Blogging
Which I did for years for next to nothing.
I had a Wordpress blog for over 15 years and worked like a dog on it, blogging multiple times a week, sometimes two or three times a day, 100 hours a month of effort.
Even though I got over 250,000 pages views a month, I couldn’t make a decent return. Ads paid me, at most, a few hundred dollars a year.
At most.
While it did drive traffic to my art and I sold more books, blogging itself just didn’t pay.
I added a donation button which paid me more than ads ever did.
Ad sponsorships are a waste of time for small fry, only useful for legacy news or clickbait.
Which I don’t do.
And those ads keep you pursuing volume instead of quality.
I finally shut down my blog and switched to blogging on Patreon.
Patreon paid me more money in the first two months than Wordpress blogging did for years. I post on my Patreon over two hundred times a year.
I started blogging here in addition to Patreon less than a year ago. While Patreon is paywalled, most posts here are not. I’m now at 1.8 thousand subscribers of which less than 100 are paying subscribers. I get roughly 20,000 views a month, only 10% of what I got when I was peak blogging on Wordpress.
But those paying subscribers are paying me more than I was paid in a decade of Wordpress blogging.
I like to think people are here because they are interested in how I discuss the creative life and the practical applications of pursuing it, informed by decades of experience.
No matter what happens with publishers, clients, or collaborators, I can pursue the freedom of personal projects in future.
I am acutely aware that every bit of that is thanks to readers like you.
I'm slowly coming around on this. I've been stubbornly blogging for more than a decade. I never monetized at all. This was partially a recognition of my lack of time to produce consistent content. It didn't seem right to ask for money and not consistently offer something in return.
I'm not a FT comic creator, so maybe that's the distinction. I alternate between teaching and creating.
Now I'm beginning to rethink that, as I start to make Substack entries. I have insights besides my comics to offer. Maybe I should let others decide what they're worth, instead of making that decision per-emptively for them.
I find your experiences and insights valuable and useful, as I continually re-examine my creative output.
And I liked your blog!
Really appreciate you pulling back the curtain on both previous and current approaches to blogging and the economics around it! So easy to assume pie in the sky numbers on either side of the equation (ad or Substack/Patreon), this kind of transparency gives aspiring folks a lot of good data to work into the napkin math.