Why I closed my Patreon page

5 Jul

My Patreon page existed for nearly two years.

I launched it on the first of October 2020 and closed it in September 2022.

It has had a deep influence on how I went through these two years. Having the support of this lovely group of people has helped me through so much and brought me lots of beautiful things : I got to share the excitement and joy that surrounded a project or an event, or find support during rough moments. I got to know these lovely people better, we chatted on a regular basis and their usernames on the different social medias where we interacted started feeling like familiar friendly faces in a crowd. I really felt like this Patreon page was a safe, warm and cozy little corner in the big Internet world where I could share basically anything I wanted - the good, the bad, the everyday little bits and pieces.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked on my Instagram profile if you had any questions regarding my experience on Patreon, and I received a few of them. So I thought I could answer them here, and hopefully my personal experience can help you in some way ♥

🌼What is Patreon ?🌼

Patreon is a subscription-based platform.

People can choose to support the work of a person. The creator of a page can choose to create one or several tiers, each one corresponding to different amounts of money and giving you access to various rewards. This is a monthly subscription that can be stopped at any time. In exchange for your support, you usually have access to some special content that other people cannot access, depending on the tier you picked.

For example, on the image above, you can see the landing page of my Patreon space, where I had created three different tiers :

“Dear friend” (2€)
People could have access to weekly life & work updates, occasional tutorials, occasional wallpapers, process articles, photos and videos
“Monthly printable” (4€)
People had access to all of the previous rewards + one monthly printable item
“Sketchbook club” (5€)
Along all with the previous rewards, people had access to one monthly sketchbook tour, either as a video or a series of photos

🌼Why did you stop ?🌼

I think it had been a while since this decision was slowly building inside of me, but I had not paid true attention to this.

For several months already, I had been working on my Patreon page like any other task I had to do, and did not always enjoy it very much - it did not feel special anymore. When I first started the page two years ago, I felt a genuine excitement and joy to prepare all the content and share my illustration adventures with all my lovely Patreons. But little by little, the excitement started to fade away, so did the joy, and I ended up many times doing things mechanically. Which is not something I wanted for my Patreon page - my goal and dream when I opened the page, was to have a cozy, safe and welcoming little space on the Internet where people (and I) could feel free and excited to share anything - and come there to relax, find inspiration and peace. I could feel that I was not fully putting my heart into it anymore, and I did not want my Patreon page to become something filled with a negative feeling.

If the joy was gone, there was no good reason to keep going.

Moreover, 2022 has been quite intense so far, and I have been questioning and doubting many things in my work. Sharing your thoughts and your process, putting it into words for other people when you feel confused yourself and still don’t have words to put on everything, is very hard and stressful. It started to feel like an extra pressure, making everything else more difficult.

As the main reasons why I had opened this page in the first place were fading away, it made more sense to me to stop the adventure now and keep a fond memory of the experience, rather than to push myself to keep going. I would then feel stressed out and nervous, and eventually ending up feeling bad about this adventure.

🌼How hard was to create a community that gives you the opportunity to open a Patreon ?🌼

It is a difficult question to answer.

I think that what matter here are not always the number, but mostly the relationship you have with your audience. I think that the closest people feel to you, your life, your process, the most eager they might be to support you and your work.

Artist Leigh Ellexson posted a video (click to watch) on her Youtube channel a while ago, where she said something very interesting : the moments where most people were joining her Patreon page were when she’d post a new video on her Youtube channel. I think it helped people feel more connected to her, because they could see her talk, see her everyday life and process.

If people feel more connected to you as a person, they might be more willing to give you their support.

Besides a financial reward, Patreon also gives you many other benefits, especially a sense of community. It can even feel sometimes like you have this little group of friends with whom you can share so much. There is this feeling of connection, of exchanges. I think it is important to have this kind of relationship with your audience / community if you want people to follow you in this adventure 😊

So, to reply to the question, it can be hard sometimes. Realistically, in order to build such a community on any social media, you have to post regularly, connect with everyone, take the time to reply to comments, messages, exchange with everyone, create interesting content, be vulnerable and share as much as possible of your process, not only the good. And like I said, when it felt harder to share my process with people is when Patreon started becoming stressful for me. Sharing all those things can be hard, but also very rewarding. I guess it can work very well in some periods of your life, and maybe be a bit harder in some others. It’s probably all about finding a good balance !

🌼Was it too much work compared to the money earned ?🌼

Yes, it was.

I think finding balance between what you earn and the work you put into it is very hard. I am under the impression that a big number of creators on Patreon have to put much more work into their content than what they receive back financially. However, this was not issue for me as long as Patreon was bringing me joy, excitement and inspiration. I felt like, even if I was not being paid accordingly to the work and energy it required, at least I was receiving may other beautiful things so it was worth it anyway.

But as the excitement and joy were fading away, it did start to feel like a lot of energy compared to the amount of money I could receive every month. Although there are creators there who struggle more than I did (I think I was lucky to have more than 100 Patreons, some months it could even reach even 150), I feel like the number of creators who manage to receive a fair amount of money for the work put into it, is rather low.

It should also be taken into consideration that the number of Patreons and the amount of money you receive can vary a lot depending on the months and the years. When I first started my page, it was thriving. The first year and a half, my income from it was a little bit better every month. But since 2022 started, it started going down every month.

I guess it also depends on your page and the content you decide to share there.
For example, monthly videos will take more time than a monthly written article. A filmed sketchbook tour was much longer to prepare than a photographic one. I also wanted to have a bilingual page (I am French but most of my audience is English-speaking so I wanted both languages), so I ended up spending a lot of time not only writing articles, but also working on the translation.

