I suspect this has been asked before (maybe if you could reply with a link to enlightening threads) but just in case…
I post mostly publicly on Puppygames Patreon. There are a few Patreon-only posts but they are pretty much exclusively limited to things that are literally only relevant if you are an actual Patreon supporter, such as stuff about the recent charge-up-front fiasco, and musings about our lifetime reward schedule which isn’t supported by Patreon directly, etc.
I had been also considering that I should make some Patreon-only posts that are of more general interest as a pseudo-reward for patronage - I’ve just started a “History of Puppygames” series for example. But then I thought, hiding this stuff behind a “Patreons Only” frosted glass pane isn’t exactly going to help get people interested in us in the first place. These pseudo-reward posts are equally validly useful as marketing material to get people to subscribe but in an annoying catch-22 they are no longer a reward if they’re public, just something everyone gets and therefore no incentive to subscribe.
Of course this is partly down to the annoying nature of computer games development, in that it literally takes years to make things which means uncomfortably long multi-year periods of patronage for no real return, and me wondering exactly what else we can offer out patrons other than the very few things we’ve actually produced over the years in the meantime.
Last year, my post count was 380, and I posted everything Public, except two posts per month that contain rewards for higher levels. I sort of use Patreon as a daily art blog, with progress photos of whatever I’m working on, plus finished pics and videos when a piece is finished. Why put that behind a pay wall?
This year, I’m using the Early Access feature. Patrons see posts two days earlier, and then the posts switch to Public. It gives my patrons something a little extra, while preserving the art blog vibe. I just have to remember to not post pics of a finished piece, or a link to all the tagged posts about it, until two days after it’s done. I’m using Buffer to set those social media posts up, and schedule them for after all the posts about a piece are live.
This is what we’re doing as well. This feature is nice, but, sometimes i forget to go back and see if it’s “effective”… in fact, this brings up a bit of a larger question around analytics and data.
I do almost exactly the same as Lisa. All posts are public, though patrons get 3 days early access to full color artwork, 2 day early access to sketches and linework, and 1 day early access to polls so I can get an idea of patron vs. follower voting.
