Change for Paid tier and Gift Link tier

Hello everyone,
the "Tip Jar" tier is being tweaked with two additions for Patrons.

First, Patrons will now get 3 days of early access to the upcoming images and animations instead of just a few hours. That means if an image is planned for Saturday on DeviantArt & Pixiv, you’ll be able to view it here starting Wednesday.

Second, replacing the 2K versions, there will now be exclusive content for Patrons: an animated version of each image published. These won’t be as sophisticated as the 10–15 second videos I sometimes post (those take a lot of work to produce, making them daily or even weekly is unsustainable).

They’ll usually be around 3–5 seconds long and available as HQ GIFs (around 6 MB). MP4 versions will be included in the ZIP recap. Think of them as animated images, kind of like the golden cards in Hearthstone if anyone can relate.

If the daily post is already an animation, you'll instead get an alternate image.
These animated and alternate images are Patrons exclusives and won’t be published anywhere else.

The tier will be renamed "Early Access", with the price staying the same. Launching November 4.

Unfortunately, these new additions affect the "Gift Link" tier. Early access and animations will not be available on the "Gift Link" tier, which will be discontinued on December 1.

Basically, everyone who joined through the free link I shared over the past months is affected: you will still see content as before, but not in early access and without any exclusive stuff. After December 1, no new posts will appear there.

It's really a tough choice to make because that's almost all my current Patrons...

About leaking

At the launch of my Patreon, people could easily and freely join it through a shared gift link. I’m very grateful to everyone who did, but that’s also when problems began.

Someone used the link, joined the tier, and then shared his session key with a scraping website. That means every new post published here gets scraped and reposted elsewhere.

This wasn’t too concerning while I was only posting non-exclusive content: after all, the same images and animations were already free to view on DeviantArt and Pixiv. But now that I'm publishing exclusive stuff and early access for paid members, that openness becomes a real problem.

Of course, this will not stop leaking entirely — I'm not being naïve about that — but at least it makes things harder: leakers will have to subscribe and pay, which makes it much less likely.
Looking back, giving away a full year of free access was a mistake. It made scraping way too easy: no credit card required, nothing. Even a small paywall of $2 might discourage it, at least for a while.

To give you perspective, here are some facts and numbers using Linkly analytics:

• for quite some time, searching my username on Google showed the scraping website before my actual Patreon page.

• Between September 15 and October 20, 510 views came from the scraping website and 6 came from Patreon.

And that’s just for videos. Images are probably a similar ratio (99% vs 1%).
Even if most of that traffic wouldn’t have converted to real subscribers, it still hurts to see.

A medium or big creator can survive leaks. It still sucks, but they have an established fanbase.
I don’t. I’ve grown a very decent following on Pixiv and DeviantArt, but it’s almost nonexistent on Patreon.
All my current members came from the free gift link. Having my work leaked before even gaining a single paid member has basically put me in checkmate.

That’s why I'm discontinuing the "Gift Link" tier. It’s a sad and frustrating step, but publishing exclusive material there would only harm my accounts in the long run.

Thank you all for understanding.