videogames is one word

good writeup! useful info

This was an interesting little experiment and bit of data collection.

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.

webdev nerd chiming in - patreon is almost certainly getting that data from the Referer header in requests to patreon. websites like twitter and whatever can control what specifically gets put in there, but i took a quick check and most places are just leaving the browser default setting, which is to send only the origin (ie. the domain name and protocol, like https://twitter.com), and not the rest of the url (bit of a simplification, more detail here if you want). so the reason patreon isn't surfacing traffic per post is likely just because it doesn't get that information.

if you do want that info - does patreon support UTM parameters in it's analytics platform? could be a viable option if they do, just chuck the parameters in the links to patreon you post. otherwise, that might just be data you can't get, unfortunately.

cohost to me is the embodiment of "don't try to find the biggest audience; try to find your audience". users here wont 1. be here or 2. follow you unless they really care about your stuff. i've found, at least

Just gonna say I’m a bit envious since I’ve tried to get a documentary (on Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, which i spent most of 2022 on) shared around like crazy here and elsewhere all year and it just flops like a fish, each and every time i share it. So for video content I don’t think Cohost or the community is that friendly to that kind of content

Some of my writing content has done OKish if I link it here however, but I notice people who get more stuff seen are usually those who end up getting lucky with a tag that works and is picked up by those browsing it (which for me is tough to find most of the time for certain niche subjects) or have a lot of followers (and can get away with tagging mistakes)

Generally i notice my content does better via Opencritic more than here, but with me abandoning my twitter, even my occasional shares here outpaces Twitter easily. I’m hoping the site makes it easier to discover content creators soon rather than just through the shoddy tag system

This is really neat to see, really impressive work.
I'm not gonna name names but an artist I followed for a while announced a bit ago that they were leaving twit for good and moving to bsky so I mentioned to them that I would love to see them on cohost more and they responded with something like (I don't have the exact words because they seem to have fully deleted their twitter so the post is gone) "cohost is a joke, i'm here to run my business not to have fun" and I think it just sucks that for various reasons people don't see it as a viable platform.

really cool to hear how good cohost is for everything.

my one note is that I think tracking analytics like this are broken for tumblr. it's my main audience by several thousands and despite getting lots of notes and comments on posts linking to my comic, my site's host and itch's referral stats don't show it.

For someone who doesn't like to do this kind of thing, you did the thing remarkably well! And I'm saying this as someone who's been educated in how to do good tests/experience + collect and interpret data and does this in part for a living. Obviously your mileage may vary, but, that's honestly just the way it goes. Framing the data in context is always crucial and your writeup was more mindful of that than most dry-ass science papers I've read that really suck at telling a story, acknowledging limitations, or making readers care (or some combination of the three).

Besides, all of the data driven recommendations in the world will never be more important than "do you actually want to do the thing for reasons other than big number go up". I'm willing to bet that the folks who badgered you about doing x, y, or z probably forget this a lot.

Thanks so much for writing this up! Caveats aside, it's good to see some data that seems to affirm some of the stuff Cohost is proving to be good for.

It's not all the way there yet in terms of discovery, but it's more than just a place to be when you don't care about discovery.

so incredibly relieved for the addendum bringing up tiktok. everyone has insisted that it's the place to be for music, but it has only ever appeared to be a pure black hole for content or relevance and just such a massive waste of time and i thought i was just crazy

i do think the technical side of things also helps or hurts adoption of certain kinds of creative work. bluesky offers no audio or video or embed support so it blows unless you're posting artwork which is the bulk of the posts i ever see on there. i just don't have a whole lot of faith that it will maintain its current community once they start opening up on a wider scale

thank you for posting honest numbers and your detailed evaluation and observations. it's hard to extrapolate a lot of things from Numbers, but you've managed to gleam some useful insights!

I follow a lot of artists on Patreon, and my primary way of interacting with their work is that the Patreon app and Gmail will send me push notifications, I'll go retweet the art if it's posted there, and then like a freak I go log on to my computer to visit the post by clicking through the email link so I can see it on a bigger screen. I guess that would put me in the "Patreon" group lmao.

Love this post! Thanks for laying it all out. I've been feeling bleakly pessimistic about illustration as a career because of all the nonsense going on with tech and social media lately.

I think write-ups like this help give hope! It definitely seems like artists need to pick their strategy and drill down on it.

Some questions I thought of...

1. How much does Pixiv/Fanbox contribute to your livelihood would you say?

2. I feel like people all act like TikTok is the place "with the huge audience" but I'm curious if you've heard of any artist having success with clickthrough rates on there. I hate the idea of artists having to jump through tiktok hoops by appearing on camera or doing timelapse videos.

Super interesting stuff! I feel like the numbers demonstrate some great things about cohost.

When it comes Patreon email clickthroughs, I usually just see the email and then navigate to the app/website instead of opening the email and clicking through there. Maybe that’s just a me thing, but if not, it might partially explain the lower-than-expected Patreon traffic?

Thank you for your hard work

This is interesting stuff! Thanks for the work you put into this!

This is such a good write up- thank you for this! Also I have an extremely stupid question: how the hell are you finding this analytics info? This is something I’ve literally emailed Patreon about adding and they never told me it actually existed already. 🙃

Love reading this sort of marketing testing experimentation! Love the work you put into this and greatly appreciate you for sharing in such caring detail. 😌

If I may ask (hope it isn't rude to do so) are you thinking of returning on Twitter, given how much it shows in the statistics during the experiment?

Just wanted to say thanks for doing all the legwork and getting all that data! Some part of me wonders how much tagging on patreon/co-host affects things, but I doubt there's any way to really find those analytics. (I just assume no one uses hashtags on Twitter at this point lol)

everything in this post is super helpful, thank you for writing it!

I know that when it comes to Patreon email links, I don't have Patreon logged in on my phone, so if I'm out of the house & check my email & see one from someone, once I get home, I'll go straight to their page to see the post in full on my home computer. So yeah, I'm often visiting without going through the email links, even if do use those emails as notifications.

This is really helpful insight, thanks for sharing this! I've been running my Patreon for a little over a year now and I didn't even think about whether Patreon had these features hiding in the analytics page until you mentioned it. My page has been mostly focused on nsfw stuff so it very likely differs in engagement (over 70% of my traffic is coming from patreon itself with the rest listed as a nebulous "other"), but cohost still played what I felt was a big part in helping me find my footing early on, so it's nice to see more data backing up my personal estimates.

really interesting data, thanks for sharing!!

This write up is awesome! Was the push I think I needed to try dedicating a little bit more brainpower into using and building my cohost page!

When sharing the link in your replies on twitter instead of the main post, did you notice any deboosting regardless? It's something I've avoided altogether out of fear of the posts doing badly ;3;

One thing I feel the need to point out is that, the way Patreon tracks the traffic and where it comes from... doesn't quite work with Tumblr. Cause tumblr just sends you through to the link instead of trying to note that it comes from tumblr. I have seen that kind of stuff with various friends and friends-of-friends that use tumblr as their primary platform and somehow had like 70% "Other" and 30% twitter (paraphrasing) on their analytics. So it's not impossible that the 34% "Other" might be coming from your tumblr.