Soliciting Goal Suggestions! & RE:ads (Patreon)

As I mentioned in the last post about goals, ads are tricky things, and promising to remove them is even trickier; by the time I meet the goal to reduce ads, the value of the ads may be drastically higher. So when I set the goals last time I tried to be pretty conservative based on long-term data and pick a goal ads wouldn't easily be able to beat.

Well, then, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp happened, and in the last week ads on sirtaptap.com alone (not even including YouTube) earned more than my Patreon in a month. Good, but awkward, news.

So for now I'm going to have to call off the "reduce ads" goals. The bad thing about ads is they're unpredictable, but the good thing about ads is they scale much better for surges in interest than Patron does; despite all the extra traffic and ad rev, to my knowledge, no one has yet become my Patron because of the AC Pocket Camp guide yet. This is similar to how my AbyssRium guide was, it took many months for people to start converting to Patreon supporters (I'm grateful for all who have of course!).

While it's disappointing to walk back a promise like that, I will say that after this year I'm much closer than ever to being able to make guides and do YouTube stuff full time than I've ever been! That is, of course, The Dream™.

Since we already met the "reduce ads to 3/4" I'm going to keep that up for at least a while longer. As I've always said I don't really like having ads so getting those reduced load times was fun.

Calling All Goal Suggestions!

My problem now is, what else to have for goals? I have some long-term purchases in mind (a new CPU for faster rendering, a faster laptop that I can actually render on) but those would probably be mid-late next year at the earliest.

Special streams are fun goals, though I'm not sure what kind of streams you all would like.

I'm open to pretty much any kind of suggestions, I'd like to keep up some fun goals at least every $100 or $50 along the way.

Ad Free Accounts

Something I mulled for a while is now looking much more possible though; Patreon now has better Wordpress integration, so I'll be able to let people log in to sirtaptap.com with their Patreon account (instead of manually setting up an account per patron, and you having an extra account to manage).

I haven't figured out exactly how yet, but this should let me enable ad-free accounts for Patrons. Since I'm calling off the ad-reduction goals for now I'm making this a much higher priority. I'll make a new post when you can log in for ad-free access.