I don’t make any money off this blog. At least, not directly. When I started many years ago, the primary way to make money was through ads, which are ugly and obtrusive and don’t make enough money to justify marring my “artistic expression”. So I didn’t do that.
Now, there are things like Patreon which allow readers to directly give back to creators. And those are great. People should be able to get paid for their work, even if it’s stuff like blogging for video games. But I’m still not interested in turning this blog into a (minor) moneymaker, for my own reasons.
Because I don’t get money from this blog, I can do whatever the hell I want. I can avoid topics I dislike (like stats and legendaries), and write about passions not many people share (learning theory, transmog), all because I’m not obligated to please a paying audience. I can fail to update or write anything for two months straight, and I’m not letting any potential customers down.
“You could do all that, and people would probably still subscribe through Patreon!” you might say. That that might be true, but for me it still feels like it would warp my selfish goals. If I have an audience that’s actually spending money out of appreciation for my stuff, I feel obligated to do something for them; to reward them for their patronage. A lot of people who subscribe on Patreon might have questions, and I probably should answer them, right?
I feel like if this were a job, it has to come with responsibility. If you’re being paid to do something, that includes doing the things someone else doesn’t want to do. And I don’t think I could make enough money through Patreon to convince me to write about boring things.
Now, indirectly I have made money off of this endeavor. Bigger sites like Wowhead pay for guides, though it’s usually just enough to cover my costs to play WoW. I wouldn’t have gotten those jobs if not for this blog. What’s probably a bigger, if more subtle, payoff is the marketable skills I’ve learned through this blog, like CSS, documentation, and learning how to answer frustrating questions in a nice way.
I’m pretty privileged to have a well paying job, and the skills I’ve learned from maintaining this blog actually contribute to my job, so that’s all the payment I need.