Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its staff

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Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its staff or 93 employees, according to a blog post from CEO Jack Conte. The layoff announcement, which was first reported on by 404 Media, notes that while Patreon's business remains strong, it needs to adjust the company's cost structure to make it "a stable, dependable rock" for creators.

"We're making a number of changes to our organizational structure and how we work," Conte says. "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 be offered 16 weeks of severance and an additional week of pay for each full year they worked at the company, along with medical benefits through the end of the year and a stipend to purchase a laptop. The company is also offering additional make-good payments for some employees who aren't eligible for other payouts.

As in other layoffs, the specter of AI looms large over Patreon's restructuring. "AI is not a replacement for human creativity," but it does "have an impact on how we operate and organize," Conte says. The issue is seemingly existential: In an interview from early this year, the CEO stressed that Patreon needed to embrace AI as a "product and engineering company" or "we, as a company, will be dead in three years."

That stance is notable because the company has largely taken the opposite tact when it comes to the creators that use its platform. Patreon announced on July 16 that it's adopting Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control tool to limit what companies are able to scrape from creators' pages to train AI. When the majority of Patreon's content was blocked by a paywall, crawlers were a non-issue, but now that the company is encouraging users to offer free content and use the platform as a form of social media, more creators' work is vulnerable.

"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 said in the announcement. "Other crawlers collect your work to help train AI models. We're continuing to allow the former while restricting the latter."