Reddit partners with Patreon to offer up a special flair, put a focus on creator communities

Attention redditors and patrons, Reddit and Patreon are partnering up.

Reddit, the #5 most visited website in the U.S., and Patreon, a growing membership platform for creators, have just announced a partnership that will “offer creators and fans a better way to connect.”

The announced partnership between the two companies, for now, looks fairly simple. The two platforms will integrate in order to offer creators’ Patreon subscribers with a “special Patreon flair” within that specific creators’ Reddit community. Essentially, people monetarily supporting a content creator via Patreon will receive a little visual badge next to their Reddit username as a sort of bragging rights over the non-paying fans who are part of that creator’s Reddit group.

You can see it in action on Reddit in the screenshot below. According to Reddit, the integration is currently being tested with a few select Patreon creators and will start rolling out more broadly by the end of the month.

You’re probably familiar with Reddit, the fifth most trafficked website in the United States, but in case you’ve been stranded on a deserted island, it’s basically a place where people, redditors, can share links and commentary within specific nice community groups called subreddits.

It’s a bit more forgivable if you haven’t heard of Patreon. It’s a rising platform within creator communities offering folks who create content a simple way to set up a membership website in order to earn recurring revenue from their fans. In turn, the creators usually provide these paying fans, known as patrons, with bonus content through the platform.

If you are or have been patron of a creator on Patreon, this might seem a little similar to the Discord integration that the platform offers. Currently, Patreon creators can offer their paying fans a bonus that includes special roles and access to private channels on Discord, a community-based chat application popular within gaming and other more internet-savvy communities. The difference between the Reddit integration and the Discord one is that Reddit is focusing on public engagement. There is no option for Patreon creators to provide some sort of private subreddit access. The point is to show off that Patreon flair to your public Reddit community and grow a subscriber base on both platforms.

This may seem like a fairly small update coming from both companies, but a site as colossal as Reddit partnering with a much smaller platform like Patreon shows that the “front page of the internet” is focusing the people and communities creating the very type of content that drives people to the site.

It’s also a pretty significant look at where things are headed. The massively popular, free-to-play video game Fortnite has earned over a billion dollars from in-game purchases that do nothing but offer players different costumes and dance moves — basically non-performance enhancing visuals, pretty much the equivalent to a Patreon flair on Reddit.