Loni CB

Two weeks ago, I (accidentally) clicked into my Patreon analytics page and was kinda stunlocked by what I saw.

^{A quick note that "Patreon" on here means people coming from email updates, iOS/Android app notifications, or I assume just typing my patreon link and finding the post that way? Probably just the former 2.}

Surely that can't be right? Fourty-nine percent of clickthroughs to my Patreon content comes from Cohost? Twitter doesn't even rank anymore??

I had a split second of being truly stunned until I remembered: I stopped linking to my stuff on Twitter because, well, Twitter's dying, right? Dead website, nobody clicks links, you have to censor P*treon and c0mmission and all that stuff, right? After a second to regain clarity I was still, like, sorta shocked cuz like... my Patreon's doing fine! My numbers haven't spiked or dropped any significant amount, it's just been keepin' on at regularly good numbers because I've been doing regularly good stuff. At least, that was my thought.

Still, I was really curious. I wanted to see where all my traffic would come from if I linked in equal amounts everywhere that I post. So for the next two weeks, the period of time measured that Patreon forces me into for measuring traffic, I linked everything and checked in to see how things were doing. I'll outline the two-week "experiment" past the jump cuz it gets a bit long but before that, here's where my numbers are after two weeks.

Here's details about how it shook out this way:

1. WHERE I POST AND HOW

When I post new art, I post to Patreon, Cohost, Twitter, Pixiv, Fanbox, Tumblr, Instagram, and Bluesky.

I generally post on all sites at the same time sequentially and I don't post at any meaningful time of day. Usually it's around 10AM PST or 4PM PST because those times lineup with "I finished a thing the night before and I'm at my desk in the morning" or "I just finished a thing and I'll post it before I wind down for the day". For this two week period, I wanted to keep to my usual posting standards which meant not really minmaxing interactions or numbers by optimizing posting schedules and all of that. If I did, the numbers would look different, I don't doubt that. But I'm not a social media manager. I'm an artist and the part where I have to think about this stuff as a "business" makes me want to die so I think about it/interact with it as little as possible.

My strategy for these two weeks was this:

• Patreon, Cohost, Pixiv, Fanbox, Tumblr posts would be like I've always done. I post and that's it. For places like Patreon and Cohost, I check in on comments but I don't bump posts on these platforms because it's not how I use them. (Or, in Pixiv, Fanbox, and Patreon's case, you can't.)
• Instagram would get the post and a share of the post to my Stories to direct people to the HQ/Patreon link since saying "link in bio" is useless. Nobody clicks the link in bio.
• Twitter would get the post with a separate HQ/Patreon link in the replies, with a retweet of the original post either later that day or the next day depending. Only one, though, because I knew doing it ad-nauseam like I did previously would just favor Twitter by attrition. Or whatever the reverse of attrition is. I put the link in the replies not to dodge boogeyman speculation of link deprioritization or whatever but literally because art posts just do worse on Twitter if they have a link. It's ugly, it ruins the vibe of the post, and people ignore it as a result. People hate being sold shit on Twitter. A link makes your post look like an ad and, well, how do you feel about ads on your timeline? However, text posts would get the link in the post itself since that was its purpose. This only applied to poll/suggestion thread posts.
• Bluesky would get the posts, art and poll/thread, with the link in them. I wouldn't follow Twitter logic because people's idea of Bluesky is "Twitter before it went to shit" so I'm gonna treat it like that. I shouldn't have to game the system on there, right?

2. MY PRE-TESTING THOUGHTS

I knew that Twitter would probably see a sharp rise because it's only logical that if I stop linking somewhere, I will obviously not get traffic from there. Whether that amounted to any kind of meaningful increase or decrease in money or traffic, I don't know. But the number would go up and anticipated that, I just didn't know to what degree. Most curiously, I wanted to see where the rest would shake out. I didn't ever link on Instagram so this would be a good experiment to see if it was worth bothering to do that there. Instagram has always felt like TikTok to me where the platform hates it when you leave, but it also has a link sticker in the stories so like... it's worth trying?

