Site Update: Patreon Tier Perk Changes Beginning in July

We wanted to give everyone a heads-up on an upcoming Patreon adjustment. Beginning July 1, we will be adjusting the perks available in each of our tiers.

What’s changed?

The main changes are that we’ve bumped the monthly recommendations up to the $3 tier and expanded the polls and feedback to more than just podcasts.

The new tiers will be as follows:

• $1/month:
  • Behind-the-scenes newsletters
  • Polls: Vote to help determine future site content and store products
• $3/month:
  • Bonus Recommendations: Monthly posts highlighting anime, manga, games, and more
  • Direct Feedback: Suggest topics and titles for AniFem discussion, provide input on future Patreon perks, request merch products, and so on (to be voted on by all patrons)
  • All $1 perks
• $5/month: 
  • Discord: Access to our AniFem private server
  • Bonus Podcasts: Monthly 30-minute audio and transcript
  • All $1 and $3 perks

We’re also considering offering yearly subscriptions with some additional perks or discounts included, but we’re still working out the details, so put a pin in that for the time being.

Why the changes?

Real talk, AniFam: our patron numbers have dipped again and the site costs more than we’re bringing in right now, even with the modest profits from the online store and the slight buffer from last summer’s mystery donor. We’re swiftly entering budget-cutting territory again, and we’d much prefer to not trim more content from the site than we already have.

The previous $3 perks weren’t attracting many new subscribers, and since recommendations/reviews are one of the biggest requests we get from readers, we’re hoping that bumping the staff picks to that level will encourage boosted subscriptions while still remaining affordable for our audience.

We understand this may come as a disappointment to some of our $1 tier patrons, and your frustration is valid. We really, truly appreciate all your support, and we struggled a lot over this decision because we didn’t want to take anything away from our current patrons.

However, we also need to be able to pay our staff and contributors fair wages for their work. It was a tough decision, but this option gives us the opportunity to break even again without having to cut any of our published content, so we’re going to try it out for a while and see how it goes.

What happens if you don’t start breaking even?

We’ll have to cut content again, unfortunately.

We’ll start by discontinuing the Patreon bonus content, since there’s no reason to keep the podcasts or recommendations if they’re not garnering enough interest to justify the costs to produce them. 

We’ll also need to discontinue the weekly Talk posts, at least temporarily.

At the same time, we’ll investigate what we can do to bring in new patrons while also looking into advertisers, sponsors, and other alternative revenue sources. It’s not ideal, but we can think of worse uses of corporate money than paying marginalized creators to put progressive content into the world. We’re hoping we’ll meet our goals and it won’t come to that, though.

What can I do to support AniFem?

• If you like what we do and want us to keep doing it, the best way to help is to become a patron or boost your subscription level. Unlike Netflix, we keep our rates low to make content as accessible as possible, plus we’re way less likely to cancel your favorite show or pay a comedian to tell bigoted jokes!
  Also keep in mind that you can select from our existing tiers or enter a custom payment ($2, $10, whatever works best for you), so if you want to boost your level to a specific amount that fits your budget, you can absolutely do so.
• We’re still accepting one-time donations on our Ko-Fi if you want to give a little more here and there but can’t commit to a monthly subscription. All proceeds go towards paying our staff and contributors for their hard work.
• Pick up some merch from the AniFem store and flaunt it like there’s no tomorrow—and if you’re on Twitter, tag us or use #shopanifem! While store profits are more for irregular expenses than day-to-day management (such as hosting fees, as-needed translations, or artist commissions), we can break the glass in case of emergency if our Patreon numbers don’t come up.
• If money is tight, we totally understand. You can also support the site by encouraging friends or followers to become patrons, sharing articles and podcasts on social media, leaving a rating for Chatty AF on iTunes or Google Podcasts, and generally letting folks know that Anime Feminist is a cool thing they should check out and support.

If you have any questions or concerns, let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them. Thanks as always for your understanding and support, AniFam, and we look forward to chatting with you both here and in the Patreon posts!