TLDR: As officially announced on today's show, The Non-Toxic Fanboys is now on Patreon. In exchange for your generous support we offer early access to new episodes, varying levels of influence on the topics of future episodes, and an exclusive behind-the-scenes podcast. All the details can be found at patreon.com/nontoxicfanboys. There are already two episodes of our behind-the-scenes podcast up there, there's a poll running on what we should cover in our next episode after the Oscar Preview, and patrons could have listened to today's episode a week ago. If any of that interests you, then check out patreon.com/nontoxicfanboys and see what's available.
ETA: The details of our reward tiers have changed since this post originally went live. Please don't make any financial decisions based on out-of-date information; check our Patreon page for the current reward descriptions.
We originally registered on Patreon as part of Scott's cyber-squatting spree to claim the name nontoxicfanboys on every site we could. But at some point we decided, there's no reason to not open it up to potential patrons. We put some careful thought into what "perks" we could offer; we didn't want to promise anything that we might not be able to deliver. The episode polls seemed like an obvious option; the worst that might happen is if the end of the poll leaves us too little time to cover the topic that wins and we have to put it off until the next episode. Early access also felt obvious; it's very rarely that one of our episodes is time-sensitive, so posting stuff a week early for patrons is simple to arrange. And topic requests are almost a perk for us, letting us know exactly what people are interested in hearing from us about.
The place where we really had to stop and consider was the idea of exclusive content. We're really not popular enough that we could ask for money and not offer something, but what exactly was a bit of a stumbling block. There are a lot of podcasts that essentially double themselves, doing two episodes at a time and making one of them exclusive to the Patreon. We didn't want to do anything like that. We never want to be in a place where we're saying things like "Here's our review of Star Trek: Picard, and if you want to hear what we thought of Lower Decks then you have to pay us!" In our conception Patreon is about rewarding people who choose to support us, not about putting a paywall between us and our listeners. Less like an HBO subscription, more like a PBS pledge drive. Plus it'd be essentially double the work every month, and we already don't have a great track record of consistent releases. :)
Eventually, Scott got the idea of behind-the-scenes content from seeing the Patreon offerings of several Youtube channels he was watching. They often offer BTS stuff like studio tours, interviews with folks not usually on camera, teases of stuff they're working on or stories about ideas that didn't work out, etc. We obviously don't have a studio, and the "crew" is just the two of us, but that other stuff all seemed like stuff we could do. So that's why we offer a behind-the-scenes podcast: It involves no extra prep work so there's no reason why we wouldn't be able to get it out every month, and it keeps all of our regular episodes free for all listeners. In our first Patreon show we discuss our listening strategy for 2020 scores, talk about one score that got cut because it turned out to not be from 2020, and Glenn comes up with a name for the Patreon show, live on the Patreon show. You can't get more behind-the-scenes than that!
(We don't mean to speak badly of anyone who does do extra episodes exclusively on Patreon, BTW. Everyone has their own strategies and their own lines in the sand. This one just felt right to us.)
So that's the story of how two guys who barely broke double-digit listens with their last episode wound up with a Patreon. Again, that's patreon.com/nontoxicfanboys if you're interested in contributing. Thank you for your consideration.
