Patreon Update: I'm back!

Hey everyone! I am back from the dead!

Sorry for my extended hiatus. I never planned to be gone so long.

TLDR:

If you don’t care about the details, I’m back! I’m focusing more on making the ideas for shorts and comics as good as they possibly can be.

To let me fully control what ideas I make, I’m removing polls as a perk and replacing it with a new and improved early access perk that will be up to a week early. Because of this change in perks, I’m discounting the prices of some tiers. VIP is now $4 and Credits is now $9.

Personal Update:

I mentioned in the last update that I was out sick, but the reality is I was recovering from a surgery. I didn’t want to worry anyone so I left it vague, but now I’m fully recovered! For a while, it did make getting back to work harder than I hoped. 

This was compounded on top of my last three shorts all significantly underperforming. Even the dancing animation I spent so long making did terrible on all platforms. It really killed my motivation alongside my YouTube revenue. Add an American election I was hoping would go the other way and I was not in the right headspace to make art.

Luckily, I was not just sitting on my hands the whole time. I tried to do a lot of introspection about my process and how to improve things.

As much as I hate to say it, I realized my strength is not in my animation abilities. 

That Trendy Dance was me trying to really showcase my animation skills and it is now my worst performing short ever.

I’m not a BAD animator or anything, but it's not my strength. My strength is my characters, my art style, and coming up with fun video ideas. I’m gonna keep trying to be a better animator, but my animation should be in service of showing off the characters or delivering a fun or funny story.

I’ve spent my whole hiatus writing up weekly comics or brainstorming short ideas. If I can come up with better ideas, I think I’ll be making better and better content.

This focus on the quality of ideas does lead to a second problem.

Patreon Update:

For the time being, I won’t be posting any more polls. This is for two reasons:

• 1) Polls only work if I offer 3 very good options and members pick the one I can make best. I often don’t have enough time to create 3 amazing ideas; so you all get half-baked options instead. Sometimes, I don’t like the winner and I can’t figure out how to make the idea work. Maybe I think of something better, but I have to stick to the winner of the poll. With my new goal of trying to pick the best ideas going forward, I think choosing whatever option I, personally, am 100% happy with is the way to go.

• 2) I want to start offering YouTube Memberships as an alternative to Patreon; but I want the perks to be the same for both platforms. Running the same poll on two different platforms will cause headaches if each poll picks a different winner. If I use a 3rd party voting system, like google sheets or a straw polls, then the link can be shared and non-members could vote and change the result. 

I really like doing polls and maybe I can find a way to bring it back later, but for these two reasons, I’m gonna remove this perk for the time being. Instead, I’m going to hypercharge the Early Access perk!

Originally, I was just experimenting with early access, trying to post it a couple days early for all members. However, now I want to make it a formal perk and I want to post it even earlier. 

I’m going to try and post it a week before it’s released publicly. That way it's more exclusive and I don’t need to rush finishing a post or a short early in the week.

Since this content will be released so much earlier, please don’t repost any early access content before it is released publicly. In an era of content farms stealing other people's work, I don’t want some bad actor to reupload my video before I do.

I’ll be adding a watermark to early access content, just to be safe, and hopefully that will be enough.

Because this new early access is going to be even earlier, this will now be a VIP perk going forward.

However, since polls are still being lost, I wanted to discount VIP and Credits to make up for this missing perk.

VIP will now be $4 and Credits will now be $9.

End:

I hope you all understand why I’m making the changes I outlined. I’m hoping these will lead to better and more consistent content from me going forward! 

But let me know what you think. I would love to get any feedback on these new changes or anything else in this update!

Thank you for your support. It’s good to be back!

Mark