I can hardly believe that the Patreon experiment has been going as well as it has.
That said, I’ve been pretty slow to get around to those two milestone promises I made back when we got started. But there are reasons for that, as well as bonus complications to talk about, so I will elaborate upon them now.
Milestone #2: No Webcomic Ads
There are still ads on the Friendship is Dragons website! Why? Well, because I’m waiting for one last payout, so what little money I’ve earned doesn’t go to waste.
Yeah, simple as that.
Basically, Google Adsense doesn’t pay out until you earn over $100, and the banner ad on FiD generally earns me about $45 a month. So it takes three months for me to get a payout. A welcome payout for sure, but if I’m only getting one measly payout every three months, it starts to get annoying.
Thus, around the 22nd of this month, I’ll collect my payout and then remove the ads from Friendship is Dragons.
Milestone #1: Proper Podcast Hosting
This one’s a bit more complex, and is part of the reason I’m putting the word out today.
When we started Fallout is Dragons, well, I didn’t know much about podcasting. Since we passed this milestone, I’ve spent just about all month researching everything about podcasting – file sizes, formats, hosting services, best practices, sites to avoid, RSS feeds, iTunes policies, the whole nine yards.
To summarize what I’ve learned: One, just putting links on Dropbox is not RSS feed friendly and that means we have to rehost everything, and two, we have a very large podcast on our hands here.
Because we’re recording a tabletop game, our episodes tend to last 2.5-3 hours. Even at really low bitrates, each file averages about 80 MB an episode. Publishing three or four episodes a month means we’re asking for a lot in monthly storage space.
Fortunately, I think we’ve found a nice new home on libsyn. I’ve just started it up and you can even grab the first few episodes on there now. But I’ve already reached my sizeable monthly limit with just those first five files.
We don’t have to wait for it to play catch-up over the next several months, though. Libsyn does provide a migration service where they’ll approve and archive whatever you need for a one-time fee of $0.05 per MB. To get everything up to Session 16, that comes to about $61.
Sadly, this month’s Patreon funding (thanks for that, by the way) has already either been spent or preemptively allocated towards many other things. I’d rather not wait a whole month to get Fallout is Dragons up to speed in its new host, so the remaining option is to crowdfund it.
Sumarry/TL;DR: If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, consider donating to my Paypal (not my Patreon). If I can crowdfund at least $70 (adjusted for fees), I can get all of Fallout is Dragons up on libsyn as a legitimate podcast.
Otherwise, thanks for supporting me, either financially or just by looking at the stuff I make. Continuing to be creative is what keeps me sane these days, and your encouragement reassures me that I’m not wasting your time.
P.S. I’m open to suggestions when it comes to extra stuff to offer on the Patreon page (new Milestones or Rewards, or rather the Milestones-as-Rewards scheme I’ve been using so far). I’m still very new to this whole shebang.
Well, if got up high enough ($200 mo. ?) perhaps do a raffle with folks, $1 per mo. = 1 ticket, $5 = 3 tickets, $10 = 7 tickets and so on. The winner could get a one shot comic of material of their choosing, like an OOC addition to the comic schedule on a day where you’re not podcasting or otherwise contributing to the Glorious Lunar Republic?
Funny how you can’t offer a milestone for timely updates because you’re already extremely responsible in that regard. Kudos I guess!
You could think about giving sneak peeks as rewards for a certain tier of patrons, and/or maybe the opportunity to be mentioned in the comic (“I had this player who…”). Monthly online hookups are also common rewards among some patreon artists.
As for milestones, Colin’s idea is not bad. Additional updates could be another objective, and/or alternative/new comics, maybe even collabs from artists, and even the solemn promise to start a cool new related project, with appropiately high milestones of course. Merch is sadly a bit on the complex-if-not-downright-out-of-the-question side, since your visual material is taken straight from the show, but again, artist collabs can help with that, and at the very least there’s plenty of written material to go around. In fact, if you’re not easily dissappointed, get ambitious! If the higher milestones are not reached, well, too bad, but at least you had a solid plan for them.