It's Spring! Patreon plans n' such

Hey folks!  How y'all doing?  Thought I'd just pop in here and put down a few thoughts on Patreon and the sort of things I'm planning on doing with it in the very near future.  I'll say here at the top that I would love for you to make your own suggestions for ideas and such.  

It's becoming kinda clear now that Patreon is totally the way forward for everything, isn't it?  I mean, seriously...YouTube is getting worse and worse.  I've often said to y'all that a YouTube existence that's purely reliant on ad revenue is the path to total madness, and I think that's what we're saying lately...especially with all this boycotting going on that's having an effect on pretty much everyone across the board.  The whole issue is pretty much misunderstood as hell on all sides, but generally people are losing money.  Judging by the past couple of days. even the revenue of a relatively small channel like mine is taking a bit of a punch, and will for the foreseeable until such things resolve.  

...Which is, of course, why I'm rather fortunate to have set up this Patreon as my main source of income - it's the whole reason I can do things this way.  But I can do a hell of a lot more with it!  As of lately, aside from the monthly Q&A - and of course, the tapes and the early access - I've kinda just been letting it tick over...so I want to do a lot more.  Here's ideas that I'm toying with.

Multiple weekly vlogs on various subjects - I've wanted to get started on vlogging for a while now.  Obviously I've done a couple on my main channel, and...yeah, sometimes they've not gone well.  But I enjoy having a lil' natter about various subjects - not just things about gaming or the state of YouTube or whatever, but other stuff I'm interested in, life things and all that.  But I'm no pro vlogger, as any of you who've watched my vlogs will now...so, I intend to make these vlogs Patreon-exclusive content!  There might be some other fun shit in there too - now that I'm filming more, there's certainly a lot more potential for outtakes.  This is certainly something that's going to happen - if I hadn't been sick as a dog this past week, I'd have started it already.  This exclusive content will prob be open to the $5 tier and above, I reckon.

One-to-one chatting on Skype - I know of a few folks who do this, and it might be worth for me to open this up to a few Patrons each month - like, around 10.   Kind of self-explanatory - nattering on Skype for like, 30 minutes or so about whatever subject you wish - whether it's video-related or games-related or what have you.  Not sure how much people would pay for this (ballpark, around $40) - thoughts would be appreciated. 

Expanding the newsletter/software giveaways - Currently my top reward is the Speccy tapes each month, which always tend to go down well with the folks who receive them :) now, I'm thinking of expanding these somewhat, with a couple more tiers - perhaps I could introduce PS2 to the mix...again, we'll see. :)

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Those are current ideas I'm thinking about, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on them, along with any other potential rewards you'd be interested in seeing.  There's several end goals here, of course:  The first is, of course, relating to the current $1,000 goal of Disappearing Southend and getting over that hump.  But the other big goal is to gradually reduce the need for ads, until a point is reached where they aren't needed at all...I'm not totally sure where that goal is yet, but the less that I, as a video maker, can rely on such a comically volatile avenue of income, the better!  Anyway, that's about it...I'm hoping I'll be all better and able to do my usual walking n' stuff (I like to vlog outside) in the next couple of days, so you can expect to see that sort of thing from then on.  But until then...wherever you are, whoever you be, have a good one! 

All the best,

-Kim