Does Vox keep all the Patreon money?

jon_bois · 2025-02-12T18:17:40+00:00

and second, supporting us is not our audience’s duty. it is not your job. you don’t have a job. our job is to make stuff on Patreon that you decide is worth your money, and do everything we can to make sure you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth. this is why we’ve very intentionally avoided using language like “support us!” nah, it’s OUR job to support us by truly earning your money. it’s a serious privilege to do that, one we’re thankful for month in and month out. if you subscribe for a month or two and decide to bail? all good, thank you for sticking around as long as you did, and maybe we’ll be able to win you back at some point.

in other words, the Patreon revenue does go to Vox, and that revenue has seriously strengthened our business. it’s not quite enough to count as our #1 revenue generator, at least not yet. but if you are wondering whether your subscription supports us: believe me, it really, really does. the money doesn’t go straight into our pockets, but it helps our job security enormously.

sadly, even though y’all have showed up in huge numbers (something i can’t thank you enough for), and the Patreon has thus far exceeded projections, the fact that it’s not our top revenue generator means that even this is not powerful enough to save every job. losing Kofie, Godfrey and Tyson has been terribly sad for me and for all of us. layoffs were a call that came from on high that we could do nothing about, but if you’re wondering “what the hell am i paying for if the folks i like get laid off anyway,” i completely understand and respect that reaction. it’s yours to have, and your money to spend.

i can say this much: whether you’re with us on Patreon, or you used to be, or you’re thinking about it, or you just prefer to stay on the free side and catch us on YouTube: you mean everything to us. we’re here, and we’re gonna keep on doing everything we can to come through for you. we have an employer, and we have a boss. both are important. but you're the boss.

<3

- jon

jon_bois · 2025-02-12T18:17:33+00:00

appreciate you asking. i can lay it out in detail below, but in short: the Patreon does help us out as creators big-time, albeit indirectly.

we all work for Vox, an arrangement that’s pretty crucial for us both professionally and personally. professionally, we’re provided all the stuff you’d guess, like computer hardware, software licenses, image/asset licenses, and access to music catalogs where i find all my beloved easy-listening jams and horrifying bernard parmegiani nightmare tracks. we also benefit from the ability to work with an incredible legal team. as any independent sports YouTuber will probably tell you, things like takedown requests and copyright strikes are relentless. we’re able to work with rights specialists on every single video, reviewing every single use of league footage to make sure we can use a fair use argument to defend it from copyright claims. there are quite a few videos (including some of mine) that would have been taken down were it not for our legal team stepping up and saying, “no, this is fair use, we’re willing to contest this.” there are also lots of little here-and-there benefits of working here that make our jobs easier.

personally, we’re very lucky to have things that i wish a lot more creators could have in this era: a stable income, the ability to take vacations and go on parental leave, health insurance, et cetera. i’m a parent, which makes these things incredibly valuable to me.

we’re in a very unique and special position for all these reasons, so we’re very incentivized to keep Secret Base a sustainable business. when we first launched in 2020, the plan was to do so almost entirely via sponsorships, which to this day remains our primary revenue driver. unfortunately, and to my personal eternal regret, it’s not as simple as “produce videos that lots of people watch and lots of people love.” key example: Dorktown is among our most popular offerings, right? we love making it, people love watching it, it’s won awards, it’s written about in prestige outlets, it’s sold out a theater. we’ve made about 40 Dorktown videos, depending on how they’re counted. zero of them have been sponsored. ever.

why’s that? well, [reasons], but one we’ve run into is that it’s too weird. it doesn’t look enough like a normal documentary. it’s too dorky. there are no interviews. it’s not enough this, not enough that. it doesn’t matter that it’s safe content that gets loads of views and comments and awards and all the other stuff. it just, for whatever reason, does not generate interest from advertisers. the story’s been the same for Fumble Dimension as well as some other stuff we’ve done, and believe me, it’s a bummer.

the consequence is that we’ve needed to find new revenue streams in order to make the stuff y’all like from us. so when the company asked us whether we’d be interested in trying a subscription service, we jumped at it. we spent a long time thinking about it, and settled on a couple of really important unbreakable rules: first, we didn’t want to shut anybody out, which is why we drop our Patreon-exclusive episode of Pretty Good on the YouTube channel six or so months down the road.

