10 YEARS ANNIVERSARY! - A retrospective
Youtube video for those who don't like to read, you know who you are.
Look at all those Updates... that's a whole lotta art! (And it doesn't even include the variations!)
It doesn't feel like it, but it really has been 10 years since I started posting on Patreon! I've worked so hard, that the days blurred together and time flew by!
Let's celebrate by going through a quick little history of my Patreon! I know some of you will remember some of these.
2016 - Humble starts
Art focus: Practice sketch pages, studies, original characters (Seedy, Vampy and Mina debuts) and overwatch!I had been drawing nsfw content for a few years on tumblr, and in October 2016, I finally took the leap and started a Patreon, with 8 Patrons joining in my first day! Ooh, we're gonna make it big, baby!
Funnily enough, it seems like my first post ever was a thank you message to those very first supporters! I guess some things never change huh.
It took me just a month to start changing rewards (I didn't even remember I had a $15 private stream tier!)
Updates back then included a week's worth of work for $5 or $10, so I only ever did a max of 4 for $40 ($10 more for a full month than currently! Definitely overtly ambitious...)
There was a Discord reward too! But I had to send discord invites manually... I guess Patreon hadn't implemented an integration yet?
Ended the year asking for patron's feedback on content (classic), and expressing my hopes to start doing original works in 2017, the first of many.
2017 - Quick early changes
Art focus: Doodle pages, original (Bunbun, Nelle, Vampy and Lyrica) and parody mix, mainly overwatch.Mail reward image debut! Made the change because some people didn't notice they were supposed to receive their rewards via email!
Patreon revamp... again! I saw some more successful artist higher tiers getting you more "Spicier" versions, so I started doing so too! ...for a few months only since no one cared and it was a pain... whoops!
Coills Debuted in June, sooner than I expected! Much better than the awkward tier that got you an Update's reward + the ability to request a past one, but only within 30 days! It honestly has been great and it's still used to this day, 9 years of Coills!
One awkward issue was that you got 1 Coill per $5, which made things more complicated than they had to be, so it changed to 1 USD=1 Coill after a couple of months.
2018-2019 - Getting into a groove
Art focus: Last doodle pages, less original (Datachan, first colored Seedy, 2 page Bunbun-Nelle comic test), Mainly Overwatch and BokuHero with some ninty sprinkled about and random anime and game chars).I seemed concerned about artistic stagnation due to only doing NSFW work instead of practice/study, so after asking patrons about it, I ended up making a SFW-only Patreon! (that lasted for 1 month since barely anyone joined... I still appreciate the few who did, tho!)
In 2019 we switched to simple pic bundle Updates instead of weekly Updates! It reduced price per picture and allowed for more focused Updates!
I wanted to optimize where my efforts went, so I asked patrons about their interest in the process videos I made, which was quite low, hence they were deprecated so I could put that time into art-making instead!
After years of growth, the first persistent downturn on my Patreon started!
It was quite a stressful time where each month you'd think "Why is this happening?" "Should I change something?" This pressure eventually pushes you to try new things.
2020-2022 - The best worst times.
Art focus: BokuHero, Konosuba some Genshin and an assorted anime, game chars comms. Couple of Updates feat. Seedy and Lyrica, not much original outside of those and commissioner OCs.Early 2020 I had the scare of my life, Patreon suspended my account because they thought the girls on some of my pieces looked "too childish".
I used to draw in a more cartoony way, with eyes and heads being, admittedly, a bit too big, to the point they sometimes looked weird even to me (I used to resize things down often but still looked crazy animu).
Still, I always gave characters bigger breasts, hips and booty, to show clearly that they were aged up, just cartoony...
Apparently it wasn't enough for Patreon and I had to delete all offending pieces to unsuspend my Patreon.
They didn't give me a clear list of which they thought were an issue, so I had to go scorched earth and delete everything (even picsof OCs I made that I KNEW were full adults!) which is why there's no art on Patreon pre February 2020.
One crisis averted, when a much more serious one just started.
COVID times
Covid started early in 2020, and unbeknownst to me it'd cause a massive surge to my, and many other creator's patronage.
