# The Business of Belonging

> A landscape look at the online-community software market through four companies making very different bets on the same idea - that owning an engaged crowd is worth paying for. Salesforce sells communities as enterprise infrastructure, Personify runs the membership backbone for associations and nonprofits, Patreon turns audiences into paying members for individual creators, and Threado represents the AI-native startup wave now consolidating. Together they map how community moved from a feature to a business.

## Achievements

- Patreon has paid creators more than $10 billion cumulatively, with roughly $24 million paid out in January 2026 alone.
- Patreon's free memberships and community chats added over 30 million free memberships in their first year, roughly doubling creators' community sizes.
- Salesforce Experience Cloud made owned, branded communities a standard part of enterprise CRM.
- Personify has spent two decades as the membership and engagement backbone for associations and nonprofits.

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Patreon reports 286,287 creators with at least one paying member and over 60 million free memberships, with community chats a key growth driver.
- **2025-06** — Patreon confirms new creators will pay a higher platform cut under its consolidated Standard plan.
- **2026-01** — Analysts size the online community management software market near $1.7 billion, forecasting mid-teens annual growth this decade.

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-09