Hey everyone!
After publishing over 1,000 articles and guides plus running this forum over the last 14 years, I've decided to put up a Patreon page -- I'd greatly appreciate whatever you could contribute to keep this project strong.
https://www.patreon.com/racketboy
I’ve always felt weird about asking for money/donations, but I’ve seen a lot of other related content creators building their projects strong with Patreon. In this age where advertising is getting more annoying and less financially beneficial (one of my goals is to eventually cut banners if I can raise funding), its very difficult to make a living on content — especially for a niche topic like retro gaming.
About 10 months ago, I had a big career change and I spent a lot of my newfound time working on rebooting content and I invested a good amount of money and time to renovate the design and technicals of the website itself.
Even though I haven’t made much revenue in return yet, I looked at as an investment and hope that people will find value. I’ve found a new part-time job to help support my family, but it would be nice for Racketboy’s revenue to help a bit more. Amazon commissions used to help a bit more, but about a year ago, Amazon dropped their commissions on video games from 7% down to 1% — so what used to be a significant revenue source just chopped down big time.
Instead of resting on search traffic on old posts, I try to keep the most popular of the 1,000 guides updated both for content expansion and visual updates. Sometimes those take just as much work, if not more that original content. It's a labor of love, but it's nice to have some income from my work.
Anyway, thanks for reading and if you have any feedback for improving my Patreon page, I’d love to hear it.