ADVICE TO CREATORS: How to get More Tips!

[LordVincent]

This is wonderful, thank you. I hate to make you write even more after such a long post but what's a good minimum tier? Like the lowest amount of coins you'd start giving rewards for?

In order to answer this question, we need to keep low tippers in mind as a reference point:

Low tippers are people who do get ads, but only very few. Low tippers are not people who don't get ads at all or people who don't want to put in the time to earn coins. These people, btw, might complain at any service or reward you offer for coins. This is something you will have to expect as an online creator trying to cross the bridge from free to paid content, no matter the percentage of your content that will still be available for free. Some people will complain and believe they are entitled to free entertainment, or they are frustrated with their unfortunate position when it comes to ad serve/economy and they take that out on you.

Regardless, those people are not your target with the low rewards. Do not make rewards with the value 0-300 coins in attempt to satisfy them because on one hand they are still going to complain, and secondly you are rewarding bad consumer behavior. By rewarding bad consumer behavior, you teach your customers that you're someone they can hassle for a lower price. That's a pain you'll want to avoid.

So who is your target with low tip rewards? People who get 2-5 ads a day are! This is the situation many people with low ad serve find themselves in.

Assuming one ad gives you 10 coins, this means they are able to earn 20-50 coins a day, which adds up to 600-1500 coins a month.

Your lowest reward should therefore preferrably be in the 500-999 range. Maybe 400-999 for a very small creator since your content can classify according to the old business term "in low demand".
Try to avoid going for less than 400 because it will make coins worth less in the eyes of the consumer (something the site at large is already struggling with) and it will barely be worth the time you put in to answer the person that tipped you.
400=$0.32. Do you really wanna sell anything that's not an automated service for less than this?
Think in work hours. You should charge at least $10 an hour. That's $0.16 per minute. It takes 1-2 minutes to check a tip and respond once you've got the habit worked in.

Conclusion: If you set less than 400 coins for a reward, you may as well not set the reward and go work an extra hour at McDonald's instead.

[TheThoughtfulBoxful]

Question:
What would be the point of support sites like patreon if creators basically turn the tipping system into a sort of mini-patreon, with teirs/rewards/etc. ?

[LordVincent]

Question:What would be the point of support sites like patreon if creators basically turn the tipping system into a sort of mini-patreon, with teirs/rewards/etc. ?

Good question, and it's a risk I took when first testing out the systems. But against initial expectation, I did not lose patrons while the reward systems were going on. Quite opposite, it brought more attention to my patreon's existence and I got MORE PATRONS.

My theory as to why this is the case:
People WANT to support their favorite artists, but not everyone can. For some, it's a matter of not having the money. For some, coins take too much time. Tipping reward systems allow you to engage further with your audience, thank those who support you with coins, and it generally makes people view you in a more down-to-earth light.

Some of my tippers have moved over to patreon and pledged more than any reward tier available simply because they realize the patreon exists and they want to support the content they enjoy. Some people see the tip rewards, go "that's awesome, but I don't have time to watch ads because I have a job." Then they see the patreon, and realize they can get those awesome things without having to spend time earning the coins.

Basically, patreon appeals to people who are in their twenties and above and have a stable income.
The tipping reward system appeals more to students and younger parts of your audience, or older ones who have low income because they aren't offered enough work hours at their job.

Both of these groups want your stuff. Why would you limit yourself to only reaching out to one of them, when you can reach out to both and create larger satisfaction in your audience at large AND earn better revenue so you can spend more time creating the comics they love?

[UbePie]

Thank you for sharing your insight. If i may ask a more technical question.

In the example of your tiers and how they are given out you say you put them in an album that you delete every month.
How does that work? What website do you use to make the album? I assume the album is private and you can only gey access with a direct link, so I didn’t know what website would do that. I am use to photobucket. Or DeviantArt which is all public albums.

[LordVincent]

In the example of your tiers and how they are given out you say you put them in an album that you delete every month.How does that work? What website do you use to make the album? I assume the album is private and you can only gey access with a direct link, so I didn’t know what website would do that. I am use to photobucket. Or DeviantArt which is all public albums.

I use imgur, set the albums to private.This is for my early access rewards.
Everytime the comic updates, I delete the page that just left early access and went free access from the album, and add a new page at the end of the album.

So let's say we've got chapter 16, and I just released page Chapter 16 page 1 to tapas for free reading.
The 20 page early access album then has Chapter 16 Page 1-21. I adjust (delete and add pages) so that it's Chapter 16 Page 2-22. Maintain everytime there is a new comic update.

