version of it in 2013. It was 40 pages, with the help of an outside consultant, and we’ve iterated on that policy over the years, and I think we’ve done a really good job of enforcing it. I’d say one of the biggest differences between Substack and Patreon is our content policy. It’s not a “by the way,” it’s a main feature for us. And a lot of creators have left Substack and come to Patreon because of our content policy. 

It’s time now to talk about the sexiest topic of all, which is your relationship to payment processors. This is what all the kids have been waiting for. 

As you go up to the top of the funnel, you have a more direct relationship with consumers. The pressure to moderate more increases, and it increases from a number of different directions. 

I think when you are just the payment processor for a bunch of creators, you could get away with a lot more. In particular, you could get away with adult content, you could get away with people selling nudes. Patreon has a long history here. Now, you’re it. You’re an app icon on people’s home screens, with a direct relationship with consumers that you’re trying to pass on to creators. Payment processors like Stripe, Visa, and MasterCard can look right at you and say, “Don’t do this,” and you’ve had to comply. Talk me through that. 

This is pretty controversial. A lot of adult creators make their living on Patreon, or did make their living on Patreon, and it seemed like you had no choice but to agree. I’m curious if you thought there was an ability to push back, or if there’s another way forward.

There was not a way to push back in the early days. I think we’re far enough down the road now. I sent many 3AM emails to CEOs, begging for them to reconsider.

And that’s like the CEOs of Stripe?

Of payment partners and processors. Actually, never Stripe, but other payment processors. And that was a real challenge for us, Nilay. If they’re threatening to not be a partner to us anymore, then it’s not just that one creator’s income that’s at stake. It’s the $10 billion that we’ve processed on behalf of creators since the company was founded. We’re processing over $2 billion a year now. That’s a lot of income that we need to be a rock for those creators, and make sure that that income is protected for them. And so, these issues are really serious.

So, we did a couple things. One, over the years, we worked very closely with payment processors to understand their content policies and their constraints, and make sure that our content policy was acceptable to them. We co-iterated on those policies together, and we also continue to co-iterate on them because culture changes. 

Content policy is a living, breathing thing. It has to change as culture changes, it has to change as the internet changes. Now, there’s nonconsensual, AI-generated nudity. That was not a thing that platforms and payment processors had to worry about four years ago. Now, you have to worry about it, and you need a clear policy around it. So, one is, we worked with those partners to make sure that we had parallel content policies. 

The second thing that we did is we built a hot-swappable payments architecture, so that, as the company got bigger, we could just unplug one processor, and plug in a different one. And what that did is, it gave Patreon a little bit of leverage—not a little bit, a lot of leverage, in those conversations. Because we’re processing billions of dollars annually, and those processors want that volume. If we can hold back volume from them because we’re not happy with their content policy decisions, that helps us. That helps us fight on behalf of our creators and have the right content policy that we want for us. It gives us some negotiating leverage in those conversations.

Now, sometimes it’s not even the processors themselves, it’s the banks behind those processors, or the acquiring banks behind them. This stuff goes all the way up the chain. I wish it didn’t work this way, but this is how it works. So, we’ve had to both be more collaborative, and also build some systems that give us more agency like this swappable payments architecture, to solve that problem over time.

Now, we’re at the point, over the last few years, we haven’t had any P0 payments processing issues because we’ve done so much work on that, and we learned the hard way over the first chapter of the business, but that was a big problem like in the early years.

Do you have adult content on Patreon right now?

Yeah, we do. We have an 18-plus category. We don’t have porn, and our content policy does not allow porn. There are people who say you can’t define porn. That’s not true. You can define it, and we have. And we’ve done that in a lot more—

What’s your definition of porn?

There’s way more detail than I’m going to elaborate on live on a podcast.

[Laughs] Fair enough.

But we have detailed that. Pedantically, like in legalese, because the point of content policy is you want 10 humans to be able to look at a policy and look at a piece of media, and then have nine of them make the same decision. That’s how we try to write our policies in terms of level of detail. So we do have that level of detail baked in, and we know “this is pornography, this is not pornography.”

One of the things we want to allow for is that we’re an arts platform. We have to have free human expression in some capacity. So, we allow nudity. There are marijuana creators, and there are people who talk about whiskey, there’s all kinds of stuff. I want that stuff on Patreon. I want artists on Patreon. I want people who push the edge. I want people who expand the Overton window. I want people who are out there. I don’t want people who are just in the center of the bell curve. I want the people who are on the edges. Those are the people who push society forward.

In some ways, we have a liberal content policy, and that’s important to me on some dimensions. I want all those things. We’ve built policies to allow for those things, and now we have the payments architecture to support it as well.

