David R. MacIver's Blog: Aligning incentives

Aligning incentives

17 December 2016

As I mentioned in my recurring revenue goal post I now have a Patreon for supporting my blogging here. I’ve only got a couple supporters on it so far, but huge thanks to all of them!

The current rewards are mostly access to the Patreon feed where I have some additional commentary, post a few ideas for posts that I’ve not fully formed yet, etc.

But there’s also a tacit “if I make money from this I’ll blog more” promise that I thought might be worth turning into an explicit promise (I like systems. If you’re someone who would support me on Patreon this probably isn’t a surprise).

I already have a Beeminder goal for my blogging, committing to an average number of blog posts a week. It’s not actually what keeps me blogging most of the time - the rate it’s been on for ages is 1/week which is a very easy goal for me to achieve and I currently could fail to blog for 66 days without failing the goal as a result - but it’s there to keep me blogging even when life conspires against me doing so.

And it also makes a pretty good way of providing a system for my Patreon.

So here are the rules I’m going to be trying:

The rate on my Beeminder goal is 1 + (money I get from patreon each month) / 200 per week. This gets up to daily blogging if the Patreon somehow hits the ridiculous amount of $1200/month, but I’m not really anticipating that happening. I’ve correspondingly raised my Beeminder rate to 1.19/week now (note for those unfamiliar with Beeminder: Rate changes take a week to take effect)
Every time I go past a new $50/month boundary I’ll clear the safety buffer down to a week. e.g. if I get another $12/month from where I currently am then that 66 days worth of safety buffer goes bye.

(Side note: Depending on exactly what I post, this isn’t really a very good rate of “pay” for writing blog posts and might not even be minimum wage, so it’s best for me if I don’t think of it that way, hence thinking about this as an incentive scheme instead)

If I ever feel like the promised rate gets high enough that it’s started to impact post quality I’ll declare a cutoff and drop it back down and see if I can figure out a new way to reward patrons. I’m pretty confident that I’m nowhere near that though given that my actual weekly blogging rate is about 3 a week, which I’m not even 10% of the way towards reaching yet...

So, if you want more blogging, or even if you want the current amount of blogging to continue come what may, do consider supporting me on Patreon.