Every new month, I delete the albums and make new ones. If you keep old links, even though you don't update them, you run the risk of people mass sharing them to the point that parts of the early access practically becomes free reading, but in a weird "pirated" form.

If you use imgur, keep in mind that when you make a new album you'll need to refresh after uploading all images to the album and then manually rearrange images. Imgur has a tendency to just sort them "randomly" (most likely in the order that the images finished uploading). You won't have to do this when maintaining the albums for the rest of the month, though.

[Wumbl]

Might do this since I'm coming to the end of a chapter and will be doing Q+As and stuff. I'll have to come up with some rewards though!

[Rhombik]

Thank you, all this makes sense.

It's good because I'm also skint so being able to watch ads to tip others is very handy.

[LordVincent]

It's good because I'm also skint so being able to watch ads to tip others is very handy.

Yeah, this is the main reason the tipping feature is so useful! Especially since people like this make up such a large portion of the site!

I'll have to come up with some rewards though!

Look around at the types of rewards and services creators similar to yourself offer and take inspiration from that. Looking at other business areas you understand well helps too if you can transform their ideas into one that works for the creative field! Oh, and don't worry too much about getting it perfect on your first try, because that's not very likely to happen. Play around with it, explore, remove badly performing or hard-to-manage rewards as you notice their flaws and add new as you get new ideas!

[NanettesClouds]

Would it be a good idea to have some rewards as tip/Patreon exclusives? So having different rewards for different platforms?

[LordVincent]

Would it be a good idea to have some rewards as tip/Patreon exclusives? So having different rewards for different platforms?

I do suggest having Patreon Exclusives since people generally prefer the idea of exclusive content if they're about to pay for something, so that's likely to attract people to your patreon regardless of if you have a tip reward system or not.

That being said, if you have exclusive content that you don't have on patreon but sell through another platform (lulu, gumroad, or maybe amazon unless you're in the program that requires you to be amazon exclusive) then you can offer those with a calculated coin "price" equivalent as tip rewards.

You can of course offer content that is tip reward exclusive too but it can take a lot of work. Keep in mind when creating rewards that they should be easy to maintain in a proffessional manner!

[bilvyy]

i'm sorry if it's been laid out here already, i might have skipped over something by accident, but the biggest thing that confuses me about tipping reward systems is keeping track of everyones tips, and who has tipped what, when. how do you tell when someone has tipped x coins in one go, when tapas only shows you the total amount they've tipped? i have people who have given tens of thousands over the lifetime of my comics, so i don't know how i would keep track of which tips are new and which ones are old. the only thing that i could think of would be to make a spread sheet with the hundreds of individual tippers and keep checking the tip list and updating their amount on the spreadsheet every day, which sounds exhausting to me?? is there some easier way i dont know about?

[MinNCompany]

I think it's like patreon model where tiers are based on the total amount of coins you've tipped

Based on how much you tip, you unlock monetary tiers that increases the content you get from the creator

[ISNEKO]

Was wondering that too, but found out they actually added a monthly breakdown on the Dashboard->Tips area. I had no idea you could look at tips by monthly. Not sure how long this has been a feature.

[L_M_S]

If you have the app, you can access a list of everyone who tipped a certain creator and how much they tipped; I imagine you can do that with your own profile as well.

[bilvyy]

i can only view people’s individual totals though. how would you see each persons individual tip? attached image of the views that i have, ranked vs recent, in which it only shows collective total in both

[bear1]

You can see it only on the Desktop version of Tapas.
Go into the Dashboard and under 'Tips' you'll find the listing of all your tippers on the bottom. There you can view and break them down by months

Sadly you can't see who tipped you what and when exactly. But at least you can sort them by months, which is a hell of a lot easier than keeping track manually, I think

[AdrenalineShots]

Holy shamoly that's a lot of tips!! How do you make readers aware / encourage them as clearly I'm doing something wrong?!

[LordVincent]

To check a tip: Check the tippers on your dashboard (it's in the tips section on desktop). Switch to your current month in the dropdown menu. Check their amount.
If someone claims a reward multiple times in the same month, just do the math.

I do not recommend rewards based upon TOTAL tip count since that would complicate things horribly or force people to tip themselves past tiers they don't want just to get the one they want. This discourages people from even bothering to tip! Not recommended!!!

[LordVincent]

Do not make a spreadsheet btw it is more work than it is worth and it easily gets messed up!!

[ryoko]

I take a screen shot at the beginning and end of each month, then figure out who the highest tipper is.
Edit : didn't notice they added a way to see the monthly breakdown until Vincent mentioned it