At least for now, ARLnow has weathered the storm caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and we've done it with your help. Back in March and April, things were looking bleak. For a time, advertising sales were down over 40% and new sales had nearly stopped. We were staring into a void of financial losses and
Patreon creators have a new option to interact with fans, as the subscription platform just rolled out a group chat feature. This community chat allows creators to interact with fans, but also lets subscribers talk to one another in a space outside of comments. Creators can have up to four chats going at once and there’s a toolset in place to allow certain restrictions as to who can participate.
The fan membership platform Patreon is beginning to roll out a chat feature, connecting creators directly with their fanbase in a group message. The offering will become available to some creators today, but will spread more broadly within the coming months. Patreon has long had an integration with Discord, which automatically adds patrons at certain membership tiers to a paywalled Discord server (so long as the patron has their Discord account linked to Patreon).
Spotify and Patreon partnered to launch an integration that lets fans listen to subscriber-only Patreon audio directly from their Spotify account. This tool is especially useful for podcasters on Patreon, who often incentivize fans to join their paid membership programs by offering exclusive bonus content. As it stands, podcast fans generally listen to paywalled content either on the Patreon app itself, or more often through RSS, an automatically updated feed of content.