Offbeatr

» see offbeatr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Offbeatr existed because Kickstarter had a rule. Adult work was off the platform, and that left a real category of people with an audience willing to pay and no mechanism to collect. A Los Angeles company called Extra Lunch Money opened Offbeatr on 9 August 2012 to be the mechanism, and the coverage settled on the same shorthand within a day: Kickstarter for porn.

The design was not a copy though. On Kickstarter you post a project and it goes straight to money. On Offbeatr a pitch first went to a public vote, and only when enough of the community voted for it did the funding page open. Two gates instead of one. You could pitch media or an event or an object, and you could also just sell work you had already finished, which made it half a storefront.

It ran in seven countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Australia and New Zealand, which is a list drawn by whichever banks were willing rather than by where the audience was. Turkey was never going to be on a list like that, and adult payments were not a corner of the web I had any reason to be near. This is reconstruction, done from the outside.

~ the record ~

~ the vote before the money ~

The vote gate reads like a moderation tool and it was, but it was doing something else too. Crowdfunding fails when a creator with a small audience posts a goal nobody was ever going to reach, and the failure is public and discouraging. Making people vote first turned that into a free poll. If the pitch could not get votes, which cost nothing, it was certainly not getting dollars, and it never had to fail in front of anyone.

The side effect was that Offbeatr's front page became a ranked list of what a specific community wanted made next, which is a strange and fairly honest document. Nothing on the site pretended the audience was anyone other than who it was.

~ the payments problem ~

Everything hard about running Offbeatr sat in the payment layer. Adult businesses already get classified as high risk by card processors, with higher rates and thinner patience for chargebacks, and crowdfunding on its own is awkward for a processor because money is authorized now for a product that may arrive in eight months or never. Offbeatr was both at once. Finding anyone to handle it delayed the launch and constrained the site every day it operated.

This is the same wall that took down the payment side of Jennicam a decade earlier and the same one that made Patreon and every other creator platform write careful adult content policies later. The rules that decide what can be published on the internet are not written by publishers. They are written by whoever moves the money, and they get enforced by silently withdrawing service.

~ who actually used it ~

By 14 February 2013, eighteen months in, the site had funded seven projects totaling a little over seventy thousand dollars, and most of that was furry fandom commissioning its own artists. That is a small number for a platform with press coverage in Gizmodo and on CNBC, and it is also a completely coherent one. The fandom already had a working culture of paying artists directly, so a funding tool built for it landed on people who understood the transaction.

The closing note went up on 2 february 2016 and the site was inactive by the ninth. The stated reason was changes in corporate structure, which is the phrasing you use when the real reason is a contract you cannot discuss. Nothing replaced it directly. The work moved to Patreon and to subscription sites, where the same processors apply the same rules, and creators there have been getting the same letters ever since.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »