Producing my videos and writing my articles is often
time-consuming and can be very costly. Just interviewing scientists at the AGU Fall Meeting can cost thousands of dollars to hire someone from the San Francisco Film Union (without it I’m not allowed to film). Each year I also spend over a thousand Euro on software licenses, equipment, and hosting. I love what I do, but these costs restrict what I can do as I have a very small budget.

To help finance my activities I did a ‘soft launch’ of my Patreon page last month. My thinking on this is that with just a few people funding me I have to worry less about how I’m going to pay annual bills or justify the time I spend on my projects. The more people help out the easier it becomes for me to work on my content. Which means I can update more regularly, improve production quality, interview more scientists, and much more.

I don’t expect it to bring in a lot of funding, just maybe enough to pay some of the annual bills I have. Being able to go independent thanks to Patreon funding would be a result beyond anything I’m expecting from this.

I’m still tweaking the texts, rewards, and goals on my Patreon page. I’m also still working on integrating Patreon into my workflow so that all the rewards are available and set up. Though despite this I already have two patrons and thanks to them the hosting for Real Sceptic is paid for. Not only that, I now also have the budget to enable hosting features for my visitors. These features can either speed up response times or make the website more secure for visitors.

For that I can only say: Thank you.

I truly appreciate the patronage these two have given me. I never expected to reach my first funding goal within a month. That just floored me.

The true launch of my Patreon page is still a couple of months in the future. That will happen as soon as I have all my Patreon videos edited and available.