2022: Per-month, no sponsors, and more

Hello all,

Time for a year-end update.

As the title hints, the most concrete change for all of you is that I’m switching Patreon charges to a per-month schedule. There’s more on the reasoning behind that below, but I wanted to call it out at the beginning to reduce the risk that someone might miss it.

No sponsored messages in 2022

In 2022, I'm planning to shift to a more Patreon-focused model. Over this next year, I'm not going to do any sponsored messages in videos. I hope to continue this beyond 2022, but I'm using this year to experiment to see whether it's viable.

I’m not the first content creator to bemoan dependence on ads. All the usual motivations apply. I want viewers to be the customers, not the product I’m selling to advertisers. I don’t want to spend time making ads or evaluating the companies to make sure I believe what I’m being paid to say about them. I don’t want to erode trust. I don’t want my choice of what content to make to be affected by anything other that what I think people would get the most value from.

Many media companies have no choice about this, but my costs are low enough right now where I can afford to take a risk building toward a healthier model.

Thanks to all of you for making this possible. Without your support, I wouldn't be able to take this leap.

Moving Patreon to per-month

As part of this shift, I'm changing the payment schedule to monthly rather than per-video. The biggest reason is that it's a more steady and predictable situation for everyone involved. A few other considerations that contribute to this:

• When I first set up a Patreon, I wasn't working on this full-time, so I didn't want to charge people monthly when I might not even be working on it. Now, this is my full-time job, and I'm working on it all the time whether or not a video comes out in a given month.
• The per-video structure comes with an incentive for me to create more, smaller videos. This might involve being less ambitious with each project, lowering my "just ship it" threshold, or splitting videos into multiple pieces. Given my weakness to scope creep, this is still a good incentive for me to have, so losing that is theoretical a downside to this change. I say "theoretical" because I'm clearly still letting scope creep run rampant despite the presence of this incentive, and I have other strong reasons to want to publish more anyway. But as someone who makes economics videos sometimes, I'd be remiss if I didn't think about the incentives I'm making for myself.
• The next video will include an interactive version of the simulation (more on this below). Depending how that goes, this may or may not become the norm, but either way, it will sometimes make sense to try things outside of the usual 10-20 minute YouTube video. Going per-month makes it less ambiguous how or whether I should charge for those other kinds of projects.

By default, your current per-video pledge will convert to per-month at the same amount. If you'd like to change your pledge, you'll need to do so before Jan 1 to avoid being charged the old amount.

Other updates

• Creative Commons: I’ve added the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license to existing videos, and future videos will have this license added after they have been up for two weeks. The delay is to make sure the video gets momentum before allowing others to re-upload. This is still a somewhat restrictive license, but my hope is that it will reassure people who are scared to get in copyright trouble (seemingly a lot of people) that they can use the videos for personal and educational projects.
• Part-time hire: Toward speeding up the publish rate, I’ve hired someone to write code and produce scenes in Unity. His name is also Justin, and he had a great entry into 3Blue1Brown’s Summer of Math Exposition that you should check out. The role is part-time for now, but assuming the specialization of labor works well, I’m excited to expand further. And it is indeed going well!
• Interactive simulation: The next video will be accompanied by an interactive version of the simulation, packaged into a simple game. The video itself is about detecting biased coins, so the sim is on the simpler side, and it seemed like a great opportunity to make a first interactive. Educational games/interactives have a pretty fraught history. I’ll avoid turning this into an essay on that topic, but for now, suffice it to say that I think it’s worth experimenting with interactives a bit in conjunction with a channel that’s mostly based around playing with simulations. The game itself is nearly ready for playtesting, so I’ll do a dedicated post on that sometime in the next few weeks.
• Public version of PrimerTools: The public PrimerTools repo has been updated and will stay in sync with my version, including new simulations. It’s still a bit rough around the edges (perhaps also at its core), but with Justin’s fresh perspective and some help from other contributors, I’m excited that it may have potential to be useful to others.

That’s it. Please let me know if you have thoughts on any of this, and thanks as always for your support.

Justin