I passed the pandemic hunkered in my apartment, pounding out pictures while hearing the horrors of the pandemic around the world. It was a terrible time for your average person, but my day-to-day didn't actually change much.
During this time, I mistakenly attributed my patreon's growth to the extra efforts I was making to change the direction of my Patreon's patronage, which seemed to be rewarded every month. In turn, this pushed me to do a little bit more each month... an extra variation here... a more ambitious background, or concept there... complexity creep was real!
Before I knew it, we went from 2 variations per pic, to 3-4, to 5-6... and some even 9! I had saturated my schedule with variations and barely had time in my life for anything else than drawing... but that was fine! My hard efforts alone (I thought) had lifted my patreon up to the top 100 NSFW artists on Patreon with over 1000 Patrons! If I kept this up, I would find security for my family for the rest of my life!
Things were looking great! Maybe... with all this support, it'd be time to start an original project after all! There should be enough supporters who would like to see my original works, right?
In September of 2022, I launched CoillWorks (later CoillComics) where I'd finally give original comics a shot to branch out at the peak of my success!
Then a month or two later, the world of art shifted. AI image generation started to blow up, and things got REAL scary all of a sudden. My safe future immediately started crumbling.
I strongly believed in 5 years, patreons like mine would be replaced by either AI users or AI sites that allow you to generate anything in anyone's style. So after a few weeks of hard thought, I decided I had to shift to something that'd be safe long-term, something that once people start to enjoy, no AI-bro will be able to replace with a bajillion images. Human-made parody works was going to die, and original works was the only way for people to care about my work long term, even if there'd be a hard fall at first.
And like that, the hardest period of my art career started... hopefully we'd start on the right foot, at least?
I immediately caught COVID during the first month of development... great times ahead!
2023 - Coillworks era. Extreme efforts, constant dread, and flickers of hope.
Art focus: Coill City characters, mainly Lumina, Molly and Lily, with some various parody commissions sprinkled throughout and other parodies late in the year.The fall was swift. -10% of patrons in December, -8% in January. Still, I felt lucky it wasn't the -50% I expected in the first month... that'd just take 6 months to happen! Haha...
Every month felt terrible, when will it stop falling...? Will it?!
First "Scene" took a whole month to complete. The in-game scene had 100+ unique variations I had exported manually, it was extremely stressful and exhausting to crunch through. Writing all the dialogue would also take a lot out of me, and looking for/making audio took forever!
I only got paid when a "Scene" was made, so in January I only made about 1/6 of my usual monthly income. Scenes required extra versions for the game, so I could only manage 2 per month, 3 max. Finances got rough really quick.
Not only did I have this harsher workload, I also had just started a comic I couldn't just give up on! I could only manage to make one page per month, but it was still a lot to do during such a critical time. Terrible timing to start a comic, right before feeling forced to start a game...
Coill City was originally made in Unity, so of course I also had to learn a lot about how to create a visual novel in it (major thanks to a naninovel, a unity-based VN engine)! I'd come to regret it when I found out issues with the number of illustrations I wanted to use causing memory leak issues and crashes, an issue Unity would later state they wouldn't fix, OH JOY!
In short, each month I worked myself to death and felt dread all throughout due to constant loss of patrons, I felt like I was letting down my family...
Another sudden turn
By October (Another fateful October, huh), the comic reached a pausing point and entered hiatus (sadly I can't afford time to continue it to this day... I'm sorry guys).
A patron poll also confirmed to me that most people just wanted NSFW art, (especially parodies, duh), so Coill City moved to a new gamedev Patreon, CoillWorks (comic patreon became CoillComics). which spent it's first 3 months porting Coill City to Ren'Py. Coill City art would be part of my art Patreon's content as usual, so it felt like I was set to have my cake and eat it too by doing NSFW parodies while keeping up a growing original game on the side.
2024 Half a year of hope
Art focus: Classic parodies like BokuHero, Konosuba, One Piece and now Frieren and Spy x Family, with some Coill City art along the way...Things are looking up! Loss of patrons has stopped (turned out AI hadn't killed interest in human parodies as quickly as I thought it would...) all while I'm making steady progress in Coill City, with about two new Scenes a month!
