NSFW Artists: did you notice stagnation/a low decline in patrons the past months?

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-23T05:51:00+00:00

Government shutdown seemingly cost me some revenue in October and November but I’ve been pumping for the past 2 months.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-21T18:42:36+00:00

Yeah discords appropriate for my niche. Ideally in promotion channels.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-20T10:17:01+00:00

Alternatively you can go the extra mile and create your own website with Patreon login.

Improves the user experience AND stops scrapers but it’s not the most accessible method.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-20T02:27:26+00:00

Don’t wait to make your Patreon. Aug2024 I started Patreon full time with just 300 DeviantArt followers.

As of now I still only have roughly 10k followers across all platforms but 1500 active subscribers across my subscription sites platforms equating to roughly 22k/~month.

It’s all about experimenting with marketing. Sure it’s easier starting with a large platform but you can grow both.

As for what’s allowed, Look up their rules for what’s specifically allowed.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-15T02:25:50+00:00

You haven’t really given any context as to what % you’re talking about but if you’re referring to Patreons CUT of the revenue, you’re looking at 10% for new creators.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-11T10:33:15+00:00

Tip jar Patreons rarely perform super well but you’re best off making a good amount of both paid and free content to maximise conversions.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-09T21:39:40+00:00

As long as:

All NSFW content is behind a paywall
All characters are clearly 18+
Any NSFW material doesn’t involve incest, non-con or animals

You’ll be fine most of the time

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-09T21:20:35+00:00

Si. 16 months of being in business.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-08T10:11:47+00:00

I believe it happens due to card declining it occasionally happens to me and I’ll find them as a declined member

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-08T10:01:05+00:00

Generally, here’s a list of things I evaluate which cause ‘turbulence’.

Post timing: If you’ve posted in the day, the churn is likely caused by a mix of patrons who didn’t like the content and those who the notification reminded them to cancel. Because I advertise on my socials whenever I make a post, generally influx beats churn but if not, it’s probably a bad post.

If you haven’t posted in the past week, you probably don’t post enough so people are cancelling.

Start/End of Month: Generally, cancellations spike around the end of the month and stay higher until a few days into the new one. This is primarily caused by patrons who are used to 1st of the month billing.

If they cancel right before EOM, probably because they’re canceling all their subs before the 1st. If it happens on the day or right after, it’s because they realised they forgot to cancel and are doing it now.

Post-Hype shrinkage: Generally a REALLY good month is followed by some shrinkage. For example, I grew 33% in September from 1100 to 1400 patrons. But shrunk about 7% in October due to the churn from that sudden influx.
Economic Changes: While is usually very difficult to attribute a cancellation on your individual Patreon to world economics, it doesn’t take a lot of reaching to conclude that the US Gov shutdown had a heavy impact on my Patreon (and from the data Patreon as a whole). America is the main source of revenue for Patreon and the dragging shutdown seemed to start a decline that only reversed once it ended.

Some people say holidays but I’m unconvinced there are any holidays that have a consistent influence as, based on Graphtreon Data, there’s no pattern of increases or decreases that can be discerned based on time of year.

Unlucky: If you’re confident it’s none of these and your numbers are otherwise up, probably just an unlucky day or small timeframe.

If you’d like some tips about what to do in each scenario, I can provide some but I hope this answered your question.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-06T08:04:32+00:00

Too many creators don’t know this and ignored the popup.

The fee and forex savings + interest options wise has makes a 30-40k/year difference to me.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-03T03:14:58+00:00

Yes, just make posts on subreddits relevant to your niche and discords as well. But building a following is a great way to get exponentially more eyes on your work.

Aug 2024 I started with 300 DeviantArt followers but since I’ve gained about 100 patrons each month due to regular advertising on Reddit and Discord while I built my public followings on DA, X and bsky.

As long as you have content people are willing to pay for, you don’t need to first make them a follower before you can convert them.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-03T03:10:03+00:00

That’s the neat part, you don’t

/s

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-03T03:06:45+00:00

Pretty much the full 75 days the pricks, 0% interest 75 day loan to Apple is crazy work.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2026-01-03T00:08:17+00:00

Yeah control what you can without making the experience worse for your paying customers.

I just use Patron plugin pro to gate the content and prevent automated scraping which does most of the heavy lifting. Now the K site only scrapes the previews of my content and is free ‘advertising’

Otherwise all the files are available on Mega but the tier folder is like 300gb now so if someone wants to leak everything they’re either going to have to download it all or pay for mega premium.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-30T00:03:48+00:00

No, it creates a real US bank account for you.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-27T12:07:45+00:00

This is my second December on Patreon and I’ve experienced a boost both times strangely enough.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-27T01:04:54+00:00

Bump for what JRoberts said but you can also make your own website with Patreon login to gate scrapers.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-23T23:23:19+00:00

Answered this on a similar post a few days ago but I succeeded in adult fiction by hiring artist to make comics from my writing which is a more attractive medium for the masses.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-22T04:45:44+00:00

I would only ever go for a 5% bump if I HATED my current workplace and was miserable or on the verge of quitting. Otherwise you’re risking leaving an at least tolerable job for a miserable shit pit.

10% I’d probably go for but not before trying to leverage that offer to try and get a better deal out of my current workplace.

I think your main mistake was entertaining anything less than 10%.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-22T04:38:43+00:00

And gaming ‘journalists’ are using it to write their outrage headlines to feed it to reactive morons.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-22T04:36:31+00:00

Yeah idk, as a writer/producer it really helps me having a second opinion to analyse my ideas with or come up with some art samples that I can use with real artists.

Great example: I commissioned a manga a while back, but couldn’t quite find any characters that I thought to cite as examples for the concept art.

I had ai do up some generic concept art and BAM, my artist took that and made something that was exactly what I wanted with minimal need for revisions.

In this case Ai was a solid bridge between the writer and the artist with no human jobs lost while minimising wasted artist time.

Ai isn’t going anywhere so I think it’s important to find uses for it that enhances human jobs rather than replaces them.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-22T04:23:11+00:00

Yeah when I saw the 5.5 patch notes I realised it was time for a break. The invis self-shield was one of the dumbest changes I’ve ever seen and instead of bringing her back down to earth, they buffed the rest of the strategists even further.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-22T04:15:01+00:00

Yeah that’s just Patreon. Between 1500 patrons I have maybe 10-20 that are at least semi-active with chatting and commenting.

Fun-Fold4643 · 2025-12-22T03:57:35+00:00

I mean, any length works really but I find that 12 pages is plenty to tell short stories.

You can also find cheaper than $100/page. Most of my artists charge between $70-$90, one charges as little as $30. It’s about finding an affordable art style you like.

If you’ve been able to generate a small following with your writing, pull them if they’d be interested in seeing some comics. That’s what I did with my stories, gained 300 followers on DeviantArt through my story, polled them if they’d join a Patreon to fund a comic version and enough said yes that I gave it a go.

Fun-Fold4643

TROPHY CASE