fafcomics
patreon
Hello everybody!
🕑 Added 2016-02-26 03:44:01 +0000 UTCWe want to discuss with you a situation. Your opinion, dear members of the club, will influence further policies at the distribution server site and how we operate.
A bit of history precedes the issue at hand. This is a bit wordy, and you can skip down to our proposed solutions if you wish! Just know that the following points are very important for the future of the club.
Foreword
Over the last 2 years of the comic we've never changed core conditions for supporters. We've changed the price of the entry to the club in response to theft, and made clearer rules for leaving the club, but the Patreon support prices of $1.5, $3, $5, $10 to $15 have not raised since we set them in motion, and will hopefully never HAVE to raise. At the same time (on share sites and forums) I regularly see thieves slander us and make ridiculous accusations of greed, despite the only cost increase (the entry fee) being in direct response to people unwilling to pay a few dollars a month for content without the deterrent of having to face a new membership fee to stop them sharing our content.
The fact is this: we have created more than 600 frames of the comic. The minimum price at which anyone pays for this content is - $ 30 + $ 1.5 per month thereon. Nearly 50 cents of a $ 1.5 Patreon pledge is wasted between payment systems, Paypal fees and Patreon's percentages, so in fact we get around $ 1 net income per month per these continued subscriptions, split over the team of artists, editors etc. In fact, the minimum price for which any honest person can get 1 frame is 5 cents with the purchase the 600 page digital copy on subscription. And this price continues to drop as we create more pages! Ultimately even out $1.50, subscribers are paying around 5-6 cents to us per the 20 frames we release during a month. The minimum price for those who want a high-res version is twice the price - 10 cents per page.
However, there were those who preferred to steal. And those who came here to steal. We spent more and more time combating this, trying to fight for the defense of our work whilst trying not to affect the base monthly costs of our trusted members, especially those who have stuck with us for so long! We agreed to no significant, unsightly watermarks and no additional difficulties for those who are already in the club. We have firmly decided that, unless there was a disruption in service (our server space, taxation or percentage loss changes on Patreon), we will not raise the price of comics, even with the fact that now each page requires far more work than before. I used to create a single image. Now with the help of 3 people, each of whom controls a stage of the work, we are able to spend more time on the sketch and make it more thorough. With refined ink work and color each page now takes 8 times as long to create, split between around 3-4 people. But for all this time, the price for our sponsors has never changed, even though that base $1 is now split three ways. We experimented with $1 as the lowest price for patrons but found that between the cut we owe Patreon and processing fees on Paypal, then to banks, we were still losing near to 50 cents per payment, too much to make it viable.
Regardless, the only requirement for our patrons was not to interrupt their support of the club and not to distribute illegally, or face blocking.
With the expansion of the project, the larger team and double the hours: we are tired, and we want to optimize as many of these processes as we can to save us time and effort. To do this, we may need to take a number of measures that we worry may cause legitimate grievances on the part of the club. But this is (we hope) a necessary and temporary measure, designed to extend and improve the life of the project. A sad fact is this: if this work continues to burn up more time, and our income doesn't rise with that, we will have to look for more manageable projects. And we would like to finish this project. And to finish it so well that this work of several years is something we can be legitimately proud of!
We work hard and are increasingly looking to the future. Growth prospects of the project at this point rather doubtful, or negligible, as adult material of this type always hits a ceiling in subscribers and whilst we're more than happy with the figures and hope word continues to spread, we also know that there are limits to our growth (har har, no double meaning meant). In the last 6-7 months we've had fluctuations into the hundreds of supporters who make new pledges and cancel or forfeit on their subscription before any money changes hands: this is a core problem with Patreon, with many browsing certain accounts looking for freebies, artists who give content to accounts that have not yet processed the first payment, and now we have to deal with Bots as well!
On a side note. Previously, I used to define this category of freebie surfers, and the anonymous entities on share sites demanding new pages of our comic for free, with the word "monkey" or monkeys, but it was mentioned to me that in the English language, especially in the USA, there is an unhealthy racist context this could be taken. Obviously I wasn't intending that, more I had in mind the sort of tantrums and cheeky thievery and disrespect of a cartoon critter. I should come up with a better word, perhaps "worms" or something... Regardless of my distaste for thievery and the threats it makes to the income of myself and the rest of the team, this aside is also an apology to all those who may have taken the word in the "extra sense" of a racial epithet, I hope you'll forgive, not being native-ly English speaking, the concept didn't occur to me. I just do not like thieves.
