Creating a Sustainable Blog Subscription Model With Patreon

This month marks 12 years since I began a blog.

In the summer of 2002, the fans of the genre of animation and comics I was chronicling numbered in the dozens, perhaps hundreds. I began a blog, called Okazu, using a niche tool to discuss a niche form of entertainment. It wasn’t, I thought, going to have more than a few readers.

12 years later, it’s been a heck of a ride. Okau gets about 2500 readers a day, I’ve published books, lectured around the world, interviewed stars in the field, written thousands of reviews, fielded tens of thousands of comments, met many amazing people and built a whole family of reviewers, readers and creators.

The one thing we’ve never managed is to create a sustainable business model. It’s all well and fine being a completely unique information source on the Internet, it’s an entirely different thing to maintain a consistent pace of content creation without selling out to advertisers and ad networks. To make matter worse, some of the content on the blog is adult in nature, because the creators, writers and readers are adults, but the ad networks are not. There is nothing explicit on our blog, but even a hint of skin on the cover of a review item was cause for alarm at most ad networks.

Affiliate links work great when you’re selling weight loss products or have a readership of millions. Okazu makes use of affiliate links, of course, and they are a nice way to supplement the purchases of the items we review…