This is not TECHNICALLY a State of the Wall update, but it might as well be considering I’m giving info a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. Not counting it as one simply because no schedule available given things are kind of… in flux right now.
First and foremost: NEW MERCH DROP! I asked for opinions on Patreon and Youtube what people wanted to see in merch. Some are things I can do, some are things I really can’t do, and some I can do but they’ll take a while. The easiest ones to put together, though, were keychains and earrings! We’ll be having magnets soon, as well (including an awesome one featuring the AT4W logo made by the ever-talented Magic Steve), we’re just working out a few kinks in the design that are causing color-bleedthrough. Otherwise, if you want to have Comicron One or Pollo dangling from your ears, take a look at THIS! Or, of course, if you’d like Pollo or the AT4W symbol on a keychain, you can look HERE! And of course everything else in the store is still available for purchase, so if you want a Comicron One model, a Robomat, or some badge cards, get them!
On the subject of merchandise, though, there IS a (hopefully) temporary snag. Digital download copies of the DVDs are not going to be available for a bit. Finances have been tighter as of late and Vimeo charges $200 per year to host VOD purchases and downloads and that was $200 I couldn’t spare this month. It’s possible I’ll bring them back on Vimeo sooner rather than later, but I’m open to exploring any ideas or options people have for other digital downloads of the DVDs (including Winter of ’83) that people think might work. The physical copies are still available, of course.
Speaking of financial shifts, prices have gone up for my PO Box so that will also be closing… though definitely not permanently there. There will be a new location and address for the box and the old box will still be active until October 15th. I’ll start advertising the new address as we get closer to the closing date and remind everyone several times as we come along to make sure that if you have any last-minute stuff you want to send there until then, you should do so (speaking of, there is a PO Unboxing we filmed a month or two ago we just haven’t gotten to putting up yet – will try to do so soon). Remember that you have two more months with that box location and afterwards packages will be sent back to you if you try to send them to the old location!
For other financial stuff outside my control, we move on to Patreon. Patreon announced a couple days ago a shift – if you paid for your membership via the iOS Patreon app, there will be a 30% additional charge made on it. This one is actually not Patreon’s fault – apparently Apple regularly does this with anything done via apps found on their store. It is ludicrous and monopolistic, but it’s BS. This charge DOES not apply if you make your pledge via a web browser or on android or other non-iOS devices. I personally do not see a need for a Patreon app at all because all of its functionalities are the same via browser, but I wanted to let people know about this so you can make adjustments accordingly since I doubt you all want a 30% additional charge.
The other Patreon news, however, is definitely their fault and I’m not happy about it. Patreon offers a few different methods for creators to receive payment – primarily monthly or per-creation. For some video creators, that works out fine because they don’t like charging people the same amount per month because of varying amounts of videos they put out per month. People like me, however, NEED that guaranteed income monthly to keep doing what we’re doing. Patreon has announced that within 16 months, they will be discontinuing the per-creation model and switching strictly to monthly. Hopefully this can get pushed back and reversed for my friends and colleagues who are affected by this, but there’s a second half of this which is much more harmful to me. The other thing they’ll be switching with their subscriptions is changing when patrons get charged. In the current system, people get charged at the beginning of the month after the initial payment, meaning if you paid on the 2nd of the month, you’ll get charged again at the 1st of the next month, same for if you initially paid at the 27th of the month.
Under the new model they wish to implement, you get charged again the next month on the same day, so you get charged on the 27th of one month, then the 27th of the next month. I understand why some people would prefer this model – both creators and patrons… but for me this is a problem. The majority of my bills are due at the end of the month or the beginning of the month, meaning that is the time frame I need the majority of my money. It consequently lets me plan out the month to know how much money I have available for those bills/payments in the middle or so-forth and budget accordingly. I’m sure people will try to push back on this and again, we have a little over a year to make accommodations and I’ll do so if need be, but I may ask patrons in the future to end their patronage and then re-up at the beginning of the month to try to keep this consistent (obviously if that’s not possible for you, I understand and won’t hold that against you). We’ll see how this goes, but that’s what’s going on.
Consequently, some creators are looking to change how they operate by doing more with Youtube memberships. I’ll be honest – I’ve been resistant to this because I haven’t seen much value in the Youtube memberships that isn’t already available via my Patreon (especially since I think Youtube takes a bigger cut than Patreon), but I’d be open to hearing some possibilities and what people would want out of channel memberships, even if it’s not any different than the stuff I already offer on Patreon.
And finally: the schedule. The plan had been to release the revised SPD video at the end of June, then have all of July for Event Comics Month, then leave August and September to do all the remaining Patreon-sponsored reviews, maybe even slip in an additional Mr. T review.
This did not end up happening. The SPD redo took longer than I thought it would, Secret Wars II THOROUGHLY kicked my ass with how much of a slog it was to write and edit it (especially since it ended up being an hour and 20 minutes long), and there’s personal life stuff that went on that took me away from working on videos on top of everything else, so things are a bit more fluid. I want October for Halloween episodes PERIOD, so if need be, I’ll push the remaining Patreon-sponsored reviews into November to finish them off. Where does that leave Secret Origins Month, then, since this was supposed to be its return after two years absent? Well, I’m down for pushing it to January or so if people are interested. Sure, there may be some more Patreon-sponsored reviews to do (since the slots will be reopening in September, as always), but at least some episodes focusing on origins will be available (although I admit, Secret Origins Month gets harder to plan each year simply due to us covering most major characters that anyone would care about or are not too recent). Or heck, maybe we just have some of those origins as scattered reviews instead of an official month?
Regardless of anything else, thank you for your continued support! I’ll try to keep people updated on anything important and I’m loving all the entries so far into the Longbox Bumper Contest!
