Howdy everyone,
So, first of all, I owe you an apology for the number of emails over the past month or so. I never meant to bombard you, though I fear I may have!
What has been happening is that I've been putting all the 400 or so stories on my own website, both the members-only ones and the free public ones, and every so often a new post goes out to you by email as well.
I know some have unsubscribed, and that makes me a bit sad, but I understand it completely. I've done the same myself with people I really liked, simply because my inbox was overflowing. So if you've gone, no hard feelings (though you won't see this apology), and if you're still here, thank you for bearing with me while I explain what I'm up to.
Before I go on, I want to be clear that I'm not leaving any site. Patreon is staying, and so is YouTube, and so is everywhere else you currently find me.
Recently, I asked my members why so many of them prefer YouTube, and plenty of you do, and I respect that. I'm not going to switch it off or nudge anyone away from it. The website is an addition and nothing is being taken away.
So why bother with a website at all?
Anyone who makes things online will tell you that the big platforms can switch you off, and when they do you have very little legal comeback, because you're up against corporations worth billions.
I've had a taste of it myself. Amazon banned me, I appealed, and I thought their grounds were unfair and Kafkaesque, but it made no difference. Spotify stopped paying me for a while. YouTube demonetised me around Halloween last year, which was a difficult time, though it's all resolved now. Much of this comes from AI scanning flagging things wrongly, and to be fair to Spotify and YouTube, they do eventually get a human to look at it and the flags were overturned. Getting through to that human can take weeks, though, and weeks is a long time when it's your living.
I do owe YouTube a tremendous amount, because it's where I make my living, and I'm very grateful. But as a matter of plain business, YouTube takes 30% of membership income, (for comparison Patreon takes 8%.)
In plain business terms, I'd like to be more secure and to keep more of what people kindly choose to send me, and that seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to want.
Now, Patreon.
I've been really grateful to them, and I want to say so. When it started it was a bit like a tip jar, but a tip jar where you could talk to people, and I loved that. I brought people over from YouTube, from Spotify, from wherever, and it became my walled garden. I could give you ad-free stories and members-only extras, we could chat, and you had real access to me, for what that's worth.
But recently Patreon has introduced a feed which ostensibly exists to help small creators be discovered, so that people see their work and perhaps start supporting them. It may well do that, and if it does, good.
But I think there are problems with it. It makes Patreon behave like a social media stream, and a paid membership is a very different beast from a social media follow.
On Instagram or YouTube you can follow three hundred people you like, and it costs you nothing, so it doesn't matter that most of it flows past you. On Patreon, ten creators at $10 each is already $100 a month, so nobody can support a myriad of creators the way they can follow them on Instagram. The model simply doesn't carry over (Substack had the same problem.)
Patreon has also started to encourage creators to make material solely for free members. I have somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 free members, which is lovely, but a very small fraction ever convert and it brings little benefit to me.
I'll admit I'm a little suspicious that the stated reason may be covering for a different direction of travel altogether, though of course I can't know that. That is to say to serve ads to the free stream people.
I should say that I don't mind giving things away. Most of the people who enjoy my stories get them for free, and I'm happy with that. On YouTube and Spotify it's paid for by my share of the advertising, which is a model as old as broadcast television and cinema.
When I looked at how other creators handle Patreon, I found that I give away far more than many of them do. I joined as a free member myself to have a look round, and nearly every post was locked.
Cynically, I might joke that I'm going to try the same approach at a restaurant: "Fantastic meal, wonderful chef, but I'm afraid I'm not in a position to pay you." I'll let you know how that goes.
What it comes down to is that I wanted Patreon to stay what it was for me for a long time, my walled garden, and I feel it is now moving in another direction. So, while I'm not leaving any site, I've come to think the best thing I can do is build my own website as my home, and as a home for my paying members, somewhere that can't be derailed by the direction of travel of outside corporations.
You shouldn't build your business on rented land, as the saying goes, and I'd like to have at least one patch of ground that is properly mine.
Thank you for reading all the way through, and for putting up with the extra emails.
Tony