Sunday, May 1, 2022
6:02 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I really shouldn’t be awake and out of bed. I can feel that I didn’t get enough sleep. I’m really tired. But I’m hanging in there because I’m hoping that at some point I’ll shift into a more wide-awake state.
I think one reason I’m so tired is that late last night, I opened a Buy Me a Coffee account. I happened to be chatting with Daryl of WanderEats about Patreon and PayPal and things like that. He noticed the other day that in order to support someone on Patreon, you have to open a Patreon account yourself. You can’t just send someone money on Patreon. You have to be a member of Patreon yourself. You have to join Patreon in order to be someone’s patron. And we were talking about how this could be a barrier for a lot of people. People might be willing to support you, but when they see that they have to open a Patreon account themselves, they might not be so willing.
With this thought on my mind, I decided to find out how Buy Me a Coffee worked. I knew that this program existed. I understood the basic concept. At least, I thought I did. It seemed like a kind of casual tip jar. People might enjoy one of your videos, and they might want to show their appreciation. But instead of making a big deal out of it (Patreon feels like a big deal, for example), they can just “buy you a coffee.” And the idea is that they can send you a couple of dollars, like a tip, and you can get a nice cup of coffee. It’s a gesture. That’s how I pictured the program, and I was wondering if it made sense to offer people the choice. I’ve already put links to PayPal in my video descriptions. I plan to establish a Patreon program. And with those two programs already in place, would adding Buy Me a Coffee make sense? Would it seem gauche? Would it seem like too much? Would I even have time and energy to maintain or even think about all three?
With these thoughts on my mind, I did a Google search for articles comparing Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC) and Patreon. I wanted to know how different they were or how similar. And it turns out that they are much more similar than I realized. In fact, they are almost the same thing. Perhaps BMAC started off as a very simple and casual system whereby people could send you a small tip. But it’s now quite a bit more sophisticated and has additional features. For example, I thought Patreon was superior, because it allowed for monthly memberships with various membership tiers. People could support you with automatic monthly donations and receive perks in return. However, BMAC can do the same thing. People can send a one-time donation as a tip. But they can also become members of your BMAC page. And BMAC allows for various membership levels with a variety of perks. I also thought Patreon was superior because the Patreon page allowed you to post written updates and photographs and videos. These would show up on your Patreon page in a feed, making Patreon function somewhat like a website. But it turns out that BMAC can do that, too. I also thought Patreon was superior because it offered app integrations, such as with Discord. But BMAC has Discord as well.
In fact, there is very little difference between Patreon and BMAC except for one. And this one difference could be important, and it might be a reason to be active in both programs and make both of them available. And this one difference is that Patreon requires you to open a Patreon account to support someone. But BMAC doesn’t. It’s possible to support someone with a tip on BMAC without opening any kind of account or joining anything. People simply click on the tip button, and then they send money, which is charged to their credit card or whatever payment option they have. And that’s it. I don’t know if this actually makes a big difference in the real world. But it seems like having that option would appeal to some people. And this might be an argument in favor of having Patreon, PayPal, and BMAC listed on your YouTube page as options for people. Some people might not want to open a Patreon account. They just don’t want the bother or the hassle. That’s understandable. Some people might not have a PayPal account. So they can’t use PayPal either. And for those people, BMAC is now an option.
Of course, YouTube itself now has Super Chat and Super Sticker and Super Thanks built into it. But perhaps people would like to have choices. And I’m learning that people really want you to succeed. They really do. Rather than being annoyed at seeing things like a PayPal Donate link showing up on my YouTube videos, they’re happy to see it. In a way, the success of my YouTube channel would also be their success. And from that perspective, they wouldn’t be annoyed to see BMAC also showing up on my channel. Chances are that most people would be happy to see it.
I started off by saying that one of the reasons I didn’t get much rest last night is that I opened this BMAC account. And that’s because it was a very involved process. I started doing it in the evening, and it took a lot of energy and focus and time to get it done. And I think this intense activity kept my brain active throughout the night, and I wasn’t able to fall into a deep and restful sleep. I probably shouldn’t have done that last night. It was too big a project to start so late in the day. And as I said to Daryl, I do wonder how much more of this I can handle. How many online accounts does one person need? And one account seems to lead to more. BMAC recommends using something called Stripe for payouts of any money you might receive. And Stripe is a brand new thing to me. I had never heard of it before. But in order to use BMAC efficiently, you probably have to open a Stripe account and set THAT up. And to use Patreon effectively, I probably have to figure out how to use Discord. I have no clue at this point exactly what a Discord server is and how you use it.
