The Math of Patreon, 2019Q1 Edition

Welcome to an update on what I pay for with the support of this Patreon campaign. Be warned, there is no comic book content in this post! It's all about budgeting and transparency.

The Short Story: What do Patrons pay for?

As of this writing, every cent pledged to this campaign is directly spent on service or equipment for Crushing Krisis after Patreon takes their fees. That includes the following list of pledge goals:

• CK Hosting Essentials - $40/month ($40 total)
• Behind the Scenes Support - $40/month ($80 total)
• Multimedia Tools, Part 1: Still Images & Research - $50/month ($130 total)
• Multimedia Tools, Part 2: Moving Pictures - $60/month ($190 total)
• Multimedia Tools, Part 3: Making Things Shiny - $125/month for one year ($315 total)

I cover the full breakdown of those costs below. As of this writing, pledges are in the process of covering the final goal in that list.

Once that is covered, I plan to expand to three new areas simultaneously, which will take us through a goal of around $1000/month in total pledges. Those are:

• Commissions & Merchandise - between $125-215/month
• Professionalization - about $125/month
• Adding New Voices - the next $250/month

I discuss those future expenses in more detail at the end of the post

Here's a sample of what a single Patron helps me to afford as of today:

• Pledging as a Crushing Cadet for a year means you effectively pay for CK's annual domain registration. Alternately, each month you pay for about 5% of CK's hosting bill.
  
• Pledging as a Pledgeonaut for a year means you effectively pay for CK's annual SEO services subscription. Alternately, each month you pay for about 10% of CK's hosting bill.
  
• Pledging as a member of the Crushing Comics Club for a year means you pay for about one month of CK's video editing costs out of each year. Alternately, each month you pay for about 20% of CK's hosting bill.

That's the long story made short! If you want more detail on the five existing goals and three future expenses, keep reading.

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The Longer Story: A breakdown of costs covered by Patrons

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Crushing Krisis exists today entirely due to the support of this Patreon community.

At the start of 2019, CK is an entirely "self-funded" project.

That means that while I might chip in some up-front costs for new CK services from personal savings, any ongoing cost to maintain CK must be supported by this campaign. I don't keep any Patreon money for personal use or as a salary. 

When I first launched this campaign, one of my guiding principals was that wanted to be completely transparent and accountable to all of my Patrons - past, present, and future.  That resulted in a pair of posts, The Current Costs of CK and The Potential Future Costs of CK, explaining all of the costs behind CK at the time.

This post replaces those two posts, because many aspects of keeping CK running have changed since 2017. Keeping reading to find out what Patron support is currently helping to pay for at CK.

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Goal #1: CK Hosting Essentials - about $40/month

These are the essential costs of keeping Crushing Krisis up and running. If I couldn't pay for these core expenses, the site would disappear. This goal includes:

• Domain registration
• Web hosting (including a Virtual Private Server)

This cost is now higher than when I began this campaign. That's because Patron support has allowed me to upgrade CK's hosting to its own Virtual Private Server, which gives it more RAM and helps with spikes in traffic.

The level of traffic the site receives after two years of improvements during this campaign would overwhelm a cheaper hosting option (which is awesome, if you think about it).

Because CK is hosted on its own VPS, I also maintain a separate, cheaper hosting plan for my supporting web content, including non-WordPress multimedia and database hosting, as well as email services.

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Goal #2: Behind the Scenes Support - about $40/month

There are a number of background costs that help me maintain my content across the web. This goal includes:

• Google Apps service
• WordPress membership management
• WordPress efficiency plugins, like time tracking
• WordPress marketing and shareability plugins, like SEO
• Additional domain hosting
• Password management

The only visible effect of these for readers is the ability to log-in to CK with a specific level of member access to see certain pages. That is not a core function of WordPress; I added it with a yearly subscription to a helper plugin.

The other services in this category aren't visible to you, but they represent incredibly useful time-savings for me. Some of the other things this covers are Gmail service for my CK email, SEO plugins, internationalization services, and additional domain registration.

I didn't have any of those things before the beginning of this campaign, and I wasted so much time worrying about them or doing them manually. Life is so much easier now.

(In 2017-18, this category also funded converting to a new theme framework for WordPress. This one-time expense has now been paid-in-full by pledges! Right now that is not a recurring cost, which allowed me to refocus that budget into other things. However, it could return in the future as I keep CK upgraded for the best possible presentation and searchability.)

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Goal #3: Multimedia Tools, Part 1:
Still Images & Research - about $50/month

You cannot maintain a blog - especially not a comic book blog - without images. This goal includes:

• Adobe Photoshop Subscription
• Cloud backup
• Subscriptions to Comixology Unlimited and Marvel Unlimited

That starts with being able to quickly knock out custom graphics with a subscription to Photoshop, which is $20 a month.

I have Photoshop templates and saved actions for everything from guide page images to video title cards. That saves me so much time compared to when I used to recreate these sorts of things from scratch every time using lesser programs or web services. 

Multimedia support also includes cloud backup for these files, which protects me from hard drive disaster.

I also place my Marvel Unlimited and Comixology Unlimited subscriptions into this category. 

Yes, I do sometimes use them to read comics for fun! However, they are also critical research tools for guide building - whether that's quickly checking on a character appearance or grabbing a high-quality cover to use as illustration. Those actions are now near-instantaneous for me because I've built databases and javascript tools to automate my workflow using them both.

