Don’t worry about ever asking for support. Your voice is unique in games criticism and whatever I can do to help support that is worth every cent. Since you requested it, I have changed my payment from Paypal to Patreon.
Pledged to your dopey Patreon thing. Don’t want a dopey reward, or a dopey thank you video either.
And I’ll use your dopey front door.
So there!
Tom,
I know you are shy about this but I think the overwhelming consensus from the QT3 community is that we would be happy to help you.
I suggest you put something on the front page about your Patreon campaign to ensure that all regular QT3ers know that it exists. The paypal “donate” button doesn’t show up at all on the mobile version of the site.
Alex.
Tom, if someone is interested in giving a one time donation rather than a monthly recurring donation, is there a threshold for when it makes sense to use Paypal vs. Patreon?
My income is highly variable (i.e. half the year I make basically nothing), so I’d prefer to give one time donations. I just donated via Paypal, but if it makes sense to use Patreon in the future, I could do that.
So glad you’re on Patreon now. I’ve been meaning to send in a PayPal donation for a long time now, but keep forgetting, and I find Patreon much easier to work with anyway.
Welp, considering that I owe my entire career in a roundabout way to Quarter to Three, I was happy to make a monthly pledge. There’s probably better ways to call attention to the fact that you’re doing this, though, than an obscurely named thread title that downplays what you’re trying to accomplish. How about renaming the thread: “Want to support Quarter to Three? Here’s how!” Or something like that.
Swapped over from Paypal. I tried turning off the adblocker. Then put it back on. Sorry.
Just pledged and no adblocker for me too. I keep going back to your site so I think it’s just fitting that you should be compensated for it! Thanks again for the great work.
Also pledged, it is the least I can do. Being able to be part of QT3 is something special. My favorite gaming forum / news site! :)
Seconded. Supporting your writing, the site (where lots of us spend quite a bit of time), and the discussions the forum generates is a good thing. Nothing to be apologetic about!
I’m in (for as long as my shaky finances allow :/ )!
Thanks for the reminder on the adblocker. During the day, I’m usually on my phone where I see no ads. But it’s off on my PC browser.
Wendelius
I donated vai Patreon, but I’d much prefer a one time donation.
Big donate button on the front page , 1 time via paypal.
Wow, the ads here on the forums generate $5k to $6k per month? That seems far fetched, my friend.
I am all for patreons and other forms of direct support, but how about we increase growth here by not showing ads on the forums at all? It’s a better user experience, and from what I hear ad rates are poised to go down over time, not up. At what point is it still worth it to drag people through the mud of forum ads for a penny on the dollar?
You’d arguably get better community support if you grow the forums (with, say, modern forum software) and get those new users to sign up for premium stuff and sponsorships. Bigger audiences – more money. And nothing says respect for your audience, like… well… anything but vBulletin… and a nice, modern, fast experience.
(Also whatever impressions you’re serving Disqus on the homepages, you could absorb those yourselves and integrate the two oddball segregated discussion communities, one on Disqus, one here – into one upsell-able whole.)
Anyway, offer stands. I can offer to cover whatever the current forums are pulling in $/month, forever, plus much faster and more reliable hosting than the “hey the site goes down for two hours a night because bullshit” on tap here.
And just to prove I’m for real, not all talk, and I completely support this kind of funding, I pledged $1k to the patreon just now.
(I tried to pledge $5k but my card company didn’t like that. Will try again next month.)
Yay, I had been wondering why you didn’t set up a patreon, since I wanted a nice, easy, paypal-less way to donate.
I don’t adblock, but I also mainly browse on mobile now, which has no ads, so I wasn’t giving revenue regardless.
Signed up. Glad to be able to support you directly, Tom.
You’ve probably gone and totally skewed Patreon’s analytics on donation per patron. :)
Wow, over $1000 a month! That’s not a living wage but it’s a great start! Don’t forget to mention it whenever you do a YouTube stream /video, Tom. I see you have a link (not clickable for some reason) on your latest video but you could also mention it at the beginning or end of each video (Don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe and if you’re interested in supporting my channel take a look at my Patreon account. The link is in the description). Don’t be afraid to promote yourself. Your channel is definitely worth promoting.
That was truly awesome of you wumpus!!
I really have no idea what the ads pay, I’m not involved in any of that and have not received a cent from the site.
Also the site goes down nightly when I take MySQL backups. Nightly downtime is 7 minutes, ending at 5:27 AM ET. I guess I could setup percona xtrabackup to do them non-blocking, but I can’t be arsed. Anyway that’s on me, not the host. Linode has been stupendous.
I always meant to set up recurring PayPal payments & never did get around to it. Consider that problem solved by Patreon!
Kudos to you for supporting Tom and the community so yugely.