I’m just personally required to have to say this every time: Justice Potter Stewart, who came up with, “I know it when I see it,” regretted it for the rest of his life. And even at the end, he was like, “I really wish I hadn’t said that,” because it is possible. You don’t have to be that subjective.

Let me ask you about the other payment processor conflict that seems omnipresent in the history of Patreon. You mentioned it already, which is Apple. We live in a world where Apple is constantly in some sort of legal fight that’s on or off with Epic, or the European Union, or whoever else it is, about the 30 percent fee. They’ve pushed you into forcing creators to be on monthly subscriptions, as opposed to some of the other plans you’ve had. You’ve changed some of your payment terms. I think everyone’s flat fee is 10 percent now, as opposed to 8 percent or 12 percent, which you had before. 

This all seems like just a big swirl to me of the same problems with Apple. Describe your current relationship with Apple, and if you think anything else is about to change.

I don’t think anything else is about to change. I hope not.

Are your creators still paying the Apple tax?

Yes. I disagree with that decision. I think that’s bad for creative small businesses. I don’t think it’s creator-first. I told App Store employees at Apple that to their faces. I tried to be polite, but also tried to advocate as best I could on behalf of creators. We have been advocating for that for years and years and years. Apple was very, very clear with us that the in-app payments system that they built was nonnegotiable.

We had these legacy billing models, that the billing structures did not work with IAP, and Apple was not going to support them. They were not going to build new features into IAP that would make those legacy billing structures work. And as a result of having to adopt that, we have to basically deprecate those legacy billing structures. That’s very painful for our creators.

There are two problems here. One is, creators have to pay the 30 percent tax for memberships that come in through the iOS app natively. 

Are you allowed to kick people to the web now? Is that one of the outcomes of the Epic litigation, that you can just tell people it’s cheaper on the web? 

Yes. And so, we did that, and we built that. After that Epic ruling, I think within like 48 hours, we had a new build submitted to the App Store where we built that flow. Apple, at first, was okay with it, and we pushed back this initial deadline that we had around our legacy billing model deprecation, and then it didn’t hold. They got in touch with us later, and were very clear again., I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with them over the years. When things come to a head, I’m personally in the room with them, talking about these issues with them.

They did extend the deadline for us. They gave us I think until the end of this year, as opposed to a shorter time period, which I thought would be really catastrophic for creators, because they have all these workflows and business models that they need to uphold. 

Oh God, look, even as I’m talking about this, I am so upset, honestly, I’m just so upset at this. They have such a stronghold on the system, and they’re able to throw their weight around, and now, here I am talking shit about Apple, live on a podcast, and maybe that’s going to bite us. But, man, it was hard working with them. And at the end of the day, I disagree with their decisions, and I wish they had given creators more leeway.

Can you kick people to the web still, did they hold that update when you shipped it? Were they weird about it? I’ve heard that they did not like it when other platforms shipped those.

Yeah, they didn’t. And that’s what I just talked through. They wrote us back, and that’s when we had to change the deadline or reinstate the deadline for the deprecation.

But the kick to the web is still there, and that flow still works? 

What we did is we gave our creators a way to up the price. Because we wanted our creators to have income continuity. A 30 percent hit on your revenue is unacceptable. So, we built a system that allows creators to charge an increased amount for memberships on iOS, such that the net impact to them is flat.

Now, what that ultimately does is pass the extra fee on to the fan, which is also a bad experience. But we pride ourselves on being a creator-first company, and so we told our creators, “Hey, we’re building the system. You can pass the fee onto your fans.” And a lot of them are doing that now. And then they just tell their fans, “Hey, if you want this without the extra fee, you can go become a member on the web.” 

That basically allowed creators to preserve their income, but it’s still a drag. It still passes the end fee onto the consumer, and then the fan ends up paying more, and there’s problems associated with that. It was not a good experience.

I want to end by talking about how you might push back against platforms. We’ve talked a lot about different kinds of platforms, and the different kinds of pressures they can impose on a creator and things you’re building to help creators take some control back.

The last piece of that is one you mentioned at the very top of the show — that maybe there are new kinds of networks to be built, where creators own their audiences, they own their follow graphs, where users feel more in control, where you can pick your own algorithm. 

Bluesky is run by very idealistic people who seem to think that picking your own algorithm will solve the whole problem in the end, and maybe to the detriment of all other product improvements, they’re laser-focused on that. Threads exists. It runs an ActivityPub. No one has yet interoperated with ActivityPub such that it makes any sense for Threads, but they keep doing it.

