A Very Long Patron Update

 Hi guys, this will be a meaty update as there is quite a lot to discuss. 

I know there’s been a lot of changes to the Patreon and the Discord setup lately, but I hope you will forgive me just one more reshaping, as I think some of the changes I made at the start of the year (and indeed some I made months ago) were mistakes. 

To give some context, in January I got a job, which I do for 20hrs a week, so I’m now splitting my time between it and YouTube. This means the frequency of content is going to drop back to one video every three weeks, and there will be a whole series of changes as well to go along with this and hopefully put the patreon in a better place. 

Patreon Changes 

I’ll be totally honest, I’m not happy with the changes I made in January. Too many tiers, at arbitrary amounts, with rewards that existed for the sake of themselves. The guides that Patreon writes for creators encourages this kind of thing, but I’ve decided I’m not keen on going down that route. 

So I’ve simplified back to four tiers: 

$1 – Access to Feed

$3 – Access to Polls

$5 – Early Access to Videos

$10 – First Draft of Script. 

Another change I am going to be making is a shift from per-month billing to per-video. The main reason for this is that it takes the time pressure off the video-making process. Now that I’m not solely doing YouTube the added pressure of getting towards the end of a month and having not made a video (as it was last month) is a really horrible way to work. My last video came out on the back of three days where I did virtually nothing except animate it- which is no way to work. My fear is that if carry on like that eventually a video will come out that will be badly below standard. 

With regards to the effect this has on billing, with a video every three weeks there will obviously be some months where you are billed twice. If you have any concerns about the added amount then please don’t hesitate to adjust your pledge to compensate. I’ll be sending a message to every patron to let you all know about this change. 

Discord https://discord.gg/sv4HdpU

My Discord setup has been a total mess for a long time, due to my bad decision to cram historigraph people into my old gaming discord. Setting up a historigraph patrons-only discord was also in my mind a bad decision because it just isolates the community. So I’m changing things to a patron-only section on the historigraph discord (the new one), and inviting historigraph viewers to join the public channels on that discord.

My hope is that we might get a vibrant history-discussing community to develop on the new discord in a way that was impossible on the old one. 

Video Updates 

The next video is on the Battle of Taranto, and I’m aiming for Feb 16th for its release. Still nailing down my topics for the two videos in march, and then once we are into the spring proper the D-Day series will make an appearance.