Internet Woes

It's been some time since my last blog post, not including the migrated and edited posted being imported from my newsletter. I felt like it was time to go ahead and update it with something more meaningful rather than general updates and other items no one cared about.

Previously On...

If you have been following me on here, my newsletter (no longer available), or on socials then you'd know I've been hopping from service to service for some time now. My goal for 2023 was to grow my audience on these platfrorms and try to convert that into sales for my art, music, and potentially freelance clients for my business, but as you may have guessed from the tone of this so far that may not have been the case. In 2012 my content was at an all-time-high where my bandcamp was reaching several hundred listeners every day and my YouTube channel that I ran with some friends as well as my own gained quite a lot of views. Since then my content on all platforms has getting very low views and interactions with people occasionally stumbling on my work in what seems mostly accidental.

Twitter Saga

At the begining of this year I re-visted Twitter (Now X) in hopes of getting people to look at what I've been doing to which garnered me a monthly average impression rate of over 100k. I admittidly payed for premium for about three months in order to see the ROI on the platform and here are the estimated results over the course of that time:

Music

While it might not seem like a lot, the earnings across all streaming sites has been pretty good despite the low returns. People streaming my music at minimum helped pay for one month of Twitter Premium which in turn helped me reach more people.

Donations

I recieved donations through Itch.io for my Gameboy Asset Pack which gained quite a large audience after I posted about it on Twitter and mentioned it in a few replies. Aside from that I also had a few very small donations via Crypto a la Solana. Overall not a bad return.

Crypto Content

This is usually the most polarizing subject however I really benefited from helping assist people in the Solana twitter space. I was a few large donations for helping develop some graphs and tools on the Dune dashboard client. This happened to be the most largest earning I made in those few months and it allowed me to reinvest and gain staked earning through Solana.

So was using Twitter a success? Did it help do what I had set out to do? Kinda, just not in the trajectory in which I had wanted initially, but that's okay.

Will I return to the platform and go back to paying for premium? Probably not, because while it I did gain more views on my content and gained revenue I didn't see that being consistant and honestly is hard having to update a platform when I work a 9-5 job and do freelance work.

Threads

I moved over to Threads when it launched thinking I could attract the 100M+ people that joined just within the first week but sadly I found out that it's timeline only promoted content from large accounts and people posting facebook-tier garbage like the 'Insert meme here' content. My reach on the platform, within the 3-week period I was on there and no matter the interaction stratagies that I've learned from twitter, I could never get >100 impressions on posts or replies.

My other grevience with the platform was the large amount of actually hateful content I was seeing on a daily basis. I don't care which was you swing on the political spectrum or whatever but calling for death threats for actual genocide for ethnic groups is absolutely horrific (I'll let you try and figure out what those groups might have been). Despite what people say about Twitter, no matter your leaning if you make a threat your post will be taken down if reported and accounts banned. However on Threads despite the reports and despite the it breaking ToS the posts aren't removed and often promoted. Other than the harmful posts, I was seeing general "the sky is falling" posts so often and it just got boring.

The platform not only lost more than 95% of it's supposed userbase it was unable to help me grow in any meaningful way so I decided to axe it.

Instagram Saga (ongoing)

I made the switch to Instagram about two months ago from the time of writing this post and it's been my primary social platform so far. To be completely honest I've seen the most

My Business

This year I closed down my business and have been rethinking my business strategy in hopes of actually recouping the losses of running said business. My business ran from 2017-2023 (quite a good run) and while it was a good run it was running at a loss YOY. While I had a few small clients - to which I still do some work for - I wan't getting enough work to "keep the lights on" as my pricing was wayyy too low in order to beat GoDaddy and the likes with hosting costs. My next blog post will cover more on my business and why it ultimately failed, but to make a long story short my customers were wanting $10k projects for a $10 budget (a bit exagerated but not inacurrate) and not willing to budge.

I'm currently in the process of redrafting some business proposals and looking for a business partner in order to make the next go at this an actual success like my 9-5.