Memberships and Patronage

I've been thinking about the whole "patronage" thing for a while. Decided I did not really want to do the type of thing that I've seen people doing on YouTube for a couple of years now, where they have exclusive content they make only for paying customers. It wasn't exactly because I didn't want to make exclusive content; it was more about not wanting to call some content exclusive and reduce the amount of posting I do for regular subs.

I suppose another element of my thinking has to do with a long, very gradual transition between the things I do to support myself and my family. Throughout a long career as a blogger, I've typically considered journaling or writing a book review or commenting on current events to be something I was doing anyway, and I'd just make it visible to other folks in case they were interested. I had a day job that was paying the bills, so I could afford to indulge this hobby, even when there were costs involved.

The same thought process applied to writing OERs (Open Educational Resources). I was producing course content for my own students, so it seemed entirely fair to either just donate that content so other instructors and students could see it, or to take a small stipend to produce OER textbooks and publish them on the Open Textbook Library.

I'm still doing those things. I've also begun running book clubs, which I originally publicized to my YouTube subscribers. YouTube is another place where I've been spending a fair amount of effort making videos for a growing group of viewers. But I don't think I'm going to turn that channel into a sort-of Ali Abdaal channel. I subscribe to Ali and I generally like his videos because the production values are good and he's fun to watch. But although I subscribe, I haven't clicked through to one of his videos for months. I just did this morning, to one called "How My Goals Have Changed This Year". It's a bit interesting, but I stopped watching about a minute in. I never believed he was going to write a book, and I'm not that interested in why he wasn't able to. I guess I'm a bit interested in Ali's journey as a bright young guy who has discovered that he can communicate directly with a global audience and earn a great living doing so. But there's a limit to how much I want to hear about Ali; just as there's a limit to how much I want to talk about myself on my own channel.

Ali has 2.65 million subs on YT. Tiago Forte has about 21k subs on YT, so I suppose he spends a lot more time on other elements of his work. I have about 1.65k. I'm pretty happy about that. I think my core group, that has been with me longest, came for videos about note-making and the tools I use. As an academic, I have some specific goals for these tools and techniques. The advantage of this is I can say something a little more in-depth about how this is working for me, and show real examples. The downside is, this may not appeal to as wide an audience. As I add a bit more history content (both "Historian Reacts" videos and my own original content) I'm curious how that will work out. However, I'd be surprised if my viewers ever numbered in the millions. So YT is not really going to provide me with a "retirement income" if I ever decide to retire from teaching at my university or get laid off.

Now as a user, I have subscribed to a couple of other YouTubers' Patreon pages. I have subscribed to Nebula and SkillShare. And I'm this close to subscribing to a couple of Substacks I read regularly -- the only thing holding me back is the TLDR nature of what I suspect I'll get as a subscriber, which makes the subscription more in the nature of support of the authors than gaining access to content I will consume in much greater quantities than the free stuff I only occasionally read now.

All of these considerations have complicated my thoughts about whether to create memberships and ask my friends who appreciate my work to support it. I can imagine a time when I won't be working at Bemidji State University, although I don't think it's soon, and I'd like to begin preparing for that. I came to academia after another career, and I find it fun and relatively stress-free. And there's no heavy lifting, so I imagine I could continue doing it well into my 60s or even 70s. Whether higher ed sill be healthy enough to afford me that opportunity is something I sometimes think about. It might be difficult, as a 60-something Assistant Professor, to get a new job if this one vanished.

So over time, I'll probably move very gradually to a business model where some of what I do isn't available to everybody for free. I don't want to really chase a mass market, which is one of the reasons (along with a 30% commission) that I didn't sign up for YT memberships. I'm beginning with this "Buy Me a Coffee" page, where people who like what I'm doing can do a bit more than just leave a nice comment. Adding the memberships this week was an afterthought, when it occurred to me that I wanted to ask members of the new book club to contribute a bit so I can buy my own instance of Zoom, add some more space on Obsidian Publish -- stuff like that which I've typically been in the habit of picking up myself. As I was thinking about it, I imagined that if people wanted to join several book clubs during a year, they ought to be able to without me hitting them up for $25 each time. Hence the annual membership. It also occurred to me during the first "Dawn of Everything" Book Club that there were a bunch of people who didn't come to the Zoom meetings but visited the Obsidian vault. Several people who didn't even add to the vault have told me they found it very useful. As I begin asking for new members to kick in a bit, I thought I'd also create a way for folks who want to continue lurking to do so. Or folks who'd like some of the future content to be accessible, which isn't all going to be published to the web or onto YT (although book club members will have permanent access to the content from their clubs).

I'm not sure how all of this is going to work out. I'm not going to "advertise" a lot that there are "bonus" items available to members, so I suppose it won't take off in the way the "Now You Know" Patreon probably did. Over time, a growing library of content from these book clubs that's available to club members (who will always have permanent access to it) may attract some people. We'll see. And maybe I'll begin a new project that I'll serialize or create something for more targeted groups. I'll keep you posted.