I also really wanted to see where Bluesky would shake out. I've made no secret of my absolute hatred of the place but artists have flocked there with the hopes of regaining what was lost on Twitter, an attempt I didn't need this experiment to know will be in vain, but I at least wanted to see if there was at least some kinda traction you can get there. I got a decent following from Twitter migrants and my posts do some numbers.

The real data I wanted to get was to see what data looked like at the end when I proportionally applied general audience size to it. Some sites, like Cohost and my Patreon, have far less people than Twitter, where my follower size is its largest (109k), and Instagram, where its audience size is the largest (About 2 billion active users per month).

It's worth noting that this data is also incredibly, uh, subjective? There's a few asterisks here, namely that this is all relative to my existence audience size, the type of content I make, etc. If you were to replicate this on someone who's primary audience is on Tumblr then obviously this would shake out differently. For me, I primarily exist on Twitter but spend most of my time on Cohost. I also don't have more detailed info on where specifically people are coming from, which posts get the most traffic, etc. because Patreon doesn't share that data for some reason. The graph I've been posting is the only meaningful data they give me. It's kind of absurd.

3. COUPLE OF DAYS LATER

Well, that updated in the way I thought it would. It turns out that if you stop linking on a site where most of your audience is, they'll just stop showing up huh. Most of all, I was stunned to see the immediate increase in Instagram! My audience there is a little under 30k followers which isn't small by any means but 6% in about 3 days of time is a lot! It's not a site people use to "go to" other sites/places, so that's a pretty sizeable amount of people clicking through. Cool!

Another 4 days and the numbers are settling again where I thought they would, and I am still surprised by Instagram ranking. It's not a fluke, and that's nice! Bluesky is still not ranking and at this point I'm wondering if it even has a link referrer because the site is missing so many other core features that who knows, maybe that one's also on the ATproto to-do pile.

4. TWO WEEKS LATER

This is what numbers look like after two weeks. I can't test on any other period of time because Patreon doesn't let you which is prohibitively stupid but, yknow, what isn't with them.

So there's a bunch of stuff to mull on here and I'll just do it in bullet point form because it'll be easier.

• Pixiv and Fanbox do not rank here because they are a closed loop. Fanbox is Pixiv's Patreon equivalent and since Pixiv primarily reaches a Japanese audience, I direct them to Fanbox since they can use their banking system instead of (maybe) being able to use Patreon.
• Instagram basically stayed at a fixed 8-10% the entire time. While Instagram's total userbase is ridiculously high, Stories are basically only seen by your following audience so getting about 3000 people to routinely click whatever link I'm posting (that also expires in 24 hours!) is great.
• Well, Bluesky has a link referrer I guess! 1% is certainly a number. I'll give the site the credit it's due in that it has a fraction of Twitter's audience but I still managed to post enough clicks to rank here. That's not nothing. And at 3.5k followers I'd at least expect to get some traction! Bluesky also has 1.8 million users, though, which is roughly 11 times¹ the user count of...
• Cohost, which I'm surprised consistently topped the list. There are some days I didn't screencap the analytics page where Cohost and Twitter were basically neck-and-neck but it never dipped below Twitter, which was always solidly in 2nd place once I started linking things again.

5. MY THOUGHTS AFTER ALL THIS ARE

That I should be more consistently linking my shit LOL

My biggest takeaway is mostly confirming a thing I've felt on here and seen echoed by other creators which is that people on Cohost, like, actually really interact with/respond to the content posted on here. The site is intentionally designed to build your feed with stuff you genuinely care about because it's both difficult and not functional for it to be a content hose like Twitter or Instagram are. The site and its features will define the culture and Cohost has largely shaken out to be a place that while I don't think the reach is bigger than any other platform, the engagement is.