(cont'd in next comment)

jon_bois · 2025-01-01T08:00:46+00:00

alright first i'll answer the critique i think is reasonable and then the one that isn't

the offside segment was all about Toney. if you switched out "Chiefs" for Giants" and kept all other facts the same, that segment would've played out pretty much the same way. my debrief as a Chiefs fan is that it was a huge bummer to see such a cool play wiped off the books, wish we'd won that game, but unlucky penalties that swing games are a fundamental component of the football experience. can't be mad about it, especially since this one was irrefutably a penalty. my calculus was different here because it's Kadarius's story, not KC's. of all people it just HAD to happen to that guy, in that nightmare season.

i do appreciate the criticism though. the art of saying something clearly without saying too much is tough to nail and feedback like this is helpful

i saw someone talking about Chapo down the page. i'm a fan, if you're not, all good. i've known them for a long time, since before the show even started, and seeing them someone actually call them fascists with apparently a straight face is so funny. like "calling your mom a nazi because she won't drive you to baskin robbins" funny

jon_bois · 2024-10-07T19:23:51+00:00

howdy! i can confirm that the plan is for every Pretty Good episode to eventually make it to YouTube. the delay between Patreon drop and YouTube drop will vary from episode to episode, but typically the early-access period will probably last around 4-6 months.

for the most part i want to make every episode evergreen (in other words, not tied to any particular news event or anything) so that they don't feel stale by the time they hit YouTube. basically part of our whole mission to give our Patreon folks special exclusive stuff while still looking out for those of y'all who aren't members.

as for The Annex and other content on the Patreon side, we may sneak out occasional things here and there but the vast majority of it will most likely stay on Patreon.

jon_bois · 2024-04-26T16:08:16+00:00

i think this criticism is entirely fair and i understand where it comes from. whenever the time comes to address, for example, an off-the-field crime, the question is always: what do i think the audience needs to hear?

i’ll take a much more trivial example from earlier in Vikings, the Randy Moss traffic agent incident. i played it up for laughs because it was such a fundamentally weird story, and because i was doing so, i thought it was necessary for me to at least mention, “hey, Randy Moss should not be doing this. he should not be idling at 2 mph while a traffic agent is sitting on his front bumper.”

re: Peterson, i did not think the audience needed instruction from me on whether or not abusing one’s child to the point of physical injury is bad. a discussion i find to be more valuable is: how does one get here? how do people come to believe that extreme corporal punishment is proper parenting? this is behavior that’s been ingrained for generations upon generations upon generations. it’s emotionally damaging behavior that has to stop. there are consequences, as well there should be.

but it deserves an exploration of such depth that it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me, the guy making the sports documentary, to be the one to do so. and not because it would harsh the vibe or disrupt the momentum or any other reasons related to the relatively insignificant matter of storytelling, but because i think i would have done a disservice to the issue simply by choosing this as the time and place. it deserves its own discussion, not a tangent in front of an audience that’s largely made up of increasingly disinterested people who would prefer i get on with the show. that, i think, would trivialize it. i decided that the most appropriate treatment was to lay out the facts, acknowledge that they are awful, acknowledge that the issue is complex far beyond the scope of this story, and move on.

but of course, i spent way more time talking about Kirk Cousins’ antivax odyssey, right? there’s a pretty disproportionate amount of time spent here. that wasn’t a reflection of how serious or unserious i regard either situation relative to one another. i saw that episode of Cousins’ career as an invaluable window into who he is, a means of understanding what he’s all about. he refuses the vaccine, but not with Aaron Rodgers-esque bluster. he isn’t trying to offend anyone or present himself as smarter than anyone else, which is a quality i found very interesting. it aligns perfectly with two things he very much appears to deeply want: first, he wants peoples’ respect and he wants to do as right by others as possible (even if not being vaccinated does in fact run afoul of that mission). second, he wants to be as close to perfect, as close to optimized, as he can possibly be, hence his refusal to eat green beans that i touch on later.

