How did KamasdevaSFM lose 500 Patreon supporters?

 

KamadevaSFM and I had a long discussion about a week or two ago about our future as artist in an ever changing industry where things can happen at any given moment. We didn't see the AI tidal wave coming, most artist who haven't sold out to the AI trend weren't prepared either. At least for those that decided to remain true to themselves vs going in the other direction. Kamadeva explained to me how sometimes he have to deal with difficult supporters. The pressure left in him in a complicated situation where he was left with the decision to continue taking his time vs moving at a fast speed to complete his assignments.

SteveCarson had a similar situation where some of his patreons may have not been very happy with his direction and so he was caught in between deciding if whether or not he should just quit or keep doing what he does. Kamas on the other hand explained that his problem is people that are impatient with how content gets made. 

That's because some of his unhappy supporters were putting a whole lot of pressure on him to create something almost every week and month. When he was unable to achieve this feat, they would stop supporting him or complain. I thought he had a lot more followers than a few because of how much effort he puts into his projects, but sometimes that doesn't too much matter if you have a few supporters that are hard to please and then they decide to just walk out on you.  

So far there are only 500 supporters backing him on Patreon which is hardly enough to rely on and I was actually quite shocked by it. He then explained to me how he's become rather tired of trying to overwork himself for people who aren't satisfied with anything he does, and the pressure just makes him loose so much energy in creating anything at all.

Part of the reason why I don't even have a patreon is trying to keep people happy. And life is just getting a lot more crappier, harder, and the standard of living
is decreasing for practically everyone that cant keep up with the constant changes.

When he works and creates he talked about the taxes kicking his ass and that more you make the more you pay in taxes. Is creating art even worth it at this point?  And then somehow he was like "I feel like this whole life is just a scam for us. But it's even worse for people like DesireSFM that gets 40 percent of their profit taken from them in taxes." I'm starting to understand now why he doesn't like to work as hard anymore or as quickly as people expect him to. No one sensible likes paying fucking taxes especially when it makes it harder to pay your damn bills and that's what Kama is struggling with right now, keeping his bills paid, both of these gentlemen are living in the crumbling Western Europe....In a high ass taxed nation that puts a severe strain on people that make a certain amount of money.

 I tend to take frequent breaks between projects because I know that it's hard to create new content every week and I'm getting into the habit where I just don't even want to make anything at all anymore when feedback is dead. People aren't as communicative or social within the art community. 

 The hard workers will spend months even a year producing something before they choose to release it as sold content. KamadevaSFM doesn't do short second animations either which is something those who quit on him failed to understand. I remember him explaining to me how he wanted some of his ideas to catch on, but when his Metal Gear Solid project failed to attract the attention he wanted it to attract he was very disappointed and dropped it. And he's a very big MGS fan. Another issue is that he was doing very well in 2019 but somewhere along the 2020s he experienced a dramatic change in the number of followers he was getting and how much support was coming in. It gave me plenty to think about because I know for a fact that if my current projects fail that's it, I'm done with graphic novels forever.

I try to advertise for KamasdevaSFM to help him whenever he gives me a new animated image and he's like "here you can use this for your blog or something." And then I take the image, post it up on Pixiv or something and hope people show interest since I don't too much care about promoting myself for money anymore. I feel like people are going to either enjoy my art and back me up on it or they will just overlook me and go elsewhere. But I'm over putting a lot of stress and pressure on myself, that's why I gamble on my own ideas vs doing something trendy. I don't do trendy crap I stay away from it.

 I have over 12,000 followers on Pixiv but I fair poorly on other platforms because my ideas are constantly rejected by the pansy ass moderators that won't even give me a chance to grow and gain followers outside of Pixiv. The worse thing is only having a lot of support on one platform vs expanding further out and having supporters on more than one platform. I'm not willing to change so I just accept my short comings and focus on trying to do other things when I'm not in the mood to create anything. KamadevaSFM and I always share our views about things, we talk about art, and the complicated environment we both live in which is creating this barrier. And sometimes we talk about health related matters. 

I then told him that we have to be vigilante because it's the only thing we can do for now. The art world keeps changing and some of us refuse to do what everyone else is doing just to stay afloat. If it gets so bad that we have no choice but to just sell out and do whatever is trendy or earning the most profit, we would be better off dead in the grave someplace because I don't rush through my work just to please people. If I have to rush through my work or sell out to trendy fetishes to get anywhere it's just not worth it...There is no point in creating for the sake of doing it or rushing your work just to end up with garbage results because people refuse to give you time to develop something.

