December Patreon Update!

Hey everybody, in case you didn't see the Patreon Q&A vid from a couple days ago, I've got some updates to discuss quickly!

ALL PATRONS: Discord voice chat hangouts coming January!

You guys all indicated you'd like it, so once January hits we'll start doing monthly Discord hangouts or game nights of some sort.  It'll be a nice relaxed vibe, any Patron can hop in and chat with me (and each other) about whatever.  My December's pretty crazy like usual, so once the holidays are over I'll start gauging the best times to make it make sense.  (Do note that this is gonna be very fluid for now - there's a chance down the road that the pure volume of people might make it hard to keep it at the $1 tier.  I hate upping paywalls or whatever but for now consider the hangouts a bonus on top of the other stuff, in case we do have to move it around.)

SILVER-AND-UP PATRONS: Tweaks to the early video bonuses!

This is an informal tweak I didn't mention in the Q&A, but I'm gonna aim to be better about early video previews - a lot of the time the vids lately have run into last-minute changes or tight sponsor deadlines, and I don't like that I haven't gotten you the previews as early as I'd like.  So my plan is on the longer vids to start sharing early previews in chunks, rather than me trying to force it to be the entire video.  Half the time, it'd make more sense to give you guys the first 20-30 mins a week earlier instead of holding onto that for no reason other than "the rest isn't done."

I did that already with Avatar (good example of a vid whose release date moved up a good bit), but in general I'd like to do it more as I make the Sisyphean effort to get a video backlog going, so that you guys get videos way earlier than the public go-live.  These early sneak-peaks would not replace the ad-free version of the final cut, which I also intend to keep giving you early as well; they're just more early previews, maybe with some behind the scenes voiceover commentary at the end where I talk about the making-of or something.

GOLDEN-TIER PATRONS: Merch Discount + limited-time Christmas stocking!

Just in time for the holidays, I got the merch coupon code set up for Golden-tier Patrons.  It takes two forms: First, there's a permanent 10% off coupon code on all items - I'd make it higher, but 10% drops essentially every item down to at-cost (I set all the prices as low as they could go to begin with, to the point that briefly we lost money on a couple merch sales!).

And then for limited-time drops like the stocking, those are Golden Patron exclusive!  So if you go to shop.thegoldenbolt.net, you'll see the stocking listed at a disgusting price - with a different coupon code, it brings it down to $13.37.  That's just how we had to work around how the site's set up.  Golden-tier Patrons, a few minutes after this post, you'll get a separate, exclusive post with those coupon codes!  Non-Golden-tier Patrons, if you're ever looking to pick up some TGB swag, or the limited-time drops, you can always bump your pledge for a month and then go back down!  The coupons should more than make up for the cost of entry, as it were.

(Do note that the distributor ships the stocking separately from the shirts/hats/mugs anyway, so I couldn't get it to combine the codes into a single order.  Thankfully their shipping costs are low to begin with, and we lowered the stocking down to that $13.37 price to compensate for the shipping hiccup.  The at-cost price was $13, blame Moriarty for adding the .37 so that we could be cute.)

Wrap-up & early 2024 thoughts!

As always, I'm continually looking for more ways to provide a stronger "value" to thank you for your support.  I know for the overwhelming majority of Patrons, you're just looking at Patreon as a tip jar, and I can't thank you enough for that.  But it wouldn't be me if I didn't try to go above and beyond to add more.  Look at my video lengths after all.

Speaking of, going into 2024, my hope is to release more of those shorter-turnaround videos and get truly consistent with it; the move and settling in has done wonders for my day to day productivity, so the next step is to take stuff like that THQ vid or the Wonderbook/Wii Remote videos and do them more.  The main reason I haven't made that leap yet has mostly been because of the dumb sponsor issue: Sponsors look at your average video viewership, and the smaller stuff is usually more likely to lower the average in my case (up until recently!).  Since sponsors are often the bread-and-butter of channels financially, I've gotta do what I can to keep the rates where they should be; but I'm working to set up a separate plan of attack for smaller videos, so that I can start negotiating both for the tentpole videos and the smaller ones separately rather than have them treated the same.

I'll talk more about that process when I hopefully make that "how I do sponsors" video on TGB2, but that's just a bit of insight.  I'm gonna put out some feelers both between Patrons and the at-large YT fanbase in the coming weeks to see what you guys wanna see me cover in 2024; I've left my outline pretty open compared to prior years, so that hopefully we can just bang out a bunch of stuff every month!  Okay, that's enough talking for now, much love as always, folks!