A note about the future of our Patreon Channel

Hello everybody!

If you are in the $15 Tier or higher, you will notice that this week there won’t be a “Story behind the Picture”. Nor will there be one next week, or any of the following weeks…

For those of you in lower tiers, the “Story behind the Picture” is a weekly series uniquely on Patreon where we tell the complete story about one of our pictures on Instagram. Recently, we’ve encountered a difficulty though… We ran out of pictures.

The way we’ve been trying to spread our message has changed over the years. It started with just words on a blog, accompanied by pictures that we found on the internet. Then we started taking our own pictures, and spreading them via different social media. And 2 years ago, we jumped on the video train and began to focus on moving images. Today, making video takes the most of our time. You are probably familiar with our weekly vlogs, but next to that, we’re also making smaller videos to use as YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikToks. For real time updates, we moved from text and a picture to Instagram Stories, which allows us to be much more creative. All of this has the result that we’re spending much less time on making photos for Instagram, hence the issue we’re facing right now that we ran out of pictures to talk about.

The start of our Patreon channel

The other day, someone sent us a message on Patreon saying that our different tiers are confusing. That person is absolutely right. We designed those tiers back in late 2020, when we first started using Patreon, based on what was possible and what sounded like a good idea at the time.

Basically, the creation of our Patreon was a huge cry for help. When COVID took over the world, all our plans just evaporated. The whole concept of Naked Wanderings was based on the simple fact that we could travel from one place to another, who had ever guessed that one day, this would become impossible?

Until then, we had always believed that the funding of Naked Wanderings had to come from those who financially benefitted from what we do. From resorts and tour companies who get new customers because we talk about them. From federations who get new members because we promote naturism. From tourism offices who see a rise in visitors because we talk about the local nude beach. Etc.

Only by starting our Patreon, we realised that we had a strong community behind us that benefits from what we do in a non-financial way, and is willing to financially support our projects. Even though most what we produce is just available for free on the internet. It’s difficult to express what a warm feeling this gave us when we realised that there were actually people out there who are willing to pay for something they can also get for free. Just to make sure that the content will keep coming. And we are eternally thankful for that. We are very certain that without you, our Patrons, there would be no Naked Wanderings anymore.

Our content on Patreon

While the goal of our Patreon channel was to create a support platform to help us create more and better content, we also wanted to reward our patrons with unique content that wasn’t available anywhere else on the web. The whole world was in lockdown, and we had plenty of time on our hands. So we created things like the “Story behind the Picture”. Long time patrons may also remember Lins’ cooking show and our weekly video updates.

As the world started opening up again, we returned to our initial focus: To inspire as many people as possible to think out of the box and to challenge the norms of society, using naturism as a tool for that. We had new places to visit, new content to create, and we were diving head first into making videos.

Our Patreon channel hugely suffered from that. Little by little, the unique content started to disappear because we were spending all our time on creating content for our “free” channels. From a financial point of view, this was probably a very dumb choice. If we had put all our time and effort into creating content for Patreon, we might have been able to generate a very lucrative monthly paycheck. But this strategy was not in line with our goal. We didn’t want our message to be uniquely seen by a couple of hundreds of paying viewers, we wanted to reach and inspire millions of people.

If you look at our Patreon channel today, the result is obvious: It became a bit of an empty box. You still get to see our videos and blog posts before everyone else does, and every single one of your euros, dollars, and yens are invested into making our channels grow and our content improve, but if you’re looking for more than just supporting Naked Wanderings, there is unfortunately not much left…

Our Patreon channel in the future

The other day during dinner, we were talking about which new things we could add to our Patreon channel to make it more rewarding. We came up with a couple of ideas that might be fun or interesting and that don’t take a huge bite out of our time dedicated to creating our “mainstream content”. But we soon realised that it would be better to tackle this more fundamentally. To have a good long brainstorm about how we can restructure our Patreon so it provides the added value that you, our Patrons, are looking for.

This is where (finally) our question comes: What would make our Patreon channel more interesting for you? Feel free to think out of the box. There are no wrong, strange, or crazy answers. Be as specific or as vague as you want. We can’t promise that your ideas will eventually make the selection, but we’re certain that they will inspire us to make the right choices.

A note about nudity

Some of you will probably draw the “uncensored content” card, which is an as valid proposal as any other, but one that we would already like to address here.

We have a friend who is a business consultant, and every time we ask him for ideas about how to grow Naked Wanderings, he replies “Start an OnlyFans and go all-in”. We’ve explained to him a million times that naturism is not about sex and that “naturist sex channels” are the complete opposite of our philosophy. He understands this very well, but from a business point of view, he’s absolutely right. If every person who has ever asked us for “sexual naturist content” puts their money where their mouth is, we would never have to work another day in our lives.

Obviously, nudity and sex are two very distinct things, but selling nudity comes pretty close. We are very aware that our Patreon channel would be much more successful if it was the only place where you would get uncensored full frontal nudity. But selling our nudity doesn’t just leave a bad taste in our mouths, we also believe that it’s very un-naturist. We wouldn’t mind creating content on Patreon that includes full frontal nudity, but only if we can also publish this content on mainstream social media. Which is, unfortunately, not the case.