Disclosure: Millennium River is an independent website that uses hyperlinks. Some of these links are affiliate links. When you click and purchase a product(s) through these links, I may earn a commission on qualifying sales. This is done at no extra expense to you. You may also support this website via PayPal. Unless it is clearly stated, the content is not sponsored.
My Ko-fi Page
After completing my article on Nation Flex Day, I went ahead and created a Ko-fi page. What is Ko-fi? Ko-fi is a website that allows creators such as myself to receive money from fans for the work they do. As such, you will likely have many questions:
- Why Do I Need Your Money?
- What Happened To Your Services & Job Searching?
- Why Did You Choose Ko-fi over Patreon, PayPal, and Buy Me A Coffee?
- What Is The History Of Millennium Creek?
I will be answering these questions within this write-up.
Why Do I Need Your Money?
I would love to be able to work on Millennium Creek full-time, but I cannot. In fact, I do not make money from it at all. As you can tell from the wordpress.com domain in my website’s name, this website is not self-hosted. As a result, this means that I cannot use plug-ins or even place monetary advertisements on it. While this website has “passion” as part of the slogan, I would like to take that passion to the next level: make it my job. I want Millennium Creek to be more than just a “portfolio” and side thing. With enough steady support, I will be able to transfer this website to an independent host, and do much more.
What Happened To Your Services & Job Searching?
Both excellent questions. For those of you that have been following the blog since early 2018, you will know how that Millennium Creek has underwent a massive transformation. During the transition of going from an “eerie desert” to a “creek in the forest” I completed a portfolio project for various categories: Articles, blog posts, website critiques, copywriting (webpages), argumentative essays, and creative pieces. My sole purpose was to build a portfolio I could show to clients as proof of my capabilities. Once I felt that the portfolio had enough meat on the bones to prove my worth, I did lots of research. I researched things like contracts, invoicing, and other needed matters.
Change Of Heart
Once I felt that I had done enough research on that, I created my invoice template and then a contract page. This led to the official launch of my services on May 31, 2019. I was very nervous, yet excited about how the launch would go. Weeks and months later, nothing. Not a single e-mail, direct message or anything. It was at that point, where I changed my mind about freelancing my services. I need money now, and did not want to bother with the unreliable nature of freelancing. I also utterly refuse to severely undercut my rates and work as a cheap labourer getting paid 0.02 cents per word. Not only is that utmost degrading, but it also would not cover living expenses, especially for the amount of work involved in a lot of those cheap labour freelance jobs.
September 3rd Update
This change of heart is exactly what led to the September 3rd Update. During that update, my Services and FAQAT (Frequently Asked Questions And Terms) were updated to reflect that I am looking for full-time remote work, and no longer bothering with freelancing my services.
What About Your Affiliate Links?
I make virtually nothing from them. And because my website is not self-hosted, it makes it ineligible to insert JavaScript codes. Yes, I have Amazon, but their 3 sales within 180 days makes it extremely challenging for micro traffic websites to officially get into the program. Thus, my affiliate revenue is truly zero up to this point. This can change, but the change rests in your hands.
Why Did You Choose Ko-fi over Patreon, PayPal, and Buy Me A Coffee?
A really good question. At first, I was thinking about only Patreon. For PayPal, I was utterly turned off by all the chargeback horror stories done to content creators like Twitch streamers and similar. Therefore, I decided it was not worth the stress of making PayPal donors sign a no-chargeback agreement form. I believe that PayPal really needs to have a built-in no-chargeback system. This would prevent people from sending money to others for the fun of it, and then charging it back for the sake of trolling.
Seeing the immense success YouTubers, visual artists, musicians and other creatives had with Patreon, I though it was the only way to go. That is, until when I saw Ko-fi come up in the search engine. Ko-fi is a platform that I have never heard of until October 2019. Over the years, it has only been PayPal and Patreon that seemed like the patron places of the Internet. Not so. Upon further researching, Ko-fi turned out to be far more attractive than Patreon for the following reasons:
- No tiers. This means that you do not have to worry about coming up with impressive rewards for people paying more to support. While some do not mind doing this, it has proven to many others to be a time consuming business. In other words, Patreon can feel like a second job because of this.
- No platform fees, aside from their Gold plan which is just a small percentage cut they take directly from your earnings.
- They do not charge the people that pay to support creators
- The only “fee” creators pay on the free account is the PayPal processing fee, if it is the method the creator uses to pull the money into their bank account.
- Better user interface.
- There is a word that Patreon claims that they use, distribute, and multiply your content. Patreon themselves say creators own their work, but I have heard from other people saying the opposite.
This is not to say that Patreon is awful, but that it is just not the choice of creator support platform for me. As for Buy Me A Coffee (BMAC), creators started having issues (2019) with customer service being non-existent, when they wanted to withdraw money from the BMAC account into Stripe or PayPal. In addition to this, here is a quote from a creator from YouTube:
“IMPORTANT UPDATE: due to continued lack of support from Buy Me A Coffee, and due to a recent experience where people were testing stolen card numbers on my Buy Me A Coffee page and it was effecting my reputation with Stripe, I no longer use or recommend BMAC.” -Craylor Made
Have they since improved everything as of October 2019, the original time of this blog post? I have no idea, but I will certainly not be doing business with them.
Can I Make My Support Private?
Yes, here is a direct quote from Ko-fi:
“It is possible to hide your name and message from the creators public feed by choosing ‘Make message private’. If you choose this option only the creator will see your display name and the message you write (if you choose to leave a message).”
What Is The History Of Millennium Creek?
Rediscovering Its Purpose details this history of my website nicely. In summary, it was created back in 2016 as a backup of some sort. I did not have any plans to do anything special with it. Fast forward to 2018, I decided revive it and turn it into a website of professional, high quality write-ups.
Do I Have To Support Millennium Creek?
No, you absolutely do not have to support my website and plans. In fact, anybody reading this blog post thinking that this is weak, annoying, or desperate is advised to keep such commentary to themselves. I do moderate comment sections for spam, abuse, hate, illegal activities, and other wrongdoings. I said this before, but will say it again: transparency and honesty are vital parts of successful professionalism. Therefore, I am living up to my word by being honest and transparent with the financial state of Millennium Creek, how I would love to be able to make it my full-time passion, and how it would be nice to have the people who already appreciate my content, help to fund my passion. If you have taken the time to read this entirely, thank you. Keep this Creek flowing with life and passion. 💧
Millennium River 