Ideas That Sell, Ideas That Do Not

I make most of my income from this website’s Patreon account. I’m not sure that’s necessarily how I planned it when I was conceptualizing the website but that’s how it has played out. This website has grown and grown and grown and it feels like the cultural space I occupy outside of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place has steadily shrunk, most recently when Splitsider cancelled my Pod-Canon column and I brought it here so that it could join My World of Flops and the Simpsons Decade in the big Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place living graveyard for good-ass columns that died noble deaths at more popular, professional websites. 

I’ve got baby number two on the way in about a month so the money brought in by this website has never been more important. So you can imagine how frustrated and concerned I was when this Happy Place hit a brick wall a few months back in terms of new pledges and new money. For a while there, I was lucky if the page gained five new pledges in total over a period of a month, and then I would look on in frustration when whatever modest advances I made for the month were swallowed by credit card rejections that put me solidly in the loss column. 

Then I created something that reversed that trend. I introduced Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, a column that allowed patrons to choose a movie I then had to watch and write about for the website. It was an immediate success. In the three or so months that I’ve had the column I’ve already written up ten movies for the column and glancing over at my Patch Adams clipboard I’ve got at least seven more movies in the hopper just waiting for me to watch and write about them. 

In volunteering to watch a movie of a patron’s choice and then write what I hope is a funny, insightful and entertaining 2000 word essay about it I feel like I am performing a useful service and given my experience and advanced age, I feel like I am offering it at a very reasonable price. 

Is my arch-enemy John Green going to write you an article for one hundred dollars? That guy doesn't get out of bed for less than a grand.

Readers embracing Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 has allowed me to go from months where I end up 27 dollars beneath where I started to months where my total haul increases by four hundred or five hundred dollars, which is huge for me and the site. Just as importantly, if not more importantly, I’ve gotten to write about a whole bunch of weird and random and not so random movies I might never have even known about were it not for this feature. 

I also noticed that I get a better response from Patreon links when I just write that I make most of my money from Patreon (which has the benefit of being true) than when I use a multi-pronged approach highlighting the exclusive content you get from pledging to the site (which, real talk, I need to get better at doing) along with an appeal to support independent media and my weird career. 

I feel like Control Nathan Rain 4.0 has allowed me to monetize the site in a very direct way without compromising its quality or personality. I’m very happy with the Patreon for the site, particularly after introducing Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, but the page for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast continues to lag far behind, with 40 patrons contributing a total of 174 dollars. 

I’m grateful for every last one of those patrons and dollars but I would love to find a “Control Nathan Rabin 4.0” like feature to speed up pledges to that particular page. I’m super proud of the work Clint and myself are doing on it, and I’m wondering if there’s something we could do for it that would be like Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 without cannibalizing it.  

Mattress people and Squarespace haven’t approached us yet (and I fucking love Squarespace) and I don’t want to get greedy but with Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place I’ve found a way to do what I love and make enough money to support my family doing so. That’s a minor miracle in itself but I sure wouldn’t mind if the Happy Cast page was just a little more lively. 

Won’t you please consider choosing a turkey for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace