Hey there, Dear Reader, it’s me – Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones, decent artist, mediocre writer, and OK Warhammer 40k player. And today I’m here to convince you to support us on Patreon. If you already do, great! Know that we’re grateful for your support and for all of your posts in the Discord. For the rest of you, I’m going to put the button to our Patreon page right here, and then explain why you should click on it and give us your support financially.
Goonhammer is a creator-owned business. We have about 50 owners right now who have voting rights and determine the direction of the company. And of those, only four are full-time employees, all of whom were hired in the past year – for everyone else this is a labor of love (and sweat, mostly). As such, every dollar we make, be it from advertising or subscriptions, goes back to the people who work on the site. Being able to finally hire people full time to do things like video and editing has been huge for us. We’ve raised our freelancer rates twice this year and would like to do so again next year.
Goonhammer is weird in that we’ve never raised any external funding and don’t have any external ownership; our goal is just to make a sustainable business where the people who want to do this on a day to day basis can make a living working on something they enjoy doing with the skills they’ve accumulated.
So What Do You Get if You Become a Patron?
I mostly want to talk to you about two tiers today – at the most basic, $2 tier, you’ll get access to ad-free Goonhammer. Ads are a necessary evil for us; we don’t like having them on the site, but as the site has grown we had a real problem: The more people who read, the more it costs to run the site. But Patron revenue didn’t scale that same way. On the other hand ad revenue – the money we get for every page loaded – does. So we put ads on the site. We’re pretty much at the upper bound of what we’ll tolerate when it comes to ads but we’d rather not have them at all.
And the funny part? $2 per month per person is more than we’d make off the ads you see, even after Patreon takes their cut. So the bare minimum here is a win-win deal for everyone.
On top of that you get access to the paid content on Patreon – the extra podcasts and the ability to vote in polls, like determining what codexes we put into Administratum or which vampire movies to make Bernhardt review.
The other big tier? The $5 per month tier. This is where you get access to our Discord. The Discord is great, with more than a thousand (mostly) wonderful people, where we talk about strategy, offer advice, crack jokes, and interact with Gregbot, an unhinged bot we made to welcome new patrons to the Skeleton Wars and also offer advice and rank things:
Also it has versus mode, where it’ll spit out custom images of things getting paired into each other, Street Fighter 4 style:
We’re all in there, hanging out, having a good time and building our own weird lore of in-jokes and references. It’s easily one of the best Discords on the internet.
On top of this, you also get access to cool special features in our apps – in Administratum you’ll have the ability to run campaigns, get access to faction add-ons, and in both Administratum and Tabletop Battles you’ll gain access to the ability to save and store photos of games and minis, which will let you use a custom avatar for yourself in Tabletop Battles. And we’re working on more custom features for Tabletop Battles for subscribers, so stay tuned there.
Other Ways to Support Us
If you’re looking for other ways to support us besides Patreon, I get it. You can find some good ways to do that on our How to Support Goonhammer page. We’ll be adding more things to it soon, and we’re working on a better merch strategy.
But the best way to support is still Patreon, and I’m going to put the button on here one more time, in case you’ve scrolled so far you can’t see the previous one. Here ya go:
The money you contribute goes toward paying our writers more, hiring more people, and building out new and exciting features in our apps and on our website. So it’s not just about what you get today, but making the whole thing better in the future.
So thanks again to our existing Patrons and thank you for reading this far and giving us some additional consideration. I’ll see you on the Discord.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