That done, we are aware that there is a ceiling for our income, and as such we have two choices: to make our lives easier so the income is worth it, and to expand (har har, again, no pun intended) to other areas. A significant part of the team is excited to move in the direction of flash games, featuring Hetty or otherwise: online game can't be stolen as easily. Of course, we also have spent most of the last few years working on artwork, not game design or animations. So we came to the conclusion that we would need to change profile, especially if we branched out to works outside of the fetish material of Hetty or the Anthro community in general. We like to draw, especially furry art, but we also have to balance our time with income... though this also means time to train and work with a larger team on these other projects.
Of course, we will not leave this project half finished, we'd really be in trouble then! We will make every effort and do all we can to finish this project. However, we have reached a point when we have to do what we did not want to do under any circumstances.
We have to do a terrible thing.
It is an unbearable, terribly cruel thing.
... Hard and noticeable watermarks. :)
and some changes in the conditions, which we will try to make optimal.
This comes to the point of us writing all this to you. We have been working to implement a system for ensuring security on our site by dividing it into two models, possibly three. And, so far, this is just an option: no changes will be implemented yet. The point of this is we want to make you aware of these options and get opinions from our invested sponsors in much the same way as if you had significant shares in a company. We have the options below for a basic plan to make the site run more efficiently and more effectively: everyone can express their thoughts and ideas about each option and let us know by replying to us. During the March work period, we'll be working with the normal model whilst we weigh up our options and the responses to them. This month we will tally up votes and after a discussion of all the options (we don't like hasty decisions and everyone will have a month to think about it all) we will announce how we plan to move forward and proceed to the execution of these options at the turn of a new month.
The list of subscription models are as follows:
1.The core of the club, or A-type model. This would be aimed at our core supporters, namely those who have been active contributors since early on in the comic and continue to be reliable supporters up to date.
We plan not to change conditions for our veteran supporters. At all. In a sense the A-Type model is the safe zone for us, where we can upload without fear of comic leaks or having to manage fluctuations between subscription and inactivity (especially tied, sometimes, to leaks from other users publicly).
We really appreciate you and everything will work as before, so long as this is possible.
There may be a dip in pacing as we implement new systems as many of our team are stretched to breaking point. I myself can work 11 hour days, usually 26-29 days a month to keep the project running. This dip in our processing speed is made worse when there are security leaks from share sites and we have to identify the rogue account on top of our usual work days. If we do have a dip in productivity as we try to identify a thief, we will try to increase the pace again as soon as possible. After all, we wont be wasting our time on this silly fuss.
I hope any delays will be a brief, and of course with 3+ team members we all need a vacation at some point! We will need some time to clean up the second part of the club to protect from worms or thieves or whatever. If we found that a thief is present in the A-type club - again we will have to change the conditions. I hope you will treat this with understanding.
The point of this separation is to to keep track of all data movements and finances more firmly. Therefore, as an aside, when this model launches we will implement the following rules:
- If a core member leaves the club for longer than 1 month, you will come back in the B-type access. More precisely: at the first day of each month Patreon generates a list of sponsors supporting the project. If your payment schedule is disrupted with us for over a month, you will come back in the B-type access for a period of a certain number of months. This rule does not apply to those who have invested significantly in the project over the years. Also, this rule would not affect those who have notified us beforehand that there will be a break in support. These users will be able to return at any moment, but they will have to pay for all the months that they missed as usual.
- If your donation has not been processed for technical reasons or as a result of site error, you will be able to come back next month, of course, and if payment delay is due to technical error within a first processing days of the new month there is usually no loss of service.
But if the donation has not been processed twice - you lose your place in the A-type club, but will be able to return to the B-type club. However, if your donation was not processed for 3 consecutive months without informing us of a hiatus- you lose a place in any type of club as per our previous ToS.
