"Rich-Get-Richer"? Platform Attention and Earnings Inequality using Patreon Earnings Data

Abstract

Using monthly Patreon earnings, we quantify how platform attention algorithms shape earnings concentration across creator economies. Patreon is a tool for creators to monetize additional content from loyal subscribers but offers little native distribution, so its earnings proxy well for the attention creators capture on external platforms (Instagram, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter/X, Facebook, and ``Patreon-only''). Fitting power-law tails to test for a highly unequal earnings distribution, we have three key findings. First, across years and platforms the earnings tail and distribution exhibits a Pareto exponent around $\alpha \approx 2$, closer to concentrated capital income than to labor income and consistent with a compounding, ``rich-get-richer'' dynamic (Barabasi and Albert 1999). Second, when algorithms tilt more attention toward the top, the gains are drawn disproportionately from the creator ``middle class''. Third, over time, creator inequality across social media platforms converge toward similarly heavy-tailed (and increasingly concentrated) distributions, plausibly as algorithmic recommendations rises in importance relative to user-filtered content via the social graph. While our Patreon-sourced data represents a small subset of total creator earnings on these platforms, it provides unique insight into the cross-platform algorithmic effects on earnings concentration.