Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its staff, amounting to 93 employees, according to a blog post from CEO Jack Conte. The announcement, first reported by 404 Media, states that while Patreon’s business is strong, adjustments are necessary for a stable cost structure to better support creators.
“We’re making a number of changes to our organizational structure and how we work,” Conte said. “Specifically, we’re flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities, and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change.”
Laid-off employees will receive 16 weeks of severance plus an additional week for each full year worked, medical benefits until the end of the year, and a stipend to purchase a laptop. Additional payments are available for some employees who do not qualify for other severance packages.
Conte emphasized the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the restructuring. He stated, “AI is not a replacement for human creativity, but it does have an impact on how we operate and organize.” Earlier in the year, Conte warned that failure to embrace AI could lead to the company’s demise within three years.
Despite its internal shifts toward AI, Patreon has taken steps to protect creators from its implications. The company announced on July 16 that it will adopt Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control tool. This tool will limit how companies can scrape data from creators’ pages to train AI models while allowing limited search crawlers for content discovery.
Patreon previously relied on paywalls that minimized crawler impact. However, as the platform encourages users to offer free content and engage socially, it increases the vulnerability of creators’ work. “Some search crawlers can actually help people discover creators off-Patreon. They index pages, organize information, and direct users back to original sources like your Patreon,” the company stated, while asserting the need to restrict data scraping for AI training.
