RivRider
patreon
New Year Retrospective + Future Plans
🕑 Added 2021-01-03 01:20:34 +0000 UTCHappy new year, everyone! Hope the Christmas-New Year week treated you all well!
As I've said before on the poll post, the usual Patreon activity will be paused for this month. Billing was paused as well, so no Patrons have been charged. You're still free to view previous posts if you're still subbed of course, but any new Patrons get charged for joining. To make up for a lack of Patreon activity for this month, I'll be posting every commission that I can onto here as they get done; rather than in bulk like the last two posts have been about.
(there's a tl;dr at the bottom with all the important stuff so feel free to skip down there if this is a lot lol)
I wanna give a thank you to everyone who's supported my Patreon this year before I get into the rest of this though!
I highly appreciate everyone's support, and I look forward to gettin' back into the Patreon grind once the mountain of commissions are hurdled over. When I started up last year, I felt really nervous about meeting any sort of expectations and maintaining consistency to my work, but I enjoy that the Patreon can give me work at all. It gives me things I can work towards every month and I like having a goal I can achieve. I was also hella nervous about making a server and managing a community, but I've met a lot of cool people through it! I've gotten to know a lot of you, and it's been nice chatting with everyone in it.
But for all I think I achieved in the last half-year, I think growth here has been a little slow going haha.
I can't help but wonder if it's because I don't shill the Patreon enough, if I don't do enough business methods like timegating/paywalling content to entice people in, or if the nature of the Patreon may be a little misleading. Misleading in the sense that, while I use my sfw art identity and make sure not to have nsfw art out front, that's still the majority of what gets done around here.
Or maybe it's all of those, it's probably all of those lol.
I'd kind of like to strike more of a balance between the NSFW and SFW pieces here, but that's a little hard to do in practice. I'm not typically a fanartist, and the majority of my sfw content revolves around my OCs or OC art I've done for others. I feel a little weird making non-commissioned OC art a post, so the times where I can post SFW art are a little more limited compared to when I'm drawing smut. At least to me.
I have been contemplating running SFW art polls now that I've managed to streamline some of my art process, so that could help. One of the reasons my NSFW poll art takes up so much time is because I tend to go for image sets to make it more worthwhile, but I have less of a reason to do that with SFW art.
I dunno, I'm open to suggestions.
I've also been wondering if it's been bothersome having to download every piece in an NSFW post in order to view it. I didn't even realize that's how those posts worked until last month and I've been self conscious ever since lol. Maybe I could make SFW art only tiers? I only crop and attach them to posts to begin with in case I have supporters who are only interested in the SFW art, but I'm not sure how much it takes for precautions to turn into a hassle.
Still open to suggestions on either of those fronts.
If nothing else, one thing I'd like to accomplish this year is getting closer to realizing all my Crash Buster plans. My major goal for the last year has been making a comic series for her, and in order to do that I really gotta sit down and commit some design and writing plans out. Who knows, I might make "planning" a theme one of these months lol.
I'd also kinda like to do more comic-ing in general so I can get used to drawing them more, but that goal is a little hazier to accomplish. That's pretty up in the air by comparison.
That's about everything I can think to say right now, so I'll just close up with that tl;dr and another word of thanks for supporting me!
TL;DR
- You're all very nice and cool!
- I wanna achieve more growth in the Patreon this year, but I'm not quite sure how I could go about doing it without stepping on a few of my principles. I'm open to suggestions, though.
- I'd like to balance the NSFW and SFW art ratio some more. I think I could do SFW art polls next, but I'm also open to suggestions here.
- Are NSFW art posts a hassle to grab and view the art from? If so, should I start posting them like normal, or would it be smarter to make NSFW restricted to an alt tier for people who don't like NSFW?
- I wanna work more on getting a Crash Buster comic off the ground! That'll take a lot more planning, but I wanna have enough to get started bare minimum by the end of the year!
