On Patreon
I’ve heard a few complaints about Patreon, where people say it looks like a shill/cashgrab/desperate ploy. Worse than having ads, even.
I suspect that’s a psychological issue. Maybe it does seem worse to some people. But as someone who messes around with web development, my humble opinion is that NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE THAN ADS.
- Ads track you as hard as they can in barely-legal (or worse) ways. Block cookies? Have an ad-blocker? Doesn’t matter. There’s a million different ways of spying on you. Notice Apple’s is built into the operating system.
- Ads load who knows what, whenever they feel like it. Ever been to Wikia? It will make your browser cry with piles of Flash, GIFs, and poorly-coded JavaScript, hammering your computer trying to figure out who you are and what you’d like to buy. All of which, by definition, is not what readers go to a site for.
- The only people ads make money for are really big sites (and the ad brokers, but you knew that). So for the little people who would even bother with a Patreon, ads wouldn’t help anyway. And if you use an ad-blocker to mitigate the first two issues, then the creators make even less money.
TL;DR: ads invade privacy, make websites slower and crashier, and then don’t even work on top of all that.
So if the alternative is small creators linking to their Patreon in text, or even with, god forbid, one whole image, GOOD.