OpenAI Brings in Patreon’s Founders to Build a Creator Business

OpenAI has hired the people who built the largest membership business in the creator economy. Patreon Co-Founder Sam Yam is joining to lead a new division called Creator Product, The Information reported. He is bringing Drew Rowny, Patreon’s former head of product, and Shannon Ma, its former head of engineering.

Yam wrote on X that the team will “build together with Creators at OpenAI and share early access to a new set of tools.” He pointed followers to OpenAI DevDay on Sept. 29 and said he was already experimenting with early versions. OpenAI has not said what the tools are or whether creators will make money through them.

OpenAI’s creator products so far have been about output. ChatGPT writes, DALL-E draws and, until this spring, Sora made video. None of them touched the part of a creator’s business that Patreon owns: the fan who pays every month.

According to Patreon, more than 300,000 creators use its platform, more than 10 million fans pay for memberships each month, and creators have earned more than $10 billion since 2013. Yam ran its technology for 13 years. Rowny came from Google and Ma from Facebook, according to their LinkedIn pages.

That is a team that knows how to turn an audience into recurring revenue. It is not a team OpenAI would need for a better image generator.

Why OpenAI Wants a Second Consumer Business

The hires land as OpenAI works to make money from the free users who make up most of its base. The company last month introduced ads to a free tier used by more than 1 billion people a week. Creators are a natural next step. They bring audiences, and audiences bring advertisers and subscribers.

ChatGPT’s lead is also narrowing. Comscore found that ChatGPT’s share of AI prompt volume fell from 70% in January to 50% in June, while Google’s Gemini rose from 17% to 30% and Anthropic’s Claude from 2% to 11%. Total use kept growing. What changed is how it is split.

OpenAI’s last big creative bet did not hold. Sora peaked at about 1 million users and fell below 500,000 before OpenAI shuttered the app in April, TechCrunch reported. A creator division built around audiences and memberships is a different kind of bet.

Crowded Field With Thin Margins

The market is large and already tight. Goldman Sachs estimated the creator economy could reach $480 billion by 2027, up from $250 billion, with brand deals making up about 70% of creator income. YouTube, TikTok and Meta pay creators from ad revenue. Patreon, Substack and Kajabi handle subscriptions. Shopify handles the merch.

Patreon shows how hard the middle is. The company laid off 20% of its staff in July and then published a roadmap to rebuild discovery for smaller creators, The Next Web reported.

What OpenAI has that Patreon did not is distribution. A creator tool inside ChatGPT starts with a billion weekly users on the other side of the screen. Whether those users will pay a creator or whether OpenAI wants a cut when they do, remains to be seen.