(For a page like the new Guide to Sabretooth, I had to review over 200 comic issues - doing that with physical issues might have multiplied the time to create the guide by 2x or more!)

If the DC Universe service broadens its comic selection, I will likely add subscription to that as well. The lack of a comprehensive DC digital service is one of a few reasons that DC Guides currently take longer to complete than Marvel Guides!

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Goal #4: Multimedia Tools, Part 2:
Moving Pictures - about $60/month

I've always wanted to add video to Crushing Krisis's arsenal of tools, and in late 2017 this campaign made that possible by saving me time and money in other areas. This includes:

• Adobe Creative Cloud subscription
• Local physical storage for my camera and file backups

Even if you have zero interest in video content, you can think of my videos as a marketing cost. My YouTube channel has made me a more visible figure in comics fandom and resulted in a noticeable increase in traffic both to CK and to this Patreon campaign.

The major software expense here is adding a subscription to Adobe Premiere to my Photoshop subscription, which costs $30 more a month. Premiere isn't necessarily my favorite video editing software, but it forms a lot of natural efficiencies when working alongside Photoshop. It also comes with several helper programs in the rest of the Adobe Suite.

Additionally, there are some unavoidable, recurring physical storage requirements that come along with video production.  I need to have enough flash memory to shoot several videos at once, as well as local physical storage to store my mixing files - as they very quickly outstripped the capacity of my web backup service. Editing an average video takes 5-20GB of space.

(In mid-2018 I actually ran out of storage before this campaign could fully fund buying more, and that stopped me from making videos for several months while I set everything right again.)

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Goal #5: Multimedia Tools, Part 3:
Making Things Shiny - $125/month for one year (and then it's done!)

This is my major focus for this Patreon campaign in 2019. Having the ability to shoot and edit video doesn't necessarily mean the video looks and sounds good. Right now, my hardware set-up limits those things. This goal includes

• Additional lighting
• Video backdrops (including Green Screen)
• New camera and lens
• Shotgun style microphone
• Live-Streaming hardware/software support

I use my family's existing video camera and tripod for CK purposes. Luckily, the camera is HD! Unluckily, it does not have the ability to add or change lenses, nor sophisticated white balance and aperture control, nor (and this is CRITICAL) an external audio input.

That not only restricts my filming options and quality, but it means I cannot bring the considerable weight of my sound production equipment and experience to bear on my video editing. I've tried a lot of workarounds for this, and they vary in quality and are time-consuming. In some cases they double both editing and mixdown time, which turns a single video into an all-day job.

That's not time I have to spend! Thus. it's time to upgrade to a new camera.

Similarly, my videos would look more professional if I added professional lighting to the mix rather than relying on my overhead lighting. I'd also like to add a few backdrops to my arsenal, including a green screen backdrop for when I want to insert backgrounds into a video.

Finally, depending on the expenses of the other elements of this goal, I may also purchase hardware and software to better support live streaming and live video recording. My laptop only shoots video in 720, but there are affordable hardware interfaces that would let me livestream directly from an HD camera to YouTube and Facebook through my laptop.

(These are all one-time expenses, so after a year of increasing pledges by $125 a month I could funnel this considerable amount of support directly into one of the future expenses, below.)

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Future Pledge Goals - from $315 to $1000!

I'm a project planner by nature and by career, so you can trust I've always planned several steps beyond the current state of the campaign.

Here's a sneak peak at the next three sets of goals after my enhanced video production is fully supported. These goals wouldn't necessarily be strictly sequential - I might intermingle them so we could progress on all three things at once.

Commissions & Merchandise - between $125-215/month

One thing that sets apart many blogs and video channels is their commissioning of original artwork to give them a visual identity and allow them to sell merchandise. 

Alas, while I am a decent type designer and photo editor, I am not an illustrator!

Funding this goal will allow me to pay for commissioned custom artwork for this campaign, which could appear across Patreon, CK, and YouTube. 

I have a solid plan for both the digital and physical ways I'd use commissioned art - I've even found someone with awesome connections to act as my artist coordinator! But, I need a budget to make this happen.

Reaching this goal would also enable me to provide an occasional physical reward for Patrons, which I've always wanted to do!

Professionalization - about $125/month

Now that the Crushing Krisis is operating at scale, it's time to get a bit more professional on the backend to streamline administration and improve technical capabilities.

This goal includes funding subscriptions to professional software for cloud backup, email lists, improved SEO management, and social media monitoring.

(When I lived in the states this also included the formation of an LLC; now that I live abroad this is as high priority or practical, for a variety of reasons.)

Adding New Voices - about $250/month, but could continue to increase

I've always wanted the Crushing Krisis media empire to be about more than just my voice. If I want to include other voices on a regular basis, I want to be able to compensate them for their time and effort.

Breaking into this level of support could mean more CK content, more video content, or even support to produce and update more comic guides!

(In reality, there are already collaborators adding value to both guide and video content, and it pains me to only be thanking them in "exposure.")

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Thank you for reading, whether you consumed every word or just skimmed your way to the bottom!

It's important to me to show you how and why your support is so critical to the continued success of Crushing Krisis. Without this campaign, CK would have likely ended its tenure in 2017 - not only due to competing priorities in life and budget, but because my traffic would have continuously declined without the SEO improvements this campaign helped me to afford!

Quite plainly: Nothing I do is possible without your support, and I truly appreciate that.