What a huge relief! CoillWorks is growing steadily too, so it'll be a great safety net if AI kills my parody works eventually! Things couldn't be better, all that crazy effort was worth it!
Coill City dies.
By July 2024 I had been hearing that Patreon was banning games that had too "spicy" concepts, sometimes it seemed unreasonably so. Perhaps the CC companies were pushing Patreon again?
What about Coill City? Is it safe? So many people are paying for it... what if it all gets killed suddenly down the line?
I couldn't work on such a long-term project while having a Schrodinger's blade hanging over my head like that, I decided to ask them directly about the lust curse concept of my game and the deadly sex battles with demons.
They responded:
“We do understand that a curse might exist as part of the narrative of the game, but this type of content won't be allowed as per our current guidelines.“
One and a half years of grueling effort thrown away just like that... and all the money patrons put on it that will not carry the game to it's conclusion... FML... man... can't catch a break...
Coill City was discontinued and CoillWorks went into hiatus. I fell back into just making parodies, the most popular thing I make, for as long as AI doesn't replace me.
With dreams of one day returning to the characters we put so much effort and money into, we carried on.
2024-2025 Ups and downs
Art focus: After Coill City discontinuation... just parodies, innit?Doing parodies full time, should be fine right? Sadly, things wouldn't be as easy as in 2020. Actually we were about to enter hard mode.
Elon bought Twitter late 2022, and killed your reach if you posted a promo link, crushing my reach and source of new supporters... sweet.
Not only that, now nsfw posts would be severely throttled by default, so I went from getting 14k likes a post, to 4k. This definitely made things harder for Coill City and The Artifact comic, right as they started.
2024 and onward had periods of ups and downs, of trying new ideas to turn things around, it working for a while, just to fall shortly after and having to come up with something new again.
Elon's shenanigans now forced me to make a SFW variation of every intro piece for better reach on X, increasing workload of every Update further.
I tried adding dialogue versions in late 2023 to some major early success, but I stopped due to how time consuming it was. Things stagnated for months, so I tried bringing them back, but it didn't help at all, crap...
Suddenly things went up mid-2024! ...for no apparent reason? Then it stagnated, falling a bunch some months for no reason! I tried increasing doing collages/comics to increase number of figures drawn per Update! To little effect...
Then in October 2025 (I see a pattern here). I started doing what has become the standard 3-piece Updates, and FINALLY things started to slowly go up again!
For half a year...
2026 - Until now
Art focus: Usual parodies (now limited by poll timeouts) and Coill City char reimagining thanks to patrons voting for them on polls 🙏I played with doing 4-pic Updates, experimented with month's last Updates, started doing multi-character Updates, and it went well... until in June of 2026 when X bots marked my 120k follower SFW X account as NSFW, so all posts are now throttled.
Dang, ok, I'll just immediately start using my old unused 4k follower SFW CoillWorks account for my SFW art posts!
Marked NSFW in 2 months... the final straw for X's censor bots? The Pirate Besties SFW piece (making an extra-special SFWer version that tones down robin's cleavage and top folds didn't help, I guess!)
Ok, just start using the test account I was using to test posts before posting on CoillWorks as my SFW account, we'll see how long it works out! Hell, I've just started blurring any boobs or booty on anything that might be too sexy for X, regardless of how obscured they are (or how much more other people get away with!)
It's been frustrating to say the least, but does this X mess actually have an effect on patronage? Hard to say since I believed posting SFW posts to all my free Patreon followers was the main reason I stayed afloat, but let's see if this X shit seems to have an effect...
Might be having an effect? A fall of 140 patrons in 4 months is scary when you only had 700! And sadly, there's no quick fix to the X issue, so I'm in for a world of hurt!
September was especially brutal, since usually the number always goes up when I start posting the month's art, but in September it barely moved, and even then it fell a fair chunk! No idea why this happened, only that my posts didn't attract enough new supporters to counter the usual churn.
Beyond the X issues, since June 2026 AI can now do nice looking animations so if I was done for due to AI illustrations, now I may as well be dead and buried! Could it have contributed to the long-term decline?
