#oneaday Day 704: A Few Small Changes

Hello everyone! Welcome to the two newcomers today, too; your presence is much appreciated!

Just wanted to let you know a few things I'm going to be experimenting with.

First up, I already talked about this on Twitter earlier, but for the benefit of those who aren't on there or didn't see my thread, I'm running a small-scale experiment with ads on MoeGamer. Don't panic; when I say "small-scale" I mean small-scale; I'm allowing them only on specific parts of the site that happen to be the pages that have the most traffic — usually people coming from Google looking for info on Magicami DX or Honey Select Unlimited. The way I look at it, the amount of traffic those pages get could potentially raise a bit of money for the site — which in turn can be invested back into the site in various ways. The more self-sufficient, the better.

I've made it a point of pride to highlight MoeGamer's ad-free nature in the past so I feel a little guilty doing this, but everyone I've spoken to already has been supportive of this idea so far. To clarify: ads will only be running on "Pages" right now rather than "Posts". That means you won't see ads on articles themselves, or on the front page, or anything like that. There may be ads appearing at the bottom of "hub pages" for games or features now, though. As I write this, they haven't showed up yet, but I don't know how long it takes for them to switch on.

I'm going to let this run for a week or so and see how things go. If I can get some meaningful data from it that will help me figure out potentially how much income they could bring in per month, I'll see if it's worth continuing them. If they suck or get in the way or too many people complain, I'll get rid of them. But I figure I'm potentially denying myself some valuable income that can be invested directly back into the site, so I want to see how true that is. Thanks for your understanding on this!

Secondly, I was looking back over the "Patrons Only" videos I did a while back (check the YouTube playlist if you missed out on these back when they were current) and remembered that I quite enjoyed doing them. Now that I've cut back a little on other video commitments (most notably long, ongoing playthroughs), I want to start doing something along those lines again, and I thought something that involved you good people would be enjoyable for everyone: a regular (probably monthly) Patrons Q&A!

My plan for this would be to provide a specific thank-you by name (or handle) to all the A-Rank Patrons for that month, and provide the S-Rank Patrons the opportunity to ask questions, make requests and the like. I've been wanting to provide an additional benefit for those kind enough to support at S-Rank tier for a while, and this seems like a good opportunity.

The way I'd do this is that I'd put up an S-Rank-exclusive post early in the month inviting you to post questions in the comments. I'm not sure if there's a way to "sticky" a post on Patreon, but I'd likely put a reminder on subsequent posts so people remember it's there. Then when the end of the month rolls around, I'll gather together all the questions and make a video that answers them. It gives me something interesting to do, and it provides you lovely lot the opportunity to engage a bit more directly with me. There's a lot of you lurking out there and it'd be nice to hear more from some of you! (Obviously no pressure if you don't want to.)

The video itself would then be public, so everyone would be able to hear the interesting questions you came up with, and the A-Rank patrons can be thanked publicly also. That, in turn, will hopefully bring a few more people in the direction of this Patreon and we can all be one big happy nerdy family together.

It's getting late now so I won't set this up today, but I'll probably put up the first post like this at the weekend, then aim to do the first video towards the end of November. Then if that goes well we can make it a monthly thing and have a bit of fun together. Watch this space!