This is a modified version of a post that first appeared on Meeple Like Us.  

You can read more of my writing over at the Meeple Like Us blog.  You can some information about my research interests over at my personal homepage.

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Introduction

One of the things I really like to do with Meeple Like Us is write the stuff that I wished had existed before I made certain decisions and agreed to certain things. It’s something I do a fair amount in academia too – when I can’t find a paper that makes an argument I want to cite, sometimes I just go ahead and research/write the paper. It’s kind of like an adult colouring book but for pompous self-aggrandising. It’s nice sometimes just to fill in the blanks.

It’s in that spirit I want to put this post in front of you – the post about Patreon that I would have valued at the time I was preparing to launch our own. I’ve already written some honest reflections about Patreon – particularly the anxieties and incentives behind ours. That post is more about the psychology of opening yourself up to the process and what It’ll take from you in return. Today I want to look at the nuts and bolts of the financials and the rise and fall of patron growth. Our third anniversary is coming up and we’ve been running a Patreon campaign for about ten months now. That’s long enough to draw some conclusions, as well as show you where the money goes.

As with the last Patreon post we did, I feel a little uncomfortable opening up in this way. It always feels a little like stripping in public, and trust me – nobody wants to see me do that. Nonetheless, if someone had done me the favour of flashing a little of their Patreon skin it would have gone a long way to contextualising what would follow for myself. Hopefully someone finds this useful.

Why Ask for Money?

I’ve been primarily responsible for spearheading many projects over the years – free textbooks, multiplayer text games, and various software tools for education. I’ve never asked for a penny for any of them because first and foremost they were about me. Things I wanted to do and other people were mostly just invited along for the ride. In the end if nobody appreciated the end product they were still fun to work on. That was how it worked with Meeple Like Us for the first two years – I had a question about board game accessibility, I answered it to the best of my ability, and I made the results and observations available to anyone that wanted them. Every teardown we publish is under a CC BY 4.0 licence which means, provided you attribute, you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with our findings. As long as my curiosity was being sated, everything else was irrelevant.

The thing is, the accessibility figures have stabilized . We have a pretty accurate snapshot of the hobby – or at least the part that is most heavily emphasized in the BGG Top 500. Or rather, we have a snapshot as best we, through heuristic analysis alone, could assess the situation. Our averages and stats are available on the site, as is our masterlist. The ‘average recommendation’ for each category we cover hasn’t changed in any significant way for about 18 months. I don’t expect it to change at any point in the future. Sure, different games occasionally offer different insights, but basically my question has been answered and published accordingly. As far as my initial incentives went, the project is done. Nothing majorly different is likely to emerge with continued investigation. All that remains is corroboration of already pretty robust data. Robust, of course, within the ‘margin of error’ that come from a single person doing the majority of the work.

At this point what I normally do with an investigation is put a line under it and move on to something else. The thing is – the feedback I have received from hundreds of people has been they find the site valuable. They are finding great games that they can play with the people they love and often they did not realise accessible games existed at all. They’re benefiting from this build up of annotated recommendations, not for the grades themselves but for the discussion around each grade. They see As and Bs in the masterlist and dig deeper, then make their own decisions. They use our recommender to short-list games and then see which they fancy. The tools we’ve written are used by schools, libraries, universities, advocate groups, charities, gaming stores and gaming clubs. In that respect, the investigation can’t ever be done. The more data points we add, the more effectively we link people up with great games that they can play.

The thing is that I’m not getting ‘research data’ out of Meeple Like Us anymore. Or, perhaps more accurately, I’m not getting the amount of research data I’d need to justify the time that goes into it. I could swap gears and do something different and get a much richer, more publishable stream of information – either something new or within the topic of board game accessibility. There are much better ways available to me now to create publishable units of work for journals and conferences. Research output is no longer a driving incentive for the site. It just doesn’t serve that purpose any more. It did, and well, but no longer.

I still enjoy doing the site though, and people seem to think the work is valuable. The obvious question that emerges then is ‘Do people find it valuable enough for me to justify the time I sink into it, when that time could profitably be spent elsewhere?’ In basic Capitalist terms – can this site survive as a (heavily subsidised) funded endeavour?