Is AI finally eating all my lunch? I keep seeing them pop up and surpass my Patreon, but after polling patrons, the great majority completely hates it, so what's going on?
Is there a recession? Maybe AI layoffs are forcing patrons to cut on expenses?
Regardless of reason, if I can't bring people back in, this churn will push my Patreon to 0 within a year.
And with Patreon forcing me to change to the monthly subscription system, any misstep may just make things worse.
Needless to say, it's been a very stressful time.
2027 and beyond.
Surprisingly, I still have some hopes to keep me going.
For one, the subscription system will give me to break away from the "Update" pattern so I can try new things! Maybe mega-sets with more than 3 pieces, or short parody comics? How about trying to make an illustration a day? Scary but exciting.
Also, it's possible there is a support floor that my patreon won't go below for a long time. Maybe there are enough financially secure, die-hard supporters that will stick with me through thick and thin for years!
If not, at least I know of other creators that are thriving with original content. I got the work ethic to do almost anything, so maybe I could succeed with original content after all? Perhaps the dream of an original game will ultimately be my only option to survive as an artist as AI users grow in number, as I suspected in 2023.
Or maybe this is all a temporary stumble, and patronage will go up again for no reason, who knows!
The one thing that I'm certain about.
I've been incredibly fortunate to have had your support for these past 10 years. Being able to make a living as an artist for this long is a blessing I do not take for granted, and for it, just like on October 8th of 2016, I thank you all from the very bottom of my heart.
Your support is the fuel that has kept this engine going all this time, and with your support, I promise you I'll spare no effort to keep it going for 10 more.
Thank you all for supporting my art for 10 Years.
Comments (20)
Happy 10th anniversary!! I actually realized recently that it should be around 10 years this year. Even though I’ve only been subscribed for a little less than half a year, I’ve known about you since 2022. Anyway, I wish you way more subscribers, and never lose heart! I highly doubt AI will ever draw better than you.
Happy Anniversary!! 10 more years!, 10 more years!
Thank you so, so much for being such an amazing supporter for so long, top 3 for sure!! I hope I'll have the chance to bring more classic characters you enjoy in the future! Cheers for 10 more years! 🍻
I enjoyed your unvarnished 10 year chronicle. Your writing style conveys the highs and lows well. Cheers to another 10 years! 🍻
Hey Neo! Congratulations on 10 years!! I honestly don’t remember exactly when I started following you, I think it was around 2020 or 2021. But I do remember how I found you! I was looking for Overlord stuff and came across your Shalltear Update (221), and that’s how it all started Back then I didn’t even have a Patreon account, so I used to buy your Updates from your old website and Gumroad. I remember one day you told me I could get the Updates earlier through Patreon, so I joined, and I’ve been a Coillector ever since! I’ve been here through pretty much every stage since then. The regular Updates, the switch to original content, Coill City and the game, the comic Patreon, and then back to the regular Updates. Reading your post, I knew things hadn’t always been easy, but I didn’t realize just how much you had been dealing with behind the scenes. I’m really glad you’ve kept going through all of it. I truly believe what you do is art, and no matter how much things change with AI or anything else, there will always be people who appreciate your work. I’m definitely one of them! I really hope things get better for you and that you continue growing and making amazing stuff. You’ve been my favorite artist for years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I’ll keep supporting you for as long as I can! Here’s to another 10 years, Neo! Let’s keep going!! And please, more Albedo Updates!! I’m still praying for those!
Thanks Hierophant! I also remember that you were one of my greatest supporters on Gumroad (man, losing it was a big hit too!), and even though we don't chat often, I always think of you as one of my greatest patrons! I'm so glad to hear you think so highly of my work too! Being anyone's "best" is really moving, and honestly, it lights up a fire inside to keep pushing my skills further, since there's always room for improvement, that I tend to forget during the months and years of grinding pieces every month. I'll do my best to keep this fire alive for as long as I can to improve my content for you guys further. If I manage to be courageous enough to experiment more, you should see further improvements in the future, the flexibility of monthly billing should help with that. It may seem silly, but thinking of any patrons who stuck with me through the harshest times really moves me, so I'm really thankful you continued supporting my work even when I was fumbling around in a panic. Even if I'm 99% of the time looking at a canvas and not socializing with patrons, I really treasure people like you. It's sad not many people suggest overlord girl any more for polls, but for at least next poll, I'll make sure Albedo gets another shot! Don't forget you can suggest her every month if you want to! It may be worthwhile to keep trying, especially nowadays that I reach deeper down the poll every month. Here's to ten more Hierophant, I'll do my best to make it a good one!
