So I'm completely stumped, to be honest. Just over a year ago, I switched my focus from conventional blogging to YouTube videos in the hope that I would no longer be lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis and having to do gruelling year-round fundraising appeals just to stay afloat, which had been the pattern since 2021. The idea was that the direct revenue from the videos might make the channel just about sustainable without having to fundraise at all. That didn't work - not because the videos haven't received enough views (they have), but simply because videos about Scottish politics generate much lower revenue per 1000 views than the UK average.
I then tried to square the circle by setting up
a Ko-Fi page. People had been telling me for years that my fundraising problems would instantly be over if I went down the Patreon route - that way I'd leave behind the 'boom and bust' of annual fundraisers, build up guaranteed monthly funding and it would all run like clockwork. Ko-Fi is like a no-frills version of Patreon - it allows people to set up small recurring monthly payments, or if they prefer to make a one-off donation of any amount, and a variety of payment methods are accepted. Slightly to my surprise (and certainly to my dismay), that hasn't worked so far either. As of this moment, I have just two recurring monthly supporters on Ko-Fi and two people have made one-off donations via the site. Many thanks to all four of those people, but obviously what I would really need to make the channel sustainable is several dozen monthly supporters, so as things stand I'm not even within sight of the foothills.
A couple of days ago I asked the open question of whether reducing the minimum payment amount from the current £3 to £1 would entice more people to contribute. As far as I'm aware, nobody actually answered that question (which probably means the answer is "no") and the main feedback I received was from people telling me I should go back to conventional text blogging. I'm sure that advice was sincerely meant, but no-one can say I haven't already spent several years well and truly putting to the test whether text blogging is viable.
Nevertheless, I've taken the feedback at face value and set up a readers' poll, which hopefully you will be able to view and respond to below, to ask whether people would be more likely to
become monthly Ko-Fi supporters if I concentrate on text blogging, or YouTube videos/podcasts, or a combination of both. The bottom line is that a few dozen Ko-Fi supporters will be required no matter what type of content I'm producing, so if that's not going to be possible regardless of what I do, it's probably better to find out now.
It's conceivable that I'm no longer producing a product that people think is worth having, which is fair enough. What I would say, though, is that if we want some sort of thriving pro-independence alternative media as a counterweight to the brazen unionist bias of the mainstream media, it will require adequate ongoing funding to be viable. It certainly doesn't have to be me producing it, and there may well be others who are more suitable for the task, but whoever does produce it will face exactly the same problem I'm facing right now. If you want to know why there's so little regular pro-independence content on YouTube, for example, there's no great mystery. Even though my videos are extremely basic, with no expensive equipment involved and no fancy editing or graphics or background music, each one generally takes several hours to make. Making even a single video to a 'professional' standard would probably take days. Few people are going to be able to make that kind of investment of time on a regular basis without at least some funding. (Unless they have 'private means', of course, but I don't think we have all that many aristocrats in the independence movement.)
Quiz Maker
