A clearer picture of your members and what's driving your earnings

For some creators, understanding your audience can be challenging, and feel like guesswork. You can see your total member count, but you don’t have a clear understanding of how this breaks down between members with an active payment vs members on a free trial or gifted membership. You may see your Patreon earnings for a given month, and not know not what exactly drives it. And when a member's payment fails, they quietly fall out of your reachable audience with no clear path back, and if you have limited space in your tiers, this could cause them to hog a space from an enthusiastic fan waiting to nab that spot.

To help creators get more clarity and make informed strategies, we've made updates to Patreon's Insights to help creators tackle these challenges head on. Read on to learn more about updates to Insights.

A fuller picture of who's in your community

Your active member count now includes people on free trials and members whose payments are being retried—so the number you're looking at actually reflects who's currently engaged with your work, not just who has a successful payment on file.

New paid status filters let you break your membership down even further, by free trials, gifts, active payments, and retrying payments. Instead of one total number, you can see exactly what your community is made of: how many people are mid-trial, how many joined via a gifted membership, and how many are in a payment retry cycle.

This makes it a lot easier to understand who your members are made up of, and where there may be opportunities to convert more fans to paid tiers over time.

What happens when a member's payment fails

Previously, when a member's payment repeatedly declined, they'd fall out of your reachable audience entirely. You'd lose the connection, and they had no clear path to jump back. If the member was in a paid tier that had limited space, they'd be stuck in that tier, preventing other members from paying for that spot.

Now, after about 30 days of payment retries, members with failed payments are converted to free members. They stay connected to you and your Patreon community, with access to your free and public posts to keep seeing your work, and have a natural path to jump back in to a paid tier when they're ready.

In fact, these members are roughly twice as likely to resubscribe to your paid membership as before!

Note: During the ~30 days when we are retrying a payment, these members do not have access to your paid membership benefits.

Understand what's actually driving your earnings

The earnings tab now breaks down by tier and billing cadence, so you can see which tiers are contributing the most each month and how annual vs. monthly memberships are splitting out.

This also helps explain something that's been a longtime source of confusion: why your earnings and member numbers don’t always move the way you'd expect.

Patterns that are now much easier to spot:

• A spike in earnings doesn't always mean a spike in members. If a few members join an annual tier, earnings jump for that month without a corresponding jump in your member count.

• Higher-priced tiers could carry an outsized impact on revenue. A handful of member joins or cancellations at a premium tier can move your revenue significantly without changing your total member count much.

Our Insights Dashboards and Membership Insights Help Center articles have more details.

You can also learn from our Get to know your Insights dashboard interactive tutorial, or read our post to see what drives growth with post insights.