Changes to David Chen's Patreon: Annual Membership and Decoding TV Discounts/Comps

NOTE: The above video and the below post contain the same information. 

Patrons,

If you're reading this, thanks for being a Patron! This has been a big year for me: I finally quit my job and dipped my toe into creating content full-time. It's only because of people such as yourself that this was even possible. Thanks for giving me this chance!

I know it's been a bit of a weird year for me as I've tried to launch a new TV podcasting enterprise in addition to producing stuff for this Patreon page. I've greatly appreciated your patience as I've tried to navigate all the changes to my life as well as to the world at large. 

Changes to the Patreon page 

Today, I wanted to announce a few changes to the benefits of my Patreon page. Over the past two years, I've learned a lot about what I feel I'm good at producing from a Patreon perspective and I've made some tweaks to the tiers to reflect that. At the same time, I'm always looking for ways to offer more value for existing tiers. Here are some significant changes I'm making: 

Annual memberships are now available - You can now subscribe to this Patreon page for an entire year. If you commit to an annual membership to this Patreon page, you now get a 16% discount. This is the highest discount Patreon will allow me to offer (I wish I could make it even higher!). 

$10 Patrons get a 50% discount to DecodingTV.com - I know it's a challenge to support me across different platforms so hopefully this makes it slightly easier: If you are a $10 Patron, you can go to THIS PAGE to get a 50% off discount for DecodingTV.com. Once you apply the code, it should provide you a discounted rate for 1 year. After that, you will then need to visit this page again to get a new code and re-subscribe. 

If for some reason you've already paid full price and wish to get a refund and/or use the discount instead, please reach out to me directly. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make it right.

$20+ Patrons get a free paid membership to DecodingTV.com -  At $20+, you'll automatically get a free paid membership to DecodingTV.com. As long as you support me at this level, you will receive this benefit. I will maintain this list of members manually, so please reach out if anything is ever amiss. 

My Wishlist for 2023

There are a few things that I'm hoping to get accomplished in 2023. I don't know that I'll be able to actually do these things but I think it's a healthy activity to contemplate your aspirations and occasionally share them publicly. 

Safe bet: Creating a Discord community - Between this Patreon page and Decoding TV, I think there's enough demand and membership out there for a paid Discord community. The idea is that you'd get access to the Discord if you're a paid member of either website, and the Discord would facilitate discussions about what's happening right now in the world of TV and pop culture. In the future, I'm interested in using Discord's broadcast features to potentially host live gatherings and do "Twitter Spaces"-like events. 

Communities take time and work to build, but I think it's something I want to try in 2023. Let me know if this is a benefit you think you'd get a lot out of.

Longshot: Reviving Culturally Relevant (or some other weekly show that's not just about TV and movies) - I dedicated a ton of my time and resources to trying to get Decoding TV off the ground this year, and unfortunately that has meant that I have neglected Culturally Relevant, a podcast that I really love. Culturally Relevant was always a passion project; it never generated any income except through this Patreon. But the purpose of the podcast was to give voice to some of the things I'm most passionate about that aren't necessarily easily bucketed into "TV" or "movies." 

At one point, I was hoping to find a path forward for it that wouldn't involve sourcing a new guest each week -perhaps having a rotating series of regular co-hosts - but alas, it has not come to be. In 2023, I'm hoping to revive the Culturally Relevant podcast figure out a way to make that podcast interesting, vibrant, and sustainable. 

Longshot: More videos/live broadcasts - Longtime Patrons know I really felt like I was starting to get into a nice groove with Twitter Spaces, and I've been gutted by how the site has been taken over by a far-right activist. This has left me scrambling to figure out how to replicate many elements of my online presence on other platforms, including launching a new free newsletter and doing live YouTube broadcasts again. In 2023, I hope to lean into doing more live broadcasts and more polished YouTube videos in general. I really enjoy doing these things but they are really time intensive and time is a resource that's been in scarce supply recently. 

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That's it for now. As usual, I'm open to any and all feedback to the above! Do you see anything you like? Do you wish anything else was available? Feel free to comment, DM me, or email me; I'm not hard to reach.

Thanks for making this past year of my life possible. I am wishing everyone who's reading this a hearty happy holidays!