I’ve once again been contemplating options for monetizing the site to keep it (and me) alive, which brings me back to the Patreon idea. This is something that people have suggested for years, and I’ve always been wary of it, but I wonder if it might be a better idea than I had thought. One big advantage of Patreon is that it’s opt-in, and is not (insofar as I understand it) dependent on harvesting unwitting visitors’ personal data for ad profiling purposes — I aggressively block most online advertising myself, and such advertising can now have complicated legal implications. Patreon also appears to offer much greater flexibility and platform support for options such as recurring payments (something that’s theoretically possible but legally and administratively stressful with PayPal).
However, there are a lot of questions to wrestle with:
- I’m very reluctant to put articles behind a paywall. It wouldn’t be in my commercial or professional interests — with content whose appeal is already somewhat rarefied, I might as well just bury it in the desert at that point — and if my goal is to expand the general understanding or address misconceptions about a topic, making the content harder to access seems counterproductive.
- I don’t know if readers would have any interest in “bonus content” for Patreon subscribers, or what kind. I took a stab at creating “author’s notes” for the two most recent articles, which ended up amounting to rather verbose section-by-section footnotes; whether anyone would want those on top of the already-lengthy existing articles, I dunno. (They seem like they would be of most interest to someone researching their own book or paper.)
- I’m not sure what kind of content schedule I could reasonably commit to. Patreon, like most Internet content models, presumably works best with regularly scheduled, frequent updates, which I’m not sure is realistic for Ate Up With Motor. The fuel injection and Jetfire/Corvair turbo articles proceeded at a relatively brisk pace given their length and complexity, but the former involved three or four weeks of more or less full-time work (which isn’t always feasible), while the latter took around 10 weeks at a slightly less feverish pitch. There is of course the possibility of aiming for shorter chunks of content that aren’t as time-consuming to research and write, but this raises the question of whether it should be specifically for Patreon (which gets back to the paywall issue) or whether it would be better to treat Patreon as a supplement/alternative to the existing PayPal button rather than as a separate content outlet.
- I don’t know to what extent there’s still actually an audience. I feel like the most substantive thing I have to contribute in the realm of automotive writing is actually doing my homework, or trying to; for instance, a lot of my research for the fuel injection article involved poring through sources while muttering, “That seems wrong,” or “That doesn’t make chronological sense,” and then trying to distill those pieces into a coherent, factually consistent narrative. This isn’t something that lends itself to short and punchy 800-word essays with clickbait headlines, which is what the Internet most rewards; that’s fine, but when it comes to Ate Up With Motor, my assumption is that if people wanted a quick summation, they’d just read the Wikipedia article. However, this is an admittedly esoteric approach to already-esoteric topics, which at times leaves me feeling like Bertie Wooster’s newt-fancier friend Gussie Fink-Nottle. Is there still a place for that? Again, I dunno.
I welcome any thoughts or suggestions, particularly from people who’ve used Patreon (either as a patron or as a creator).