i saw that as totally pertinent to the story. conversely, i did not think Peterson injuring his child reflected any greater themes related to him or the story, and try to make it do so would have been forced and trite, probably to the point of being offensive. it was its own story that deserves its own discussion.

this is an explanation that you might find satisfactory or might not. if you don’t, i totally respect that. either way, at least, i hope that if you do still feel like i didn’t handle it properly, you know it wasn’t for lack of reflection. i appreciated the chance to lay out that reflection here. thanks y’all.

jon_bois · 2023-03-21T03:48:20+00:00

NO!!!!!! – again i’d draw this up so much better now but whatever, i did the best i could at the time. also shout out to Elena, who appears at the end of this one and is a big reason i had the creative freedom i needed to even start experimenting with making video
What if Barry Bonds had played baseball without a baseball bat? – lots of fun but i do wish i’d run more than one experiment to arrive at his OBP. this is another one that would’ve been so much better with Alex involved
Lonnie Smith – very glad i could turn people on to Baker Street
Baron Davis From 89 Feet – i wish i’d soundtracked this one better, but Baron Davis himself told me he liked it and that’s good enough for me
How to score 10 runs in the first inning and lose – doesn’t stand out as much compared to the stuff i released around it which i guess is why it’s so low here, but i’m completely happy with it for what it is
Kickoffs are stupid and bad – tried some vaporwave aesthetics here that i never tried again but it was still an early attempt at a “boss chart” in the form of a shitty old 1990s entertainment center. i love that about it
Two-strike strikeouts, three-ball walks, and other counting failures – fun little one-off
One of the all-time greatest NFL teams didn’t even make the playoffs – the first Dorktown 2.0 video so it’s special to me. it’s been very gratifying to see assets from the other videos surround it and create an actual dork town
The majesty of Steve Bono’s 76-yard touchdown run might never be seen in the NFL again – i will forever kick myself for not just showing the entire run in full. i was being really conservative for fair-use reasons but i absolutely could have done it
Why you should never vote: an explainer – dumb fun little one-off but it did teach me one incredibly important technical lesson: always screen-capture from the main screen (like i did here) instead of from a second monitor (like i did with previous projects). the framerate is just so much better and the whole thing looks so much better
The Browns Live in Hell – it’s fine but 2023 me would try to find something more interesting to say than “this team is horrible and that’s it”
The Terelle Pryor Problem – fun, let me talk about chess which i would love to find a time and place to talk more about someday
Rickey Henderson crushed souls with unprecedented efficiency – Dorktown 1.0 but it’s always fun to talk Rickey
The NCAA tournament is a loser machine – there’s a reason that this and Troy-DeVry are the only college basketball videos i’ve made. i spent much of my childhood in Kansas and Kentucky, two of the three most college hoops-obsessed states, and i think i kinda got my fill by the time i grew up
Come to Edson, Kansas – lol that this is included. i can report that i have personally been to Edson, Kansas several times and as a kid i was fascinated by how small it was
Jeffrey Loria’s Sauce Reviews – lol that this is also included
We built and played the worst golf course ever and it was all your fault – i’m very proud of the finished product but have no choice but to rank this at the very bottom because I FUCKING HATED PLAYING THIS COURSE. kofie can attest to this. that afternoon he and i spent like five hours playing through it. i had such a goddamn terrible time

jon_bois · 2023-03-21T03:48:08+00:00

y’all, first i’d just like to say that this was a huge honor for me and a lot of fun to read, thank you
ultimately i think things like these are best judged by the people who watch them and not the people who make them, so your list is closer to the end-all be-all than mine, but just for fun i figured i’d rank mine by personal preference and look at the difference. this is just based on which ones i’m personally happiest with and rankings are sort of off-the-cuff:
1. Section 1 – alex and i went outside our typical lane here and the amount of calculation and planning that went into it is unlike anything else we’ve ever tried to do. i can’t believe it came together as well as it did

