Trail Thoughts ✦ July 2021 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! I am having the hardest time accepting it's already the beginning of August, but here we are! July was a really sweet month and I am excited to write this post!

July Stats:

• # of Streams: 12
• Avg Viewers, incl. Hosts & Raids: 67 (45 without charity stream)
• Avg Viewers, excl. Hosts & Raids: 50 (32 without charity stream)
• Unique Viewers: 3,649
• Unique Chatters: 343
• Chat Messages: 14,763 (avg 1,230 per stream)
• New Followers: 91 (avg 7-8 per stream)
• Subscriptions: 111 (avg 9-10 per stream)

The following charts below do NOT include the figures from the charity stream, just to maintain a realistic picture.

I have started to look at my trend from the beginning of this year as well.

July Thoughts:

This month was INCREDIBLE. It started off with a massive amount of planning and preparation work for the Nook Summer Charity Festival. During my stream, we raised over $1,500 for To Write Love On Her Arms, and as a team we brought in just over $80,000 which is a massive number and I cannot thank you all enough for contributing and participating! I was fortunate enough to have 30 minutes of front page time at the start of my slot, which brought in around ~800 viewers. This stream had a pretty significant impact on my stats for the month which is why I am continuing to track my averages on my own without this stream. I also had a wonderful time being a guest on SoEverdream's channel for his slot in the charity event and I'm excited to continue our playthrough of It Takes Two together.

I am very proud that I only cancelled one stream this month and it was the Tuesday before the charity stream as I needed the extra time to plan. I'm feeling VERY good about how things are feeling and going lately and I haven't felt the need to cancel at all, and that has been really wonderful. 

July saw me start my Renegade Playthrough of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is going absolutely amazing and I am having so much fun with it. I also continued through my first playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda. Both of these games will take up the entirety of August as well. The Fridays this month were very fun. I played some solo Stardew Valley, a co-op Stardew Valley stream with TheYed_, Her Story, and A Normal Lost Phone. I love how I did not end up following what I had written about in the last Trail Thoughts. It do be the way sometimes. I also recorded Part 3 of my playthrough of the The Pillars of the Earth and that was uploaded into the collection on my Twitch channel.

I am very pleased to see that even excluding the charity stream, my base viewership went up by 7.24 viewers from May. No clue if this was due to starting the Renegade playthrough or having more raids from folks and having raiders stay longer, but I am very appreciative of this! 

Thoughts for August:

Naturally, I am VERY EXCITED about this month. ICYMI, I pushed out my teaser video for my rebrand launch which will occur on Sunday, August 15th at normal stream time. Make sure you are there right at go-live as the new stuff starts right from the beginning of stream. I have shared details about this rebrand here on Patreon all along the way and I am very excited to be able to share everything with you finally, as well as everyone who isn't on Patreon.

I will be listing out all the changes in more detail closer to, but as always, want to let you all know about a couple things you can expect.

Merch: 

• At rebrand launch, I am going to be running a special sale for merch on my website with the new designs/visuals that will last one week or two (haven't decided yet). The discount will be 20% and open to everyone
• There will be a permanent EXCLUSIVE line of merch items that are only visible and available to people here on Patreon! These exclusive Patreon-only items will require a password to view that I will provide to all of you once the new items are live
• I have introduced a one-time permanent Patreon merch item with one of the new designs that is exclusive to Patrons (Trail tier and higher). When I upload this, all existing Patrons (you here reading this) will receive it, and any new Patrons that sign up will receive it as well. This is IN ADDITION to the regular recurring merch items that are part of some of the tier benefits

Raid Videos:

• I have put together FOUR new raid videos that all combine old clips with newer clips. My plan is that whoever raids me first each stream will pick a number and then after that raid I will play the raid videos in order so if I have up to 4 raids in a stream, the videos will be different each raid! I created a really neat format for these videos so it will be easy to swap out clips or create more videos as more clips are generated. I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek into one of them, so enjoy!  

Important Update to Pricing & Benefits:

Please make sure you read the last post here on Patreon (posted under 24 hours ago) about important changes made to pricing (TL;DR: switched my prices from being listed in USD to being listed in CAD so that I can be paid out in CAD and not have to deal with the foreign exchange) and benefits (removal of some, addition of others).

As always, let me know if you have any questions! I hope you all are getting just as hyped as I am for August 15th! Thank you so much for the support.