Patreon is changing their fee structure in a way that substantially increases fees, especially for patrons supporting large numbers of creators. Creators and patrons are crying out in droves. Patreon doesn't seem to care. Why are they doing this?

Patreon has hit a very dangerous point in the life of a company, where the math of company metrics starts to smack you around.

When investors look at growth companies, their focus isn’t about the current value of most metrics. They care about rate of change. They want to see sustained, high-percentage growth.

Suppose that the metric you've been pitching to investors is "monthly active creators".
When you only have, say, 2000 creators, adding 500 more is a 25% improvement -- a good-looking result.
When you have 50000 creators (https://www.patreon.com/about), adding 500 more is a 1% improvement. That looks like nothing.
You need 12500 more creators to get that same 25% improvement that investors are used to seeing. That's really hard.

To make matters worse, when you have 50000 creators, everyone else – Kickstarter (Drip), Gumroad, etc. -- says "Hey, that's a market worth pursuing." Competition makes large-scale growth even harder. And your competitors are smaller, so now they’re the ones who can produce big percentage rates of growth relatively easily.

If this is indeed the problem, then at this point, Patreon can do one of three things.
* They can say “Hey, we’re no longer a growth company. We’re a mature service company. Deal with it.” But then investors will value them as a mature company rather than a growth company. That valuation will be quite a bit lower.
* They can do increasingly hard, increasingly expensive things to try to keep their current metrics growing at high-percentage rates.
* They can say "Hey, investors, that old metric doesn't match the current state of our business -- here's a new metric you should care about, and look how that's growing!"

Judging from this investor-focused article, it looks like Patreon may be going with the third option here. "Hey, investors, what you should care about is the creators making a life-changing amount of money!" That's a much smaller number -- and they can choose how small it is by arbitrarily defining the "life-changing" amount. It's easier to produce impressive-looking percentage increases in that number.

And when someone points out that the old metrics are stagnant or even dropping, Patreon can say "That's okay, that's no longer the focus of our business, and we're streamlining to produce better results in our core market."

It may or may not be a successful pitch, but it may very well look better than the other options.

And it's almost certainly not good for many creators or patrons; but hey, that's their problem, right?