I make money on the internet by trusting people.
I upload videos. Then I beg for donations. Last month, I received £418.86 from this method.
If you pay monthly, you gets some rewards.
But how do I make sure these rewards go to the right people? How do I stop them getting stolen by people who don’t pay?
I upload my weekly update to patreon. You have to be logged in as a paying supporter to read and listen.
This is a form of DRM (Digital Rights Management).
You can only access the update if you’re paying for the ‘rights’ to do so. And you have to prove this to the patreon website by logging in.
Sounds good right? WRONG.
Sometimes I want to add someone as a supporter for free, as a freebie gift voucher, or a prize, or a thank you. Unfortunately, patreon doesn’t let me do this.
Also, I want to let people pay me on different platforms, like liberapay, then get access to the patreon. Again, patreon doesn’t let me do this.
I also want to let people ‘snoop’ at the weekly updates before joining. Patreon doesn’t let me do this.
And it’s just annoying to have to log in. The weekly update is a way for me to tell people what their money is going towards, so I want it to be easy to access.
And to top it all off, patreon is often quite buggy. Audio wasn’t working for firefox on some updates.
So……. I started cross-posting to substack. It lets me add people for free, and show teasers, and it works great.
Sounds good right? WRONG.
First of all, substack is full of nazis, which is pretty bad.
Secondly, uh… no wait that’s enough-
So what do I do? (rhetorical question, please don’t reply guy me)
I could move to yet another platform. Maybe something self-hosted. I looked into a lot of options in detail (please don’t reply guy me).
Listen, I don’t want another complicated platform, I just want to stop people from stealing my content.
All this time I’ve been worrying about people accessing my work, which is like… the opposite of what I should be doing.
I don’t want to give away the updates for free. But also… Why am I so afraid of people stealing them?
I don’t want to ‘cheapen’ the updates. I want them to be special - for supporters only. A place where I can speak to them directly. But I’d rather make the experience simpler and better for the people that do pay - which means no paywalls, no DRM, no nothing.
So now, I upload the updates for everyone on todepond dot com. I haven’t set up a feed for it yet, but I will soon, now that I know I’m sticking with it.
At the top of each update, there’s a little message saying that the update is for paying supporters only. I’ve started putting a checkbox too, that doesn’t do anything.
I love how different this feels to most platforms. For me, it’s a continuation of my values.
Since adding this DRM-free version of my update, I haven’t noticed any difference in my incoming patrons. It hasn’t slowed down and it hasn’t sped up. Most people want to help, and don’t care about the updates really.
The occasional person reaches out to me and says “I read your update without paying. I assume that’s ok?
No it’s not ok! You’ve abused my trust to steal something you haven’t paid for. But you can solve this problem very easily. Just sign up to my patreon.
I don’t think it’s nagware because there’s no nagging. There aren’t any popups, warnings or indicators that you can get rid of by paying.
Maybe I’ll switch to that one day, but I hope I don’t. Please pay to help me out!
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