Occasionally I find myself in strong disagreement with a fellow blogger. My very good friend Julie (strictjuliespanks.blogspot.com) and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. That’s fine. We’re both well-meaning. She recently promoted a pay-for-view blog on Patreon. I don’t share her support for either the blogger or the platform. Patreon is a subscription site that will force you to pay to read blogs and other material. So far, a few blogs I avoided have moved to that platform. One, Julie’s friend, maintains his free site as a tease to lure you into paying for content.
I would love to monetize our website. We need the money. It would be nice to defer the costs of maintaining this website. I can’t see forcing readers to pay. It would make our content less available to people who are just curious about what we do. Bloggers use various strategies to try to get some income from their writing. “Female” chastity bloggers write”books” (usually 25,000 words or less. A real book is about 85,000 words) with provocative titles professing to teach you how to be a keyholder, dominant woman, etc. They don’t tell you that the same material is also available for free elsewhere. I don’t think it is worth $25+ for a little jerk-off material. You may disagree.
Our site, for example, has a bunch of free pages that offer reliable information on the same subjects. Julie’s site has excellent, accurate information on spanking. As an added bonus, it is free and doesn’t feature the ugly cartoon art some sites feature. Youtube offers free content on almost anything you can imagine. Xhamster.com has an amazing library of free porn. Any legal porn is available there.
I pay for a subscription to “The New York Times.” It makes sense to pay for high-quality content like that. I can’t see paying for something inferior that is available for free elsewhere. I would pay to read Julie’s blog. It’s exceptionally informative and entertaining.
I wonder if Google indexes those Patreon sites. I hope not. Google Images shows stock photos you can license. They even put a little symbol inside the images to indicate they can be licensed. If they note it will cost money to read an article they index, that would make sense.
There has to be a better way for sex bloggers to make a little money other than dumping them into aggregators like Patreon. My experience trying to sell a self-published book (Vacation with a Stranger) hasn’t helped much at all. The people who have read it say they like the story. No one has bothered reviewing it. Clearly, this isn’t the way to make a buck. I’ll bet that if I assembled my free chastity and spanking pages into “books” and sold them for $25 each, I could make money.
It’s natural for a content provider to feel that it would be fair to get some compensation for his work. It hurts when you see pure crap being promoted on a subscription site like Patreon. It makes me reconsider my strategy. Many bloggers are intensely jealous of others. For example, when I published Vacation with a Stranger, Julie happily agreed to mention and review it. The publisher of the crappy blog wrote back a two-word response, “not interested.” I get it. There are no pictures in the book. He would have trouble understanding it.
I’ve long promoted the idea of cooperation amongst us kinky bloggers. It makes sense for us to have a community. I’ve been unsuccessful. Too bad. We have a lot of readers who might be interested in reading other blogs. By the way, we list blogs that we find interesting. We don’t care if they promote us or not. I’m always looking for more.
I suppose this post is way off-topic for our blog. I apologize if I bored you. I’m not an intensely political person. I don’t chase causes. I feel very protective of our blog and other blogs that try to communicate about our kinks honestly. Tastes vary. What I perceive as crap may be gold to someone else. I’ve long resisted discussing blogs that I don’t like. I mention the ones that inform and entertain me. Most aren’t particularly noteworthy. Anyway, I needed to growl a bit. It’s good for my mental health.
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I followed your book link! I guess you did a heavy revision of “Fanmail”. I admit I really enjoyed Fanmail and am waiting for the release of your second book. You can trust that I will review it when it is available. At the moment though my new blog has very few visitors and followers. I suppose that’s to be expected when starting over. There are still quite a few glitches to be worked out as well.
I am of similar opinion with respect to paid sites. But they do exist for a reason and if someone can make it worthwhile to themselves, then I wish them all the best!
I did minor revisions. I changed the title to make it more descriptive of the content. If you don’t mind, would you review the new title? Your blog will pick up its readers again. I promote it here. Keep writing posts. If you need help, let me know.
Oh dear! I’m sorry for making you growl. If not a misunderstanding, then that was not nice of Glenmore to not support you and to be so curt with you in the process. As you say, we need to support one another.
You saw how I also had issues with Patreon as a platform, but different ones than you I guess. I felt I could not in good conscience promote a Patreon site without stating my objections to that platform at the same time. I was truly conflicted for a while when he asked because of this issue, but eventually settled on the course I did.
I think a good approach might be a mix of free stuff to serve the community and keep the traffic flowing, along with some paid for extra stuff of value that is very clearly described for those who can afford it and are sufficiently interested, or as just a means for them to support you. If everybody who visits my blog and likes it were to just purchase one or both of my books, even if they don’t intend to read it, just as a show of support and gratitude for all the free stuff over the years, that would be good! I’m sure you feel the same.
I wasn’t growling at you. I would never do that. I was annoyed at an inferior pay-for-view blogger getting your support in the face of my own strong feelings about his lack of manners and shoddy content. I suppose Patreon as a pay platform is OK. My gripe isn’t with bloggers who feel that people will pay for their content. I believe that blogs, by their very nature, should be free. They are informal and always intended to be free. Authors of more formal content have the right to charge for their work. Readers can decide if they want to pay or not. Some sex bloggers maintain both a free and paid version of their sites. The honest ones, like Domme Chronicles, provide decent free content and offer “something more” to Patreon subscribers. Dishonest bloggers, like Gilmore, use their free blogs to write teasers and require an interested reader to pay to finish reading the post started on the free site. That’s just wrong.
I like your suggestion for an honest combination of free and paid content. I also agree with your idea that your supporters could buy one of your books, even if they don’t intend to read it, just to support you. You bought mine, and I thank you. I also bought yours. So far, very few of my readers have bothered to buy or review my book. The Kindle edition costs just $2.99. It would be a big help. One thing we don’t seem to get from our readers is gratitude for the time, effort, and expense we spend entertaining them.