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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.

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Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.

I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.

Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.

Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.

Quite frankly, I don't think you can compare image generation, let alone NSFW image generation, with YouTube and podcasts. You are simply operating in a medium in which this is going to be dramatically tougher, primarily because most people who consume your content are likely there for the content and unlikely to have any relationship to you specifically. But either way, "It's a rare trait" isn't disagreeing with what I said. The successful conversion rate in my last comment was below 1%.

> aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to

vtuber culture proves that this is categorically wrong

Right, I suppose I should have mentioned the caveat of desperate men hoping to get a glimpse of attention from a woman.

At that point I'd just make a Patreon (that offers various benefits including exclusive videos not on YouTube) while also monetizing via YouTube ads and sponshorships.

Yes, there is a reason I said "you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them". I'm not claiming this is a new concept, I was making specific allusions to Patreon and the idea of 1000 true fans[1].

[1] - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

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