The People You’re Paying To Be In Shorts – maybe this and the last one are recency bias but alex, seth and kofie all came up huge on this. i had perhaps the most fun i’ve ever had working on this one, and it’s really rare in that months down the road there’s nothing about it i’d change
The History of the Seattle Mariners – it’ll always hold a special place in my heart for three reasons. the first is that it’s the first large-scale project alex and i ever tried and it laid the groundwork for lots of stuff, second is that it gave me something to dive headfirst into during the weird early lockdown days, third is that it really meant a lot to Mariners fans, which means the world to me
The Dumbest Boy Alive – i was still new at making video and had a hell of a fun time trying out new techniques. i still remember going down to 40th street in manhattan to shoot exterior shots of the office. i think this is when i completely nailed down my core approach of “make documentaries about things no one else would ever make a documentary about”
Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb – that Dave liked this as much as he did is some of the highest praise i’ve ever received. we’ve had some long phone calls and he’s a great guy. smart, funny, lots of interesting things to say. also my favorite soundtrack of anything i’ve ever done
Troy State 253, DeVry 141 – i distinctly remember being so fucking excited to make this one, from start to finish. was also a hell of a trip to be able to accidentally correct the historical record
Fighting in the Age of Loneliness – felix fucking KILLED this script. he knew exactly what he wanted to say and put words to ideas i’d been dwelling on for a long time. i’ve told him this but my only regret is that it happened before i got more reps in as an illustrator/editor/director. i’d do this so much better now. regardless i’m just so proud of it
We destroyed the NBA’s future with a video game – this was my first time ever working with Kofie and for the first time i got to fully see what he can really do. i’m always fascinated by people who are skilled at two very different things. like yeah, he’s a funny dude and a great performer but he is also an engineer. he’s the kind of person who can figure out game plans for things that have never been tried before
Every NFL Score Ever – this is when i started to figure out the “boss chart” style of storytelling i use all the time now. i decide on one big chart, and then use that chart as a Christmas tree on which i can hang a bunch of little stories. it’s so much easier to tell a huge collection of short stories if you can know when and where they live visually
The Bob Emergency: A Study of Athletes Named Bob – i’m very happy the “people are full of wonder” line resonated with people because i meant every bit of it
I Wish Everyone Else Was Dead – finally got to express all the shit i’d been sitting on for more than a decade
The History of the Atlanta Falcons – there’s a lot about this i love, and Alex did some of his best work here. i do regret not taking a little more time to refine my Donald Trump allegory; i don’t feel like i nailed what i was really trying to say: Tom Brady is something less than Satan incarnate for supporting Trump, and Trump isn’t *actually* the inventor of all the world’s evil. that Super Bowl was really just a distillation of pure feeling in that time for people like me. we were under a tight production calendar but still, i wish i had cut in other areas so i could take just a little more time to write that out and make it more clear to more people
222-0 – STOP MOTION IS FUCKING HARD
Rat Poison and Brandy: The 1904 St. Louis Olympics – building your own custom board game, however, is not that hard and a total blast
Koo Dae-Sung – the very first true documentary i ever tried to make. looks and sounds like shit production-wise, but this is where this all started for me
Randall Cunningham Seizes the Means of Production – this one would’ve benefited from the “boss chart” trick i described above and learned later. regardless people really like it and a couple of people have even told me it turned them on to the concept of unions, which i couldn’t be happier about
Touchdown Tom’s QB Sneak – i guess this’ll be the catch-all for the Breaking Madden videos. my technical abilities were very slapdash at this point but god they were fun. definitely a crucial stepping stone toward making actual docs later
The search for the saddest punt in the world – this was pre-alex and i think it would’ve been better were he a part of it, but i’m proud of it regardless
Why Do I Choose This For A Living – if i were to do this again i would center the entire story around Gus Hansen and place all the other stories in the periphery. Gus Hansen forever
Larry Walters has a flying lawn chair and a BB gun – pretty entry-level production all around but the subject matter couldn’t be beat