10 years eh? Never thought it would be that long but happy 10th year anniversary, Neocoill! Don't let AI take over what you do and allat and just try to ignore what these companies are trying to do and shit. Never back down and definitely don't you dare bend the knee to these AI enthusiasts and shit. They're trash man!
Thank you and yeah, I was shocked too when I noticed! I'll do my best, but ultimately, it'll be the "world" that decides if human art can survive. To me, as long as I can make enough to do right by my family, I'll be content, and thanks to support from patrons like you, I will be able to continue to do so for many, many years!
Ten years, and I've only been here for six and a half of those years. I appreciated the read. Here's to a future where you can further your reach without obstacles from social media. Cheers!
It may feel like "just" 6 years, but still you are and has been one of the greatest supporters I've ever had! I hope I will continue to create art you enjoy for a very, very long time, Makise. And even if I were to fail there, I hope you will keep an eye on my work so I can get a shot to change things around. Thank you for 6 years of support 🙏🙏
Thank you dor making art all this time. I know i not been here from start or can support much but i happy i can help pitch in even little bit Wish you best with bew system and do hope you can figure out how do original content as well
That's all right, ever since you joined you've been one of the few always willing to go the extra mile to help in whatever way you can, and as you know, I truly appreciate that. Let's hope the world is kind enough to allow me to succeed with original works one of these days! 🙏🙏
Happy anniversary! Your art rules! I don’t believe that you're really at fault for those fluctuations of your Patreon subscribers, there are so many things at play here, some of them beyond anybodys control. I believe that there will always be a market for human made art, people have a need to express themselves or they simply admire it, it's in our nature - AI can’t take that away from us
Thank you and I really hope you're right! I'll do my part to keep human art going from my small corner on the internet. Thank you for supporting it, even if it's in a small way each month. Like I said in the post, I can't do this without your guys' monthly support!
Man. 10 years. Congratulations, Neo. That's a lot of heartbreaking set backs, especially with the October ones. While I wasn't there at the start, I'll still be here supporting you. You're one of the best artists, who is dedicated to art, and has a wicked great humor. Plus makes THICC Masterpieces. Along with drawing guys with intact Bananas. Just remember what matters the most is your health and needs. Don't ever hesitate taking breaks if you need to. Your fans will understand. If you need more funds, some of us will do what we can. Thank you, Neo. Here's to good fortune. 🫡💝
Thank you for the good wishes man! You may have joined later on, but you're one of the few patrons that takes the time to comment and talk every about almost every post I make, so you're already one of the core members in my mind. I appreciate the concern and you're right I should do more to stay healthy, but it's hard not to sacrifice a bit extra when things look dire, especially when you have family that depends on your work! But I'll try to do a bit better on that front, not having to crunch to finish a 6th Update before the end of the month should help somewhat. Here;s to good fortune! I hope I will be able to continue making content you and everyone enjoys for many, many more years.
Screwed by the tech oligarchs pushing AI, screwed by the credit card companies controlling what you can produce and sell, screwed by another tech oligarch buying twitter. I'm started to sense a pattern. I reiterate my comment from your post about AI, never let them back you into a corner enough that you feel you'll have to sell out.
Of course, I'll do everything I can to keep going as always. As long as there's enough people in the world willing to support my work, I'll keep drawing the human way.
Happy 10th anniversary, and I hope your patreon continues to grow in the future you truly deserve it! For me, your amazing art style are what make you one of the best artists in this field on Patreon, if not the best, hands down
Thank you Hathe! I hope so too, and I hope I can do enough to deserve it! I'll do my best to continue to improve my content, there is still plenty of room to improve!