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Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place, was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the hardest problems on the internet: micropayments.

By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades. The problem with micropayments was that there was a huge amount of things that people buy for very small amounts of money, and a huge amount of what people wanted to buy on the internet were things that could not reasonably be priced more than a few bucks – one track on an album, for instance – but the transaction costs for very small purchases were such a large percentage of such purchases that they weren't economical. The payment processing fees put so much friction on small purchases that they pretty much killed them dead.