Poll: Thoughts About Patron Exclusives (Patreon)
Content
Since I started my Patreon, I've always thought it was difficult to ask people to pay for something I've been doing for free before then. From the very start, anyone who pledged at least $2 monthly had access to every content post.
This was completely by design on my part: I would much rather have as much of what I make as possible be accessible by as many people as possible. By divorcing what I created from payment, I thought that people would be free to only pay what they thought I deserved—that I wasn't forcing anyone to pay for anything.
But now I've started wondering if that's fair to the (wonderful) people who do pledge. Why should they keep pledging when they aren't getting much (at all) in return? Long story short: I've considered offering some kinds of exclusives to patrons who donate a certain amount each month.
The problem is that I tried this when I first re-launched last year, offering the Patron campaign, periodic one-shots, beta-testing, and what-have-you, but I really wasn't able to keep up with these on any kind of consistent schedule, so I eventually decided to call off all that extra stuff.
So to prevent the same thing from happening again, any exclusive would have to be easy to produce based on what I already do, yet still valuable enough that most potential Patrons would think it was worth a couple bucks a month.
TL;DR: No matter what, my streams and stream posts will continue to be free for everyone!
Having said that...