The next stage in this process is to figure out how to integrate Patreon and BMAC into my YouTube life. And that means setting up tiers for Patreon and membership levels in BMAC. And that involves working out a system of perks for anyone who joins either platform. It occurs to me right now that perhaps having both isn’t such a big deal, because I can use the same structure for both. If I work out a system of tiers and perks for Patreon, I can use that exact same structure for BMAC. At this point, I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible. And then, that would allay some of my concern about adding BMAC creating a lot of extra work for me.
Perhaps a good starting point for my thoughts is to consider this journal that I keep. One of my ideas is to offer these journal entries as a perk. And the idea would be to make these journal entries available only to sponsors, whether those sponsors are on Patreon or BMAC. But as soon as I had that idea, I realized that it conflicted with my initial impulse, which was to post these journal entries to my Planet Doug website and have them available to everyone who wishes to stay up to date with my thoughts and what I’m doing and where I am and what I’m planning. Plus, what I didn’t know is that both Patreon and BMAC allow you to post text directly to your profile. I was going on the assumption that I’d post my journal to my website, but then it would only be accessible to people if I send them a kind of link via Patreon. But it wouldn’t actually work that way. What you would do is physically post the journal entry to your Patreon and BMAC profile pages. They would be right there as part of your feed, and you can make them 100% public and visible to all, or restrict access to various tiers and membership levels. This seemed like a conflict. I can’t post my journal to Planet Doug dot life to a general audience, AND post it as a perk on Patreon and BMAC. It’s not a perk if everyone has access to it elsewhere.
And then I realized that the early access model might solve this problem. Early access is a very common perk on Patreon. I wasn’t sure that it would work for me when it comes to YouTube videos. Somehow I don’t like the idea of dividing my YouTube audience into two groups – the haves and the have-nots. One group gets early access to the videos. The others have to wait. I didn’t like that idea. Plus, it would mean that you can’t post videos in real time. Early access only works as a perk if the videos routinely get posted quite a bit later than the real-time events. What I mean is that if I shot a video this morning and posted it this afternoon, that’s a good thing. People like to see videos posted as close to real time as possible. But if you adopt this early access model, then your videos by definition will always be posted later. By definition, nothing can be early unless the norm is to be late, or at least later.
However, even if early access is not great for videos, it could be perfect for something like journal entries. Most people probably don’t care about written stuff anyway. They are interested in videos and are not interested in reading at all. But it would be possible to post my journal entries and life updates to Patreon and BMAC first. Sponsors would get instant early access to them. And then a week later, I could post the same journal entry to my website. Then it would be available to the general public. It’s kind of the best of both worlds.
I still haven’t spent a lot of time looking into this, but I’m slowly gathering ideas for tiers and their associated perks. Having three tiers seems to be popular for Patreon. And these three tiers are usually spread out over the perks and the costs in a standard way:
Tier 1: $1
Tier 2: $5
Tier 3: $10
And the first tier is often treated as a tip jar with few perks or no perks at all. It’s just a way for someone to sponsor you in a limited way. And then tiers 2 and 3 get additional appropriate perks. But sometimes, there will be a special fourth tier that allows for someone that wants to really help. That monthly amount could be set at $50 or $100. Not many people would do that, obviously, but maybe someone would. And why not give them the opportunity? So I was thinking that this 4-tier structure might be appropriate for me.
But I was thinking that it might be nice to make the journal entry perk available to all the tiers. It feels mean to have a tier where there are no perks at all. I would want everyone to have access to my journal if they were interested. And I think I would make early access to my journal a perk for all four tiers.
I’m realizing just now that thinking of the tiers only in terms of the price per month doesn’t paint the whole picture. It’s useful to think of the whole year. And when you think of the year, then these tiers are suddenly much more expensive. $5 per month doesn’t seem like much. But that’s the equivalent of $60 per year. And that’s a lot or money. People hesitate to pay that much when they are signing up for a Flickr account, for example.
And then it might make sense to make more gradual steps. The jump from $1/month to $5/month might be too great. That’s going from $12 a year to $60 a year. Perhaps there should be an intermediate step in between them, such as $2/month or $3/month. I like the idea of $3.
Tier 1: $1 – Iron
Tier 2: $3 – Bronze
Tier 3: $5 – Silver
Tier 4: $10 – Gold
Tier 5: $100 – Platinum