Thus, Patreon – I’m looking to see if the financials of this project can ever reach the point where it merits the operation and opportunity costs of the work. So far, the answer is ‘no’ but there’s time for that to change.

Operational Costs

We don’t operate a tight ship on Meeple Like Us. We can function with a smaller percentage of what we spend on almost everything. We pay for ads every post, for example. We have a web hosting package considerably more sophisticated than we need for this specific site. We could very easily tighten our belts, but given this is a labour of love there’s a point where you need to ask yourself why the belt-tightening is even necessary.

Our monthly expenses break down into following core expenses, averaged out:

Instantly £85 a month goes towards regular activities. Of these the advertising figure is perhaps the most eye-opening but the simple fact is Facebook is an awful company and they charge you for access to the audience you have built. Of our 1250ish Facebook subscribers, if we don’t serve an ad for those that have liked the page only 100-200 of them will see any new post we publish. Assume around £5 a post to make sure that the people who have chosen to see our updates can actually see our updates. If I sound ridiculously bitter about that, it’s just because I’m ridiculously bitter about it. This is why I keep telling people that if they can’t support us on Patreon they will genuinely be worth their weight in gold if they boost our signal on social media and Reddit. A single Reddit post that doesn’t get aggressively downvoted will send more traffic our way than any six Facebook ads we run.

We also spend some of the Patreon money on games for review. We can probably request review copies of most things at this point but I always feel somewhat beholden there. If I request a review copy, I’m obligating myself to a review. I also try to operate on a policy where I won’t request a review copy of a game I’d otherwise buy myself. I try to ensure a clear break between ‘review copies’ and ‘games I want for my library’. When the overlap comes in, it’s after the fact. If my primary interest in a game is that I want to play it, it seems only appropriate that I actually buy it.

In terms of game and supporting component purchasing, it breaks down to another £30 a month. That’s both physical games and apps. I sometimes use apps to explore games at inconvenient player-counts or just to work out whether the physical game might be worth attention.

On top of that we have convention costs – Over the past ten months we’ve been to two – the Glasgow Games Festival and Tabletop Scotland. We also went to UKGE last year but that was paid for by my employer because we were giving the equivalent of a ‘research seminar’. Convention costs, averaged out over the ten months, is another £30.

There are other things that need to be taken into account – banking fees, registering with Companies House, branded T-shirts, occasionally foreign currency fees and so on. They add on a bit but they’re also erratic and irregular so we’ll discount them for now.

With these we’re at £145 a month, although if we needed to pare operations to the bone we could probably get away with considerably less. If we were happy with nobody reading anything we do, and relying on publishers for new games, we could probably get ongoing monthly expenses down to maybe £40 or so a month. We could cut down web hosting, and remove the software that we have written that takes advantage of the hosting capabilities that we have. We could let the site lag or crash rather than pay for a content delivery network. We don’t though. the expenses we pay are what we think is needed to operate the site at a convenient level of impact and flexibility.

Total in American Silver Dollars – $188 p.m at time of writing.

Even this is lower than it might otherwise be because of our ongoing Depth Year and a question mark over whether we’re attending UKGE this year. The figure would be closer to £195 ($250) otherwise. I’m also going to discount the money that we are pledging to other creators, which I aim to be approximately 10% of what we are receiving. That’s not really a business expense. It’s a ‘pay it forward’ expense.

Notice here that not one penny is spent on ‘actually funding someone to do the work’, because at the moment that’s just not paid for at all. The best I can say is that these expenses sort of pay for my hobby, except I don’t ever need to spend another penny to continue enjoying gaming for the rest of my days. I have hundreds of games. I’m over forty years old now. How many more days can I realistically have anyway?

Income

The income we get is broken down into a few categories:

By far the largest chunk of this money is Patreon. For most of our time operating a Patreon it’s been under the privacy system – you could see how many patrons we had but not how much money we were bringing in. Graphtreon comically estimated that we might be making as much as $800 a month from the site, which just goes to show how much you should trust averages. Before I get into figures, I want to show you the graph of our Patreon income from when we started and when we opened up the info. All Graphtreon can do with that is say ‘This is how much it was then’ and ‘this is how much it is now’ and then draw a line between them. Ideally, that line would skew upwards.