The biggest problem I have with going to "where the other people are going" re: Twitter panic migration to places like Hive, Threads, Misskey, and Bluesky is that "where people are going" doesn't also mean "where you need to be going" because More Users ≠ More Engagement. Microblogging sites like Twitter have pretty much always been shit for selling or promoting anything. It's not how people use the site. Power users (which is all that's left, basically) following thousands of accounts that are posting/retweeting constantly and anything you post has a shelf life of, at most, 40 minutes. The interaction you get on there is subject to so many factors that are out of your hands that it can feel like an unsolvable black box, one that easily creates speculative workarounds by people who luck into the right factors for success.

I, like a lot of other creators, found success on Twitter because we were lucky to be making things when the site was growing and we got to build alongside the site before its crash. There's no two ways around the reality that what we had with Twitter is irreplaceable. No website or platform will ever be Twitter ever again. No matter where you go you will have to rebuild and the result of that will be completely dependent on where you rebuild. Your results on rebuilding will just be entirely dependent on where you choose to do so. I'm personally not really interested in doing it with other already-crumbling empires.

6. THOUGHTS... 2!

I'm lacking more precise data to really scrutinize the results but I wanted to bulletpoint some other things I've interpreted off all this (and longer times being around all these platforms.)

• I think Cohost performs so well because the post rate is slower (meaning people have a better chance to catch up on posts at the end of the day or whatever) and features like the Following/Email View page ensure people see your stuff when they want to see it. The Following View in particular I suspect is responsible for some late-night spikes I saw in traffic counts. That stuff combined with the general site culture of actually, like, reading and interacting with posts makes it so friendly to promote things. It's freeing! I can just post once and forget about it and it'll still do well because people will see it and/or find a way to see it because the site is not trying to shove more stuff down my face.

• Tumblr is fucking useless dude. My follower count there is about 60% of what it is on Instagram but it never rated in traffic, not even once. I'll keep posting there because hey if one person clicks, yknow, but christ. Buncha non-clickers over there.

• Instagram is still a nightmare to use. Please stop forcing me into square drawings.

• Bluesky.... look. I think 1% is good given for how small it is compared to Twitter but it's undeniably rough for a site that's already rocketed past every other "new" social media site in active user counts. People are migrating there because it's currently less hostile than Twitter and I think people see normal-looking numbers (RTs/likes) and think it's blooming but, and I've said this a few times, to what end? Does 20, 60, 200 RTs matter if nobody clicks the thing that lets you do this for a living? Any site will work out in the end if you commit to it as your Primary Place of Posting (PPP™) but I'd at least encourage you to explore options that don't wear you down in the end, especially if you can look at the road ahead and already see it getting pretty rough. This has definitely motivated me to keep linking there but it's absolutely not changed my mind in not spending any time there.

• Patreon-specific traffic accounting for like 15-20% of clickthroughs is... lower than I'd expect, I guess? Means a lot of folks stopped clicking those emails or turned them off. Which is fair. I also did for a bunch of people I support. Idk. Expected this to be higher.

• So my traffic numbers shifted around but how did that shake out for, like, making money? Well, in that two week period I'm +11 on new and active Patrons, accounting for the ones I've also lost as we crossed over into a new month and some folks (predictably) opted not to renew. It's not a huge increase but it's a good uptick. My Patreon has been pretty stable for years, I'm probably in the ballpark that it will stay at for the foreseeable future, so any kind of climb like that is good!

7. CONCLUSION

bro idk just do whatever feels right for you, i'm not your mom. but for once, i do have data to support my belief that you should probably go where people will actually give a shit about your work instead of just briefly chewing it in the content mulch. ultimately, the belief i've had with twitter for years and years is that whatever clicks you were going to get at that time, no matter the site, is the clicks you were always going to get. There's almost never anything you can do to cheat the system and Get More Views other than literally manipulating people into doing so using language or imagery to entice them. This was told to me many times by people who did social media stuff for a living and it almost always bore out.

8. CITES AND STUFF