That advertises paying for followers not subscribers. They're charging 80 cents per 100 followers. If they had to actually pay to subscribe to the creator it would be a lot more expensive than that.
How is this differentiated? I presume Graphtreon is scraping this data from Patreon and they only display "members" on the landing page for a creator, if I join for free I am counted as a member under the membership tab so I would presume they are included in the figure on the main page.
I can't find anything on Graphtreon to suggest that they are able to differentiate between paying and non-paying members, unless more information is exposed via the Patreon API?
Either way that kind of jump, literally tripling the member count in 24 hours with an immediate fall off in growth, isn't natural and should be associated with an uptick in comment activity if it were. It could be a reporting change of some kind but the fact that it happened in two bursts makes this unlikely, seems more likely to be bot activity and the initial part of this got caught in the first reporting window.
EDIT: Yeah it looks like
You must be registered to see the links
, just a free tier that has been hidden in the options on the front page.
All fans can join for free if their creator has a free offering listed on their page. Some creators may only show their paid options prominently on their Patreon. You’ll know a creator offers this option if you see a Join for free button on their page.
So either this is a new feature (entirely possible, that FAQ is from 5 days ago) or Helius recently enabled it.