JOURNEY... INTO SENTIMENTALITY!!!! (Patreon)

Something I noticed the other day is that my Patreon is currently at its highest level ever. For a long time it seemed as if the number of patrons was slowly declining, ever since I launched the Patreon, however many years ago that was. 

And yet ever since Digitiser The Show - and particularly since I started doing the Mini eps - that decline has reversed. So, a huge, huge thank you to those who've been here since the beginning, those who've joined since, and everyone who has clambered aboard recently. 

On a purely practical level, the Patreon funds help me make the videos - you've seen the tat I buy - and pay for the website, and the games I review. It also, bluntly, helps me through the year - my day job is very much feast or famine (hard as I work, the money tends to arrive in chunks at the end of the writing process), and it makes all the difference to have something regular during those fallow times.

But what's really taken me aback is that, because I'm nosy, I've looked at how many backers we have on here compared to other, much bigger, YouTubers. And we're way ahead of most of them.

It's not a competition at all, but Larry, DJ Slope, Kim Justice, Nostalgia Nerd et al, have massive audiences, far, far in excess of the views we get on YouTube, or the traffic that arrives at the website. They've built up their audience over more years than I've been back doing Digi. We'll get 4,000-5,000 views per video compared to the hundreds of thousands some of those guys get. 

We must be doing something right, but I can't account for what. 

Obviously the really big boys and girls in the Retro community get sponsorship and ad revenue - which Digitiser doesn't - so they're doing alright on that front... but I'd really expected them to all be much bigger on Patreon. We're tiny by comparison, but not on this site. Why me, and not them?! No, that's not fishing for compliments. 

Then there's the live show. We've sold out a 400+-seat theatre. People are travelling from as far afield as Skye and America. Some are overcoming their social anxiety to be there. It blows me away that we're able to do that. I mean, demand has outstripped the number of seats we're able to offer (there's currently one ticket left on the website shop, due to a return, if you wanted to nab it...).

This isn't me parping my horn, but more a case of expressing my bewilderment. I get that there's a nostalgic element to the Digitiser brand, but we even seem to have tons of new people joining the audience who don't even remember the old Teletext incarnation.

I guess I'm just overwhelmed with gratitude, even if I don't understand the disparity between how popular we are in terms of numbers, and the sheer passion of the Digitiser audience. It's the same as it always was; if you love it... you really love it. 

It almost seems weird now, but I was so scared of bringing Mr Biffo out of retirement. I sometimes cringe when people talk about their "journey" - but over the past four or five years to go from never wanting to be in the public eye again, to putting out tentative feelers on Twitter, to launching the website, to doing my first expo panel, to asking you to help fund Found Footage, to being IN Digitiser The Show, to being confident enough to just be myself in the Mini eps, and now preparing to stand up and arse around in front of a hundreds of people... 

I couldn't have done any of that if I wasn't carried on this wave of enthusiasm from you lot. It has been a journey, following a long time of feeling like I was just treading water. 

So, again, thank you, for whatever reason you chose to support me. It means everything.

Paul