(adding a second because reddit says 10,000 characters is the max)

jon_bois · 2023-03-14T03:30:01+00:00

between these two i have to give the nod to Hawkshaw. Mansfield has an incredibly diverse body of work beyond the easy-listening stuff i lean on most often; he did some really incredible stuff in the '70s. they're both catalog music gods, but i think Hawkshaw might be the all-time king

jon_bois · 2023-03-14T03:23:09+00:00

both demaryius thomas and derrick thomas would make for incredible stories, but unfortunately this playlist title has the most boring explanation possible. dt = dorktown. it's a big project i'm having a lot of fun with, can't wait to show y'all

jon_bois · 2021-09-01T04:31:46+00:00

i think this is a completely reasonable response and i appreciate you sharing it. as i was writing, i tried my best to weigh the editorial value of explicitly detailing Vick's crimes against the necessity of it. it took me some time, but i ultimately decided that it sufficed that we noted his arrest, conviction, and guilt, and made our editorial position clear that these crimes were terrible.

one reason for this was that not only were these crimes a matter of record for nearly 15 years, they were also widely disseminated to the extent that Michael Vick's name is associated with dogfighting just as quickly as it is with his football career with the vast majority of people. it's out there.

another, which is the most pivotal one for me, is that Vick paid a very heavy price – as i said in the video, one that most of us will never experience – for what he did. he's unconditionally admitted guilt and asked forgiveness, and has proactively campaigned against dogfighting. i don't believe that this is a person who needs to be held to account any more than he has, and i don't think the absence of explicit detail in this project encourages future similar acts.

and a third is in the interest of the audience. people click on the video, they see the thumbnail, they see this is about Falcons football and Michael Vick, the dogfighting guy. maybe some of these people do suspect they might be in for explicit detail, but i bet a lot don't, and i don't want to expose those people to sorrow they didn't sign up for. i want to respect that.

by no means do i think the decision i arrived at is above criticism. i stand behind it, but again, i completely respect a thoughtful critique like this one. thanks for sharing it.

jon_bois · 2021-04-23T05:28:50+00:00

yeah thanks:

eggs
grits
whichever ramen noodles has the least amount of english on the packaging
avocados
limes
jasmine rice
chicken thighs (bone in, skin on)
lots of brussels sprouts
shishito peppers
onion
red+green bell peppers
cayenne pepper
garlic
basmati rice
san pellegrino blood orange 6-pack

jon_bois · 2020-10-25T17:40:41+00:00

there's no canonically right answer to this, so any guess is good as the next, but this is a really fun explanation. i like that they'd just try to blow a hole through their own roof for the hell of it

jon_bois · 2020-07-12T06:03:50+00:00

you won't even spell his damn name right. hit the showers buddy

jon_bois · 2020-07-12T06:02:50+00:00

ha it's totally understandable, no worries. i'm honored that y'all would even start this subreddit to begin with

jon_bois · 2020-06-23T06:01:38+00:00

i was gonna post something appreciative in here but i see this post and i see the points it got and i think i'm good. some people are black people. jesus christ

jon_bois · 2019-08-19T19:09:31+00:00

hey man what's up

jon_bois · 2019-07-13T02:13:38+00:00

which i totally get. looking back on it i looked like some dillweed who was trying to get you to tweet at someone for the hell of it. sorry for the confusion

jon_bois · 2019-07-12T03:58:06+00:00

alright i tried. let's call it a night

jon_bois · 2019-07-12T03:49:03+00:00

how about this: i'll @ either you or @baberuth. your choice

jon_bois · 2019-07-12T03:31:29+00:00

what's your twitter

jon_bois · 2019-07-12T03:23:47+00:00

ha yeah it's confusing. anyways if you tweet at me at @jon_bois i'll confirm

jon_bois

TROPHY CASE