 Animapron is one of those examples that would produce content, and he would take up to 4-5 years just to finish something and he would still take home a sizable amount of income.  People would still attack him and accuse him of all sorts of things. No matter what he still pulled in those large numbers and the only thing he ever did were the same old animations involving Quiet, a faceless woman and a Horse. And people have even accused him of having multiple accounts so people were just paying double on both subscribstar and patreon for the same thing multiple times doubling his income.

Kama understands the battle requires sacrifices some sacrifices neither of us want to make and I can tell that he has a lot of doubts even for someone with all the experience that he has. There is a lot going on inside his head and the creative world he tries to create with his moving pictures. I have battled and fought my own insecurities about the world around me, dealing with struggle all the time, and feeling like I'm not getting anywhere artistically or just having those days where I want to say "forget it, I give up I don't want to do this anymore." 

I usually don't want to create if I know something won't generate enough income because I don't have access to twitter where most people gained a vast majority of their followers. All I've got is baraag, Pixiv, a few supporters from Renderhub, people are starting to follow me on Picarto now but at a much slower pace. I was kicking ass on Slushe.com until they harassed me about my content, forcing me off the platform. Because of all the discrimination I kept facing I could never build up a large enough empire, instead my largest support base is from Pixiv. If I lost Pixiv, I lose everything and because of their new policy change, it's easier than ever to get kicked off Pixiv.

So I know where he was coming from when he was telling me about the downsides of losing all his patreons and people just being downright impatient with him for not working fast enough. He's the kind of person that would make you worried but we both deal with disappointment differently. In my case I usually just abuse sleeping medication or anti-depressants and then I end up making poor decisions when I'm under the influence of medication drugs that are suppose to be helping me deal with my problems.

I don't know if Kama believes that he have a legacy to uphold or to protect. We always talk about his approach to creating content that has a cinematic method behind it because he really wants to be known for his story driven material and demonstrates it every time he shows me a new animation that I'm suppose to promote.

So he always pushes himself to show the viewers that he's not some run of the mill artist that wants to be overlooked. That's the one thing that bothers him the most just as much as it normally bothers me is feeling overlooked and then assuming that I'm not working hard enough. No one wants to work so damn hard and STILL come up short. 

And then we were discussing Onlyfans and how they tend to generate a lot more income than artist do. So people are paying them more than they are paying artist. Even when they get their stuff pirated, you have Onlyfans users bringing in real money while artist actually have to do real work to earn anything.

From what I've heard some of those women take home 40,000 a month or more if they are really famous and it's just crazy. You have a small percentage that will manage to earn close to 1,000,000 a year and so far I don't know of a single artist making that kind of money no matter how hard they work. One of  those OF chicks got on youtube and bragged about how she made one million within 4 months.  They have all these fans from different countries paying for their stuff too.

But K and I we went over that stress is a hindrance to an artist success. At the same time it also comes with the territory. The more support you have, the more work you have to do. There is also that realization of having to just deal with the losses and accepting that it's impossible to please and keep everyone happy. Once an artist starts losing too many supporters it's obvious at that point they may start to accept that it's time to quit and give up.

There are a lot of personal battles we both endure which is why we always share our stories together, the challenges we face and struggle with. I told him that his work is good and it's been improving but never sell out just to keep from losing followers. Selling out is worse than your supporters quitting on you...It's one thing if a man is about to lose his house, or have kids to take care of and just don't have any choice but to take drastic measures to survive. People will do whatever it takes for survival reasons. Desperation, panic, and fear are the worse feelings.

But we don't have to fall into that adapt to the trends or fail routine. We stay true to ourselves and replace those who don't want to support us anymore just like they chose to stop supporting us. You can have about 40,000 fans, but if you lose 800 of those fans or even 1000 supporters. Over time you'll be able to replace them if you can come up with a way to attract new viewers that want to support you. 

It's impossible to keep people from leaving no matter what you do, you're going to lose them anyway. You have to gain as many supporters as possible, but for 500 of them to just get up and walk away like that because you aren't working fast enough....It's tragic. That's the kind of thing that can persuade a person to lose confidence and I wouldn't blame them if they decided to not create at all anymore.