Mike McCue built Surf and with it you can browse Bluesky and Threads and Mastodon, all the open social networks. You have Quips, which is a social-ish product. They make social-ish objects on Patreon. You said you’re not federating yet, but you could. What do you see as the benefit of going to interoperate with those networks? Is it just bigger distribution? Is it bringing more content onto the Patreon platform? How should this work?

It’s creators owning their audiences. That’s the benefit. When we launched in 2013, I think we were the first platform that gave creators the email addresses of their fans when they signed up. And we did that despite advice that we got when we were raising money. People were saying, “Hey, this reduces switching costs. Why would you give them emails? Then they can just email their fans and tell them to go to some other platform.”

Our whole point was, “Yeah, that’s exactly why you should do it.” Because that lights a fire under our ass, to build a product that’s valuable enough to keep creators, and to keep their trust. That was part of version one of Patreon. It’s been in the product since. Sometimes I like to say Patreon was the original Web3 before Web3. We were trying to do things, and we had the spirit of building things, in a decentralized way using protocols.

You’ve got to be careful of that, because that definitely sounds like you were doing crypto scams.

No, no, no, no.

I was robbing you blind before any of these NFTs ever showed up.

No, but seriously, the spirit of it was emails based on a protocol, and there’s something really beautiful about that. And so, we want to make sure that we can pull that into Patreon as much as possible.

The benefit is creators having confidence that the platform isn’t going to fuck them. Even if the platform changes, or enshittifies, or does something that is abusive to their users, they can then take their audience elsewhere and use some different front end to interact with their network. That is ultimately the benefit. 

That’s a signal that the company believes that power is shifting away from institutions and towards individuals, which I believe. I believe that companies that embrace that, over the long run, are going to be the companies that empower that movement, and are chosen by people, and used by people. And the companies that fight that, ultimately, I think will lose. 

It sends a very powerful signal to the market that we want to treat people well, and that we want you to own your data. We want you to own your social graph. We want you to own your relationships, not us. You can hold us accountable for building a great experience, because if we don’t, you can just choose somebody else.

I feel like I could do a full hour on that with you, because I’m very curious if there are products to be built with these technologies that aren’t just signaling, and there have yet to really be any. 

The existing platforms built on these technologies actually still appear to be closed, right? Threads is maybe the most algorithmic of them all, even though it’s built on open technology. I’m very curious if it is all just signaling, or if the actual accountability mechanism of “you can leave” exists.

I think it’s really early right now for that technology. It’s not in mainstream consumer consciousness yet. Mike McCue talks about this, but the only way that we think about it is the fact that we own our phone numbers. You can change providers and keep your phone number. So, in that sense, you own this unique identifier that you can carry across different networks, but people don’t think of the internet like that yet. 

I think eventually people will think of the internet like that. Again, this isn’t on our road map. I’m not saying this is something we’re going to go do next quarter, but it is something I think about. I would say it’s one of three things that humanity ultimately needs to do differently for the next two decades of networks. It’s three things.

I think that the first is the business model and the optimization functions of the platforms. Are you optimizing for watch time? Are you optimizing for things that are actually in concert with human flourishing? 

The second thing is, does the platform own the network effect, or do the people own the network? Do you own your own data? Do you have access to that data, or are you blocked into a walled garden? 

And then the third thing is governance. Governance that keeps platforms focused on the mission and the customer in a way that I think they’re not right now. Case in point is Twitter. There needs to be more structural integrity around governance systems for companies over the next phase, that pushes them to do right by users and the people that make the product what it is. 

There’s a guy named Eric Ries who wrote this book Incorruptible who’s talking a lot about these new types of governance systems, and the book is amazing. His thinking is amazing. I think it’s actually a very big idea, one of the best ideas in the field of economics that I’ve heard since I’ve been alive, and could potentially change the way companies are organized and structured.  That’s the third leg of the stool:  governance that is robust and allows a company to be true over a long period of time. 

If you do those three things — like different business model and different optimization functions, the people own the network instead of the platforms, and then the right governance to keep the platform true to its mission and customers over the long run — that, I think, is a pretty good bet for the next two decades of networks. I think that will do a better job than the last two.

Well, Jack, I can’t think of a better place to end it. It also sounds like we’ve got to go talk to Eric Ries for the next episode of Decoder.

Oh my God, you’ve got to get him on. Seriously, this book is, I think, world-changing. I really do.

Jack, we’ve got to leave it there. You have to come back sooner than five years, because it feels like a lot of things are coming to an end, and the new internet is being born and I want to catch up with you on it. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

Thanks, Nilay. I appreciate it.

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