erica

talk account

freelance illustrator, designer, and idk buncha stuff

@kuraine's wife

avatar by karu

ascari
Last.FM Recently Played



cohost accounts for half of the traffic to my patreon posts now lmao

listen i can't tell you that this is like, solid data it's extremely circumstantial to the type of artist i am, the exisiting audience i have, etc etc but like... 49% is pretty nuts! functionally half of traffic to my posts, meaning people either looking to get updates or sign up, are from here

i will also add the caveat that i don't add links to my posts on twitter, not because they get deprioritized but because people will see a link and immediately ignore whatever the post is about it's how twitter has trained its users over time. art posts with links do worse because the link makes the post look ugly. so there's potentially a chunk of traffic missing here. i'm gonna try linking a bit and see how this ends up changing but yeah.

thought it'd be worth sharing!

edit: to clarify the 3rd paragraph a bit, there is definitely data that's "missing" from twitter since i don't actively link there like i do on cohost but my patreon is also doing ok! my numbers are stable and i get new sign-ups here and there that make up for people who leave for whatever reason. that's kind of the thing that's got me feeling pretty ok is that whatever i lost there by sheer volume of views, i've seemingly made up here by people who actually care to see the stuff i'm posting.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @erica's post:

The important caveat there was that I haven't been linking much on Twitter apart from specific posts. The numbers have since changed but still overwhelmingly in Cohost's favor. I'm gonna test it out for the next 2 weeks to get a fuller sample but idk. So far it sure lines up with the general vibe of linking things here which is that people actually read and click your shit.

i've found that the people willing to actively use cohost are also the people who want most to actively participate in the media they enjoy (supporting it, buying it, sharing it, etc) rather than just consuming it. it is very much the "find your audience" website. i get more active support through cohost than i did on twitter with 1/10th of the followers

Wait this is actually kind of nuts! Having a near majority coming from Cohost is incredibly significant!
I'd even say that a pretty large pre-established audience on other platforms makes this number even more impressive considering that you didn't really build most of your audience here! (I'm pretty sure at least)
Sure it's not 100% proof of anything, but it is indicative of a larger whole potentially!

I think it's mostly indicative that people here are here to actually support and enjoy the content that's produced by its users like... the way the site is structured discourages ballooning your feed with posts. The stuff that is on your feed is going to be stuff you explicitly sought out which makes it far more likely you're gonna click a link/support the person. That's definitely the vibe I got early on so I'm glad that's actually how it manifests with outside data!

But again, there's an asterisk here in that I do think I have some unique factors about like, existing audience and stuff. I can't say that this would look the same for someone who has a less widespread audience or has a different kind of following on other platforms. I'd imagine someone with 100k followers on Tumblr or something might drive more traffic than here just by sheer volume but I don't know for sure.

True, often the problem with statistics that involve individual human action without proper surveys is that it's almost entirely guess work, at most you can point to trends but they don't actually have any statistical meaning.
For now though, I'd like to believe that this site's very much capable of producing a more active audience 😌

It's easier for me to follow creators on cohost since it does the simple job of showing me posts from people I follow and what they share compared to twitter wanting me to show posts from people I follow, posts liked by people I follow, posts retweeted by people I follow, maybe you just want to follow this random person followed by one of your mutuals, oh and here are a shit ton of ADs to put between all of it even though you blocked every brand on the site.