How to Watch the Cycle Repeat
Added 2024-05-06 07:00:02 +0000 UTCThere was a time when pay-per-impression banner ads on a blog or a webcomic were a profitable way to support your creative endeavors. For a long time, I didn’t have any ads on Basic Instructions. I had dinner with a popular blogger and their spouse, (Good, good people. Not greedy at all. They just knew how much money I was leaving on the table.) One of them ended up telling me, “Ideally, I’d want to put … I’d say … eight ads on your homepage.”
If memory serves, I ended up putting three on there, and for a couple of years, the profit was well worth the headaches.
Then, the bottom fell out of that particular market, and a lot of blogs and webcomics either folded or started scrambling for a new business model (Like many YouTubers are now). I settled on the subscription service. My first one never brought in as much as ads did in their heyday, and Patreon still doesn’t. But, it brings in enough to make it worth my time, and I don’t have to feel like I’m selling my audience’s eyeballs for my own profit, or worry that an ad for something I don’t approve of will “accidentally” run on my site a few thousand times before the service can get around to stopping it.
What I’m trying to say, with my standard lack of brevity, is that while I try to approach my Patreon account as a business proposition, not a charity, that doesn’t mean that I’m not grateful to you, my customers. I hope the content I put out is worth the subscription price to you, and please know that I am working on a new addition to the package of offerings you get for subscribing, which I hope to start sharing soon.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Now, back to sarcasm. All this sincerity is making me feel "icky."