Overall, I feel like it is hard to truly receive back what you put into it in terms of money, but there are many other things that you can receive from the lovely people who support you there - and that can still make it very worth it !
It all depends on your state of mind, your goals and what you are looking for I guess 😊

🌼If you get to do it again, what things would you change ?🌼

It is a little hard for me to answer this question at the moment.

It is exactly what I was trying to find out before I took the decision to close the page.
But I realized I needed much more time and a step back before I could figure out what needed to change in order to work better for me.

I think that I would maybe focus more on, are spontaneous little updates rather than polished printables and sketchbook tours.
What was very fun at the beginning of the page started to become quite stressful when I started to feel like I needed to make a flawless printable very single month. And instead of being this fun personal project I wanted it to be, I started to set very high standards for myself and spend so much time working on each printable. However, I did realize it was too much after a while and had already started to take it easier this year than I did in 2021. But still, having to come up with an idea for a printable every month plus actually creating it, was a lot of hard work. I think I might keep printables as an occasional thing, whenever inspiration and motivation strikes, rather than imposing this on myself very month.

In the same way, sketchbook tours, which were very fun at first, started to be more and more work every time. Indeed, as I felt quite stuck and uninspired lately, I didn’t have a lot of sketches to show most of the time - so I started recording myself sketching instead of showing already-made sketches. It was fun and I genuinely liked sitting down and draw “with my Patreons” (it was not live but it still felt like they were with me). But after that, I needed to spend many more hours editing the video, finding the right copyright-free music, creating the thumbnail… it started to become more and more work everytime, until it became way too much. So I would probably take it easier as well.

One thing that I might like if I ever start a new page, is to have one single tier for everyone, based mostly on little spontaneous updates (in the form that suits my mood best at the moment : writing, photos, videos, audios), and then add a little extra sprinkle here and there when I have the time and ideas for it, rather than imposing this right from the start.

But again, I think I would have a clearer idea in a few months, because I didn’t have a chance to take a step back and look at this experience from afar yet. So if you ask me again in a month, maybe I’ll have a completely different answer ! 😊

🌼How have you grown creatively and as a person throughout the Patreon time ?🌼

Having a Patreon page brought me so much.

It allowed me to feel more free to work on my own ideas and experiment with new techniques and mediums.
Knowing that somewhere on the Internet, there was this beautiful group of people with whom I could share whatever I was drawing (whether I liked it or not), made me feel so happy. Sometimes, knowing you are going to share what you draw is scary - but some other times, it can also actually be a motivation. And for most of my time on the platform, it felt like a motivation for me. I could feel free to do different things because I knew everyone was so kind and supportive, and at the same time knowing that I had to share things made me feel accountable and so pushed me to actually make time to work on my own ideas.
It made me realize how important it is to cultivate time for your own stories, ideas and projects even when illustration is your job and you have client projects.

On another note, sharing my process and talking about myself (even if it is through the lens of your work), helped me a lot more than I would have thought at first.
I am not usually very comfortable with talking about myself, I always need a long time to figure out how to transform my thoughts and feelings into words and to share it out loud with people around me. But having to share updates, tips and little insights with my Patreon regularly helped me practice more, and it somehow pushed me to reflect more on myself as well. Because how could I share my process and my thoughts if I don’t take the time to observe them first ? I think in a way, having a Patreon page helped me take a step back every once in a while to look at myself and my work, and it is something I did not really do before this.

It also made me realize how Internet can create such beautiful connections - it sometimes feel a little unreal, you share something there and then you go do something else and just get on with your life. But maybe, somewhere, someone will be moved by what you posted and it is going to stick with them for a while, make them think or bring them something beautiful. What you post and write online can really have a concrete impact on someone - numerous times, my Patreons had a beautiful impact on me and brought me so much comfort and motivation, even without knowing it.
And when I announced I would close the page and saw everyone’s reaction, is also when I realized that I had an impact on their lives myself as well.
It made it all feel very real. And very beautiful.

🌼 What was the hardest part about running a Patreon page ?🌼

This is funnily linked to the previous question for me, as I found the hardest part was to actually take a step back to look at myself, my thoughts and my working process in order to observe it, put it into words and share it with other people.
As I am not used to writing/talking about myself a lot, it was especially hard at first - and even if practice helps making it a little easier everytime, it was still very difficult sometimes. Especially these last months, as I was confused about my work ad how I felt about it. It can be very scary to share your process with other people, because it can be very intimate, so it is intimidating at times : when you first start, when you doubt yourself, when you go through and art block…

As I am self-taught and never studied art, I also feel a bit like an impostor when it comes to sharing tips or giving advices on how to paint this, draw that or do this. I never feel like I am the right person to give advices about technical parts of painting, drawing or being an illustrator, because I figured most of these things by myself and I am never sure this is the “right” way. But I learnt with the pass of the time that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to do things, just different methods that work for different kinds of people.

I think I have answered all of the questions you asked me on Instagram !

Of course there’s not really a rule to follow and everyone’s experience on Patreon is different, but I hope that reading about mine can help you in case you would like to start Patreon soon, or just if you are interested in it 😊

Thank you so much for reading this article until here ! And of course thank you to my former Patreons who made this 2 years adventure so beautiful 🌼

See you soon for a new article, and until then, take care of your beautiful selves !
With love,
Cécile

Cécile Metzger