Friendly Reminder
Added 2018-07-31 22:23:52 +0000 UTCYour continued support means a lot to me. I know some of you hate the transition from posting directly to Patreon and onto PrimeLeap. I know it’s not easy, and I lost a lot of patrons due to the switch. I will continue to do my best to make receiving content as convenient as I can for you with the transition.
Your continued support is helping me in my
Personal life. For that, I thank you.
Comments
It's a website that I use to post my patreon content. You can link your patreon account after you've joined my club on primeleap, which gives you access to patreon content.
EbonyChimera
2018-08-01 18:41:16 +0000 UTCThank you for your input. Here's the thing, though. For years, my artwork has been pirated, everytime I try to make something new, and it gets pirated very early during the middle of me actively trying to sell my new content. Piracy cuts directly into my sales, and hurts me more than it benefits me with "exposure to a greater audience". The audience being people that have no intention of paying artists for the stuff that they create to pay the bills. Those people share it with their friends who are, or are potentially customers. If they get stuff for free, then there's no point in paying for it. I've actually had a lot of people say that to my face. They found my new content on an image board site, and were thinking about purchasing it, but it's free now so they don't need to. A patreon piracy website that has been active for a couple of years now, that because of this site's creation, they have no reason to actively support my Patreon. Everything that I create will be scraped and viewed for free so they don't have to pay a cent. Even when I've adopted the new posting method of posting the content for free a month later. Losing patrons is inevitable, no one's going to keep supporting someone forever, it's a fact that I've come to accept as I experiment with different things on terms of art, or utility for posting my art. As for the watermarks, that was my mistake. I didn't properly implement them upon each new upload, which I will go back and correct on PrimeLeap today and tomorrow. I've been doing my best to try and make the transition easy for patrons that are signing up for PrimeLeap. If people still have issues signing up, I can walk them through it, or if the e-mailing system is taking a while, I can buzz the dev to have it looked at. PrimeLeap is a new site, and there are kinks to be worked out. But it's developing, and I have high hopes for PrimeLeap. For every new picture that I post, I'll make a direct link to it on Patreon here, so you don't have to constantly check one site or the other, you'll just be directly linked to the picture itself in a preview post on patreon. I apologize if dealing with another site fills you with annoyance and frustration, and I appreciate that you've supported me thus far. I can only hope you will stick around as PrimeLeap develops. If not, it will be sad to see you go, but I will understand your decision.
EbonyChimera
2018-08-01 18:38:19 +0000 UTCYou already know my stance on all this; I'm just happy to be helping you out. Not a lot of people are willing to put up with my shenanigans and/or mental health quirks. So the fact that you've been such a nice friend, more then deserves my support! You just keep being awesome Kayla! ^_^
Gorehound
2018-08-01 16:15:29 +0000 UTCUhhh... What is prime leap..?
Matthew lau
2018-08-01 03:21:28 +0000 UTCKayla, I appreciate that we are helping to support you while you continue doing what you love, and that's part of the reason that I have been a patron of yours for the past 2 and a half years, but something's gone horribly wrong when it's easier to download a pirated collection of your Patreon works than it is for a paying customer like me to access a single patron-exclusive post legitimately. Over the past 2.5 years, I've seen it become progressively harder and harder to access the content I'm paying for. Back when you posted monthly Dropbox links, I could simply download a zip of the past month's works and browse them offline at my leisure. Then, the Dropbox links were discontinued, and I had to check Patreon after each email notification that I received in order to view each new illustration. Saving images for offline viewing required going through each post and saving each image individually. Now, we have PrimeLeap, which not only inserts another step in the process of actually viewing new content, but degrades the content I do finally receive by plastering a giant watermark over it (when their image servers aren't just down). The experience that I receive as a paying customer of yours has degraded to the point that I'm starting to question why I do pay anymore, since the pirates seem to have a much nicer content-consuming experience all around (download content archives in one click, no watermarks, etc.). Now, I assume that your goal with your Patreon page is to make money, and that making more money is a good thing and making less money is a bad thing. If my assumption here is wrong, please let me know, but if it is correct, then I would also argue that placing more barriers between your customers and the content they have paid for, even in the name of anti-piracy, will only hurt your bottom line. You mentioned that you "lost a lot of patrons due to the switch," which I hope you realize is a natural consequence of making it harder to access the materials people are paying for, and not just an aberration. I hope you also realize that even if you significantly curtail the piracy of your works, not every person who pirates your content, and not even a significant percentage of the people who pirate your content, will become paying customers if no other means of obtaining your work is available. Having been a college student without any real disposable income at one time in my life, I can personally attest that there were plenty of things that I pirated back in the day that I would never have paid for, even if there was no free source available. Finally, while I won't argue that piracy is a net positive, I will argue that piracy can have benefits, namely in exposing your work to a wider audience that might not have otherwise ever found out about you. If we're being honest, Patreon isn't the greatest for being able to reliably discover new creators that you know you want to support, and I haven't pledged to a single creator because I found them through Patreon directly. I have, however, started pledging to multiple creators precisely because I found pirated archives of their patron-exclusive work (on sites with far more robust tagging, rating, etc. systems), and decided that I wanted to support that artist so they can continue making their art. I really love the work you do, Kayla, and I want you to be able to continue to do that work. To that end, I want you to be able to get and keep more patrons and be able to make more money from this platform. However, from where I'm standing, the decisions you've made recently run counter to that goal, and seem to have hurt your bottom line more than they have helped it. (Again, I'm making assumptions here based on your comments and what I've seen elsewhere with similarly aggressive anti-piracy campaigns. If this has all actually been a net positive for you, then congratulations!) I hope you can see what I'm proposing here as a win-win for you and your patrons. Make it easier for us to access the content that we have paid for, and as a result gain and retain more patrons by not turning people off by making them jump through hoops to access it. Even if you disagree with me, I hope this can be the start of a dialogue between you and your patrons about these issues. Sincerely, Aaron Loessberg-Zahl
Aaron Loessberg-Zahl
2018-08-01 03:12:12 +0000 UTCYou deserve the support. You work so hard and produce such beautiful content. I wish I was half the artist you are. Thanks for all that you do <3
Stratus Wind
2018-07-31 23:19:53 +0000 UTCPrime Leap is just a small bump in the road but necessary due to the bandits that did that patreon work-around so I accept this.
David Ewell
2018-07-31 22:47:03 +0000 UTC