2. The B-type club. All those who came to the club in April 2015 and later. And who are currently present in the club. I think most of you are honest people, but security research through data leaks suggests a small number of dishonest users who have been leaking content since this period, maybe as few as a couple of people. And finding and removing them from the club will take some time, hopefully not, but perhaps a sufficiently long time. We will try to keep this silly fuss to a minimal effect on you, but sadly some security upgrades are a necessary measure, sort of like a quarantine section.
We have, until recently, made a lot of effort eternally to locate these thieves. But due to the persistence of the thief we will be employing an integrated overlay watermark. This, sadly, will result in some loss of image quality, though we plan to start with a small, minimally noticeable watermark. If the work is still being edited, perhaps a larger watermark will be needed. Probably sooner or later, the thief will be thrown out of the club as the circle of suspicion narrows, but it will take some time. We have ideas in this direction, but they require a long fuss. After the B-type club has been thoroughly de-wormed you will join the A-type and will have all the former privileges. When members join the A-type group they will receive a comic version without watermark, of course! If we discover that the thief is in the A-type part of the club, we will have to change the conditions again. But in this case, everyone in the B-type club automatically receive the A-type access.
We hope the watermark will not impact the images too badly. The core balance here is the triangle between support, time and income. Our time is finite and losing supporters will drop the number of pages per month, or we would be forced to increase our monthly base subscription values, which we have been trying hard not to do. Of course, this may be down to a vote: less pictures or increased price of access. We will have to see when the time comes.
3 The C-type club. Now I'm still pondering whether it makes sense to spend time on this model. It's an experimental suggestion.
This model works thus:
We invite all who wish to pay an arbitrary amount (any amount really). And the accumulation of all the donations through this method unlocks pages at intervals during the month, like crowd funding through Kickstarter. These pages will be placed publicly, on art sites with totally free access, with the understanding that support is what unlocks each page.
For example, we estimate the cost of creating images is around $100 USD, a fair price especially for color, 2-3 characters per page etc. After collecting $ 100, a page will be released, no watermark, free to the public. After $200, a second page, etc.
This will start from the first page of the FOURTH part of the comic book. This is prior to the current uploads through Patreon (funding is currently for Part 6), but have not been released publicly at high resolution, though some thieves have shared poor quality versions of some pages.
Title pages and such will be included for free, and the size of all these pages will be 1920 pixels wide, a high resolution quality. If the flow of support moves to this model then that will be acceptable
thus, as an example - cost of parts 4 and 5 will be about 150 comic book pages multiplied by $ 100 = $ 15,000
This costs. The price of labor. Profit (value added) - is the income from the club, whose members are, of course, will have all of these pages are much cheaper (on the condition that they would not place them in public access, as before). I think if we find 2000 willing to pay 1.5 dollars per month, fans of a freebie will mark the day with champagne. Everyone can see 20 free pages per month. Members of the club at this time will see verlyatno little more pages and much earlier.
This threshold funding method allows for those in the pay what we want, when we want camp. I don't personally prescribe to this, but that is why we ask asking for feedback!
In other news
Backlog and delays:
As you all know, I always do what I promise. I am an honest person and everybody who is in line for individual bonus or prize art and those who have not yet received any extra pages from changing pledge level: you will get these! Regardless of any changes in our distribution model, all supporters will receive Everything. They. Have. Paid. For., if bonus art or larger resolution is due to you please be sure to notify us via email so that we can check your subscription to the server and inform you of your place in line for any prize art as we work through our backlog.
Until all lag is caught up, no changes will be made to the site's operation. We have at least a month, if not two or three, to discuss all the nuances and to listen to all ideas and suggestions. Do not hesitate to comment, I will be listening carefully to all suggestions, providing they do not cross our fundamental position: that we will not tolerate thieves disseminating private access material and making a mockery of the support and patience our loyal members have given us.
I would rather discontinue these art projects to concentrate on online game projects than to sit back and let a small number detract from the earnest support of our patrons by sharing the comic to hundreds for free.
If funding permits, I want to complete this epic comic project: and more projects in the future, I have a handful of stories just waiting to make it to the page if our support remains strong.
For now, it is back to work for us. Thank you for reading, and for your continued support. Without YOU these projects would be impossible! (a little later, you'll see a few new pages to the update server too!)
