The flavor of the moment in crowd funding seems to be “Patreon.” The idea is similar to Kickstarter, but instead of a person kicking in X dollars, they kick in Y dollars per month (or per some-sort-of-unit). I tried something similar a few days back with the PayPal “subscription” option next to the tip jar, to results I pretty much expected.
Searching through Patreons listings, I note a number of ’em for blogs. So… what the heck. Is it worth contemplating for the Unwanted Blog and/or the Aerospace Projects Review blog and/or the photography blog?
There are two sorts of goodies that patrons get:
1) You get specific rewards depending on how much you individually pledge
2) There are general performance goals depending on how much total is pledged (“milestone goals”)
If I were to do this for my blogs, I’m not really sure what I’d do for #1, but I was thinking of something like these for #2:
“If I get $100 per month pledged, I will weep sadly and not say anything further about it”
“If $250 per month, I will make sure to post one aircraft or spacecraft project or full-rez photo every three days”
“If $500 per month, one project every other day”
“If $750 per month, one a day”
“If $1000, one a day plus one CAD drawing in DWG/DXF format per month”
or
“If $1000, one high-rez photo/concept art/blueprint/whatever per week”
And then so on and so forth. Something like that.
I was also thinking about how the system handles contradictory goals… “At $1000 per week, I’ll post nothing but politics; at $1500, no politics at all; at $2000, nothing but politics again…”
Some seem to be doing pretty well… the online webcomic “Questionable Content” has, as of this writing, signed up nearly $6,900 per MONTH worth of patronage. Others are doing kinda meh, like the funding for the Atomic Rocket website(which I wholly recommend to anyone interested in spaceflight tech and science and/or interested in creating scientifically accurate spacegoing sci-fi) currently sitting at $188/month.
So: is this worth considering, or would it be yet another wasted effort? This is, after all, a pretty piddly little blog in the grand scheme. But if it’s worth doing, what sort of pledge-rewards and milestones should I have?