BoysDo vs Patreon: The Tip Jar vs. the Storefront

Patreon Is the Bill You Send Your Best Fans. It Is Not the Place That Made Them Fans.

Patreon's contribution to the economics of independent creative work is, on balance, real and good. The model is straightforward: a fan pays a recurring monthly amount to a creator they already follow, and gets, in return, exclusive content, early access, a closer relationship, sometimes physical perks. For gay erotic photographers specifically, Patreon offered a way to get paid for work too explicit for Instagram and too small-scale for the studios — a survival mechanism that has kept a number of careers viable.

But Patreon is, structurally, a tip jar. It collects money from fans who already exist. It does not, in any serious sense, make new ones.

That distinction is the entire shape of this comparison.

What Patreon Does

For a creator with an established audience — someone whose Instagram has 50,000 followers, whose Twitter is active, whose name is already in circulation in the relevant communities — Patreon is a working business model. The tier structure can be designed around the work. The exclusive content tier, the polaroids tier, the print tier, the one-on-one Q&A tier — these are real revenue lines that can add up to a survivable monthly income for a working photographer.

The platform's content policies on adult work are restrictive but workable. NSFW Patreons are allowed but cannot be promoted on the public Patreon home page, must be flagged appropriately, cannot be transacted via certain payment processors, and have to navigate ongoing policy shifts driven by payment-processor pressure. The risk is not zero — Patreon has periodically tightened policy on adult content under pressure from Mastercard and Visa, and creators have been demonetised or banned mid-career — but for now, working as an adult creator on Patreon is feasible.

What Patreon Doesn't Do

Patreon is closed by design. The tiered content lives behind paywalls. The browse experience for someone who is not already subscribed to a particular creator is essentially nothing — Patreon's discover page is a functional afterthought, the search is poor, the algorithmic recommendation is non-existent. The platform is built to deepen relationships that already exist, not to start new ones.

Which means: a gay photographer who launches a new Patreon page from scratch, with no audience elsewhere, will earn approximately nothing on it. The model assumes the audience-building has happened on a platform that does that work, and Patreon is the conversion mechanism at the end. Without the front-of-funnel platform, Patreon is a billing system attached to no business.

For most of the 2010s, that front-of-funnel platform was Tumblr. Then Twitter / X. Then a fragmented combination of Instagram (with the work hidden), Twitter (chaotic, increasingly throttled for adult creators), and TikTok (which doesn't really host this content at all). The discoverability story for gay erotic photographers has been getting worse, not better, for the entire period that Patreon has been growing.

What BoysDo Is For

BoysDo is the front-of-funnel platform Patreon needs to exist downstream of. The publishing platform where photographers can show the actual work, build an actual audience, and create the relationships that — for the photographers who choose to monetise — Patreon is then the right tool to capture.

The two platforms are not in competition. They are sequential. A working gay erotic photographer in 2026, doing this seriously, probably has a published presence on BoysDo where the audience-building happens, a paywalled Patreon (or OnlyFans) for the deeper-relationship monetisation, and a print-or-zine arm for the high-margin one-off purchases. The publishing platform feeds the membership platform feeds the print operation.

Without the first link in that chain, the rest of it doesn't fire.

What This Looks Like for the Viewer

For the viewer, the practical version of this is: you discover a photographer on BoysDo because their work shows up in your feed, you follow them because the work is good, you read their bio, you find their Patreon, you decide to subscribe. The decision happens because you've already had the experience of looking at their work as a continuous body rather than as one image extracted from a search.

Patreon could not have produced that decision on its own. It does not have a discovery surface that surfaces work to people who don't already know they want it.

The Verdict

Patreon is the right tool for converting fans into supporters. BoysDo is the right tool for the part that has to come first, which is creating the fans. For working gay erotic photographers, you almost certainly want both, in that order. For viewers, BoysDo is the platform you can actually browse without a subscription decision attached to every link.

[Find the photographers worth supporting →](https://boysdo.com)

Read our full guide: [Where to Find Artistic Gay Erotic Content Online](/articles/guide-where-to-find-artistic-gay-erotic-content)