August 2016 Earnings (Patreon)

Last month I gave this on the 1st, but I decided to give this one a day for more people to cash their declined payments in properly.

Original Projections

• Originally Number of Patrons: 2490 Supporters
  
• Original Pledge Amount: $10,314.40
  
• Original Projected Earnings: $9,231.39 (~ish, we tend to have 10.5% of our pledges shaved off to processing fees and patreon's cut)
  

We can't show more than this right now, because some of our statistics are not showing up for the month of August yet, I have no idea why they did for our July pledges immediately and our August pledges are still going through? But I'll keep you guys posted on this.

What I can tell you is the alterations in our pledge base and how we've grown and changed over the last month versus how we grew in the first month. It is likely that this is how we'll be displaying the numbers form now on, given that a lot of the time we remake a good chunk of our losses from the previous month in terms of people returning with their declined payments later on. So you won't see how well we did out of the previous month until the end of the current month. Sorry about that, but we can only really show you what Patreon itself lets us see.

July Growth

• New Pledges: $7,051.51 / 1618 Patrons
• Increased Pledges: $0 / 0 Patrons
• Deleted Pledges: $0 / 0 Patrons
• Decreased Pledges: $0 / 0 Patrons
• Total Change: +$7,051.51 / +1618 Patrons
• Amount Pledged at End of Month: $7,051.51 / 1618 Patrons
• What We Earned / Total Processed: $6,153.33 / $6,863.51 (89.65%)

August Growth

• New Pledges: $3,988.90 / 1088 Patrons
  
• Increased Pledges: $322.00 / 44 Patrons
• Deleted Pledges: $701.01 / 166 Patrons
• Decreased Pledges: $170.00 / 17 Patrons
• Total Change: +$3,439.89 / +922 Patrons
• Amount Pledged at End of Month: $10,491.40 / 2540 Patrons
• What We Earned / Total Processed: $8,410.59 / $9,410.00 (89.38%) (this is a 'so far' number, it will likely increase incrementally over the course of the month)
  

As you can see, we're doing pretty freaking good!

That said, I've been very carefully going through the list of patrons in our records, including everyone who has ever pledged at all. Starting at the end of this month, anybody on that list will at best get warning, and at worst,  be blocked from our system. We can very easily track, thanks to the metrics that Patreon gives us, the people who are duck and covering to avoid paying for content, and the people who seem to always decline payment to us yet still keep appearing on our billing list despite never having given us any money. Those are the types of people who will be targeted by the list. Thankfully, while the Patreon metrics might not give us a 100% rate of finding such folks, they do enable us to avoid any possibility of a false positive. If you were declined once or twice, or even if you've ended up having a declined payment every time at the start of the past few months, but ended up paying us in the end, you won't make it onto this list of suspicious patrons.

As time goes on we'll see about increasing the level of transparency on the project. I hope to include the list of wages paid to everyone, along with their total working hour totals each month, so it can be understood how our money is being spent.