Potential Patreon Updates (Please Read!) (Patreon)

Hello! Emily here! It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these extensive text based Patreon updates. About a year? Wow, time flies, huh! Before we get in the thick of it, I want to have a moment of celebration: it’s been over a year of the channel! Neat! AND as you may know, we hit our first patreon reward goal, a full length video on all the Kingdom Hearts games. A gargantuan task that I’m sure will be a smooth and easy production process.

All joking aside, I am very excited about the project and have started work on it. It’ll take a bit, considering it means playing through and capturing footage of uhhh 10 games. But I’m going to do my best to make sure it’s worth the wait.

Anyways, there’s a reason why I’m writing this today. Since the start of 2022, I’ve been contemplating changes with the Patreon, stuff I’ve thought about implementing but needed time to work through in my head. After thinking it over, I do think there are some things I have to change or do going forward. However, before I make these changes, I want to pitch them to you all. I’m so grateful for every one of y’alls support. The Patreon, and the channel as a whole, has been a success outside of my wildest dreams and I have you all to thank for it. I don’t want to do any big or significant changes without running it by you all to see how you feel about it. With that in mind, let’s get right in.

PATREON CREDITS

I love the Patreon credits. I like getting to showcase y’all and I like seeing who all supports me and having it serve as a good end point for the video. One thing that has been causing issues for me recently, though, is reading the names in the $5 tier. And I don’t mean pronunciation, though God knows I struggle with that (sorry). I mean that there’s so many people in this tier that doing the credits has become way more difficult.

When I started this Patreon, I didn’t really expect anyone to donate to the $5 tier. But now, looking at the numbers, there’s almost 200 of y’all. And I’m incredibly grateful! But the credits have gotten to be a huge huge hassle, taking several hours on their own just to compile, record, and edit, in addition to becoming incredibly incredibly long. For the Spider-Man vid I had to do my best to cut down 15 minutes of already edited audio of me just reading names into 4 minutes, which is still an incredibly long amount of time for youtube video credits. It’s just getting increasingly unfeasible.

I still want everyone’s name in the credits, but what I’m considering is creating a brand new upper tier for it to be under in order to hopefully make it a more manageable process. Either that or dropping the spoken names completely, which is not my preferred option. People on the $5 tier would still have access to the bonus material like notes and bloopers and scripts as they currently have. Everyone on every tier will still have their name in a video. It would just be changing up the names that get spoken aloud and introducing a higher tier for it.

PAYMENT PLAN

This is perhaps the hardest change and the one I’ve been contemplating and trying to figure out for almost half a year now. But something that I think I need to do is switch the Patreon from charging per video to charging per month.

The main reason for this is quite simple: I want extra stability as I start progressing in my life. When I started working on my channel a year ago, I was in a much different place. The world was still mostly shut down, I was just a few months out of graduating college, still in that post grad phase of “what now?” and trying to figure out exactly what this whole online thing would end up being. But now here we are, the world is turning again (for better or for worse) and as the channel grows more and more, and I need to spend more time on it, it’s becoming more and more clear that this is my job that requires full time effort and attention. And if this is my job, then I need to make sure that I have enough coming in monthly for things like bills, medical fees, or anything else life throws my way.

Additionally, I’ve talked before both on social media and in videos about the ways in which the Patreon payment option can be stressful. Because it only collects at the beginning of the month for whatever stuff was put up by the end of last month, it can often mean increasingly stressful deadlines. If something happens like a sponsor being late for approval or a video taking slightly longer to edit than planned or youtube copyright problems and it keeps me from being able to have that video up before the final day, I just… don’t get any money that month. Furthermore, having a more stable income coming in from patreon would mean it gets a little easier to spend more time working on bigger projects like the Berserk or AVGN videos, as it would help me keep doing more large ambitious projects like those without the pressure to constantly have something out every month to survive.

I can understand if this idea might upset some of you. And I hope you aren’t upset at me for pitching it. If I do enact this and you don’t want to or can’t support the patreon anymore, I totally understand. It’s just something I think I need to do, both for my livelihood as well as my mental health.

I do realize the optics of this and rest assured, I don’t want to be charging more to give you all less. I want to give you all rewards to make sure that you feel that donating to me is worth it. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to propose an idea…

NEW PATREON REWARD: EXCLUSIVE MONTHLY VIDEO

So this is something I’ve been working out the logistics of in my head for a few months after seeing some other essayists do it. And after thinking it over, something that I think would be fun to do would be a monthly, unscripted and lightly edited video/podcast exclusively for Patreon. The way I’m thinking this will work is that every month, I’ll ask for suggestions from higher tier patrons for whatever that month’s topic is. I’ll choose from these suggestions and pick a selection of them (either based on patron enthusiasm for the subject or my own familiarity with it or the feasibility of it) and then I’ll post a poll with these suggestions and maybe one or two of my own and let patrons vote on them. Once that’s done, I’ll record it and post it up both as an video (with minimal editing, meant primarily for listening) as well as an audio file, for those who would prefer to download something like this to listen to later. All patrons will have access to these exclusive videos, regardless of tier.

I think this is a fun idea because I love rambling about stuff, if you couldn’t already tell by my Twitter and also everything about me, and there’s certain subjects that I’d love to talk about that I don’t think I’ll ever actually make a video for. Things like video games I’m playing, comics I’m reading, shows I like, current events, maybe even expanding upon things and subjects from past videos, if people wanted. Anything goes, really! I think it’ll be fun and I’m excited at the prospect of doing this and having more stuff out.

PATREON SUGGESTIONS?

These are the ideas I had so far, but before I go, I just want to say that if you have any suggestions for rewards or tiers that you’d like to see, let me know! I’m always looking for new things to have up here and I’m open to any ideas! There are limits, like they do have to be something reasonable that wouldn’t take a substantial amount of energy and focus away from actual full videos and work, and also there are some things like a patreon Discord server that I could be open too but I’m also cautious against just because of past experiences with that sort of thing. But feel free to suggest whatever ideas you have! I know I’ve been thinking over things, like maybe doing a monthly Q&A here because I like doing those or maybe exclusive streams if I’m able to move into a place that actually has good internet. The sky is the limit, really!

Anyway, this ended up a lot longer than planned. Like I said, these are ideas I had. I’d love to hear feedback. Approval, disapproval, suggestions, whatever. And I hope you all are having lovely nights and lovely days!

TL;DR
- Considering moving "name spoken in credits" to a new higher tier
- Considering changing the Patreon to charging per video to per month
- Considering monthly unscripted videos on user suggested and voted subjects
- Send feedback and suggestions if you have any!