Patronize This! #3
Although I skipped a couple of weeks due to a complicated holiday schedule and because I was busy setting up my own Patreon, it’s now time for the newest thrilling episode of Patronize This!
Today I’m featuring three people who are supported on Patreon by people who also support ErosBlog, although I won’t lie to you: I picked one of them mostly on the strength of her “I Dream Of Genie” avatar. (And, her Patreon video made me laugh.) Aside from that, though, I’m letting the artists do their own talking:
Erica Moen writes Oh Joy Sex Toy, which is
a light-hearted, humorous, sex positive educational weekly webcomic that covers a wide spectrum of the sex world; from sex toy reviews to sex education to interviews with sex industry professionals and more.
Nesoun draws “erotic sensual stuffs” and “your favorite characters in sensual manner.” Yup!
Enjoy!
Image Credit (directly above): Movie patrons in an advertisement for the National Cash Register Company’s new ticket-printing register, from the Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1916.
Image Credit (top of post): Wealthy 19th-century motorists, as seen in an advertisement for a map of automobile and bicycle routes through the Dauphiné Alps, printed in a publication about the 1900 Paris World’s Fair.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=17800
Quite some time ago I tried out Patreon. Like most things I try, I fucked it up. I couldn’t think of any good things to give people as incentive to give me money, and because I only had a couple of Patrons I kept forgetting to put my latest blog post up there. I’ve thought of giving it another go, but keep thinking that feels greedy. I have a full-time job and I do okay with affiliate sales. But then I think – “affiliate sales are never a guarantee and I should have a backup”. Then I think “by the time my affiliate sales shrink to nothing I may be done with blogging anyways”.
Clearly I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. :)
Well, I’m probably fucking it up too! I’m not offering a ton of concrete rewards and I definitely have “issues” with asking people to support me so I have time to do creative stuff that makes me (and hopefully them) happy.
At one time ErosBlog supported most of a full-time living for me through affiliate sales (porn) but that market changed a lot and is now almost gone. Meanwhile my own blogging interests have changed so much that marketing porn that way is no longer so close to the core of what I want to be doing; from afar it looks like your sex toy sales remain closer to the blogging/review work you seem to be enjoying.
It’s too soon for me to say “Patreon works for me” much less “Patreon would work for you if you gave it another chance.” But the reason I’m doing the “Patronize this!” series is that I think patronage in general offers an alternative (possibly a healthier alternative, remains to be seen) to the toxic death spiral of low quality web advertising, click fraud, and value-negative offers that characterizes most of the economy of “content production” on today’s web. We need *something* more community-focused and ethically responsive than that, and right now the patronage model seems to offer the most promise. So I started trying to support it before asking for it to support me, and I imagine I’ll want to keep doing the former at least as long as I’m doing the latter.
I’m tempted to try it again just to see if I can get *readers* to support me, so that I can then in turn support more *creators*. It felt like a circle jerk when I had other creators supporting me and I was supporting them and it canceled each out.
Yeah, that’s why I’ve been slow to make many pledges. My thinking is that it would be good to redistribute some support once it’s in surplus, but fairly pointless to do too much too soon.