What do do? I have had some craziness in life recently and I really started thinking. I know you’re expecting gaming content here. Well, this is about delivering more content and keeping the good old blog afloat.

My goal is not create a second income. Sure it would be nice but I want to be realistic. I’m very niche in what I post and what I like. I’d just like to set the reasonable goal of covering the costs of web hosting and occasionally buying some RPG product that I might not otherwise for a review. Nothing super spectacular there. So what to do?

I already have Patreon and Locals pages. There are pro’s and cons for each. Patreon is more popular and many folks are more comfortable with it. Locals does have a few more features available like native live streaming. It’s my personal feeling that Locals is much better than Patreon when it comes to building a community. Patreon feels much like building a virtual storefront or subscription service.

Of course, going a long with this thought process is video. Yes, I started a Youtube channel a long time ago and the pandemic blew things a part and I haven’t uploaded anything in a couple of years. But a lot of things have changed. It does take a bit of extra effort to do a decent video and I was just thinking is Youtube really worth my time as a primary video hosting solution? There’s a huge sound to noise ratio on Youtube. There’s just so many folks on there. It’s good but let’s face it, half of your task as a Youtube creator is working the algorithm and the other half is trying to keep up with what Google decides is the community standards of the day. I have plans of going of the deep end but heck if I want I should have some choice in the matter. Plus Youtube has made it even more difficult to reach that golden point of being noticed and maybe making a few cents off your work.

I’ve looked around at various alternatives and there really aren’t that many. I’m leaning towards Odysee. Sure there are a bunch of crack pots on there. But so are there on Youtube. And I suppose I could just use Youtube as back up for the Odysee videos and see what happens. As mentioned earlier, yes there are more people who use Youtube but there are so many and with Google’s algorithm the chance of someone finding it are about the same.

I did do a little experiment last year. I stopped sharing blog posts to Facebook. Yes, the blog does have a Facebook page that still gets auto posts. But I was also cross posting to a few fo the more popular Facebook group. I stopped doing that and just started posting on MeWe. Guess what? It didn’t affect the blog’s traffic. I had fewer pissy comments. And what’s even more interesting, blog traffic has actually gone up this year.

So with all those thoughts, what’s your opinion? What’s your experience? Or any other thoughts?