Two years... what now?

Hey guys! As a heads up, I'll start this post more happy then it will end. What is important to keep in mind is that I'll always be grateful to everyone who has currently or in the past ever given money to this project. You guys are the reason the website has made it to two years and has a chance to make it to three. More about that later.

First happy news! Today two years ago I decided to launch InflateVids publicly, after some other sites either restricted squeaky content or just completely shut down. It, incidentally, is also my birthday. What a coincidence. To celebrate, here are some fun statistics:

Uploads have never been more regular, with an average of 8 videos being uploaded for public viewing daily. That is a total of 2815 new videos uploaded this year for you to browse on the website, totalling on 5367 videos public in total (or 5691 also counting unlisted & private videos). Watching the entire catalog non-stop would take you over 20 days!

Views too have increased, more then doubling from ~1mil video views last year to ~2.2mil video views this year (totalling exactly 3.220.934 views at time of writing)! People have in total left over 13.3k comments and liked a video over 109k times. We have also recently gone over 9000 users, totalling at writing... 9001. No, that is not a joke. It says it here in my admin panel. put meme here

It has been an absolute privilege to host one of the biggest websites in the community for the past two years. I never get used to people randomly sharing InflateVids links and the passion people feel for this website. Especially when there is a fire I need to put out.

And that is where I'll start my rant section. Feel free to skip this part if you don't feel like reading it or don't care about my struggle hosting this website. Both are valid reasons to not be bothered! And besides, you are already helping take some of the load I am going to talk about off my shoulders.

rant start

So let's start at the obvious thing. InflateVids is really, really, really fucking expensive. Obviously $500+ from Patreon is amazing each month, but for the month of November (which payment is due now) the bill is a little under $800. You might think, how does he pay for that? And yes, it is the obvious answer. I pay it from my own pocket.

Over the past two years I have more often then not needed to put over $100 a month into the website myself. For the first year I accepted it, it isn't going to all be paid by patrons immediately, and that is why I pushed for the initial date of December 14th 2021 as deadline to break even on cost and earnings. Obviously that didn't work out. Then I said "alright if it stays manageable, I can pay smaller amounts". That obviously hasn't worked out now.

Besides cost there is also the time and effort I put into the website. I have a full-time 40 hour/week job (as programmer), a house to keep clean, adult responsibilities, family/friends to keep up with and all the other fun things life throws at you. However unlike most people, I host and moderate a fetish video website that has taken off.

Last week I released the new video conversion system. Turns out I was a dumb dumb not testing out the conversion giving an error on a dev server, and accidentally nuked the table of videos in the database. When this happened, I was at the office. This is why it took over 8 hours(!) to "fix", because the person needing to fix it, me, wasn't available. Let's just say I wasn't super productive that day, instead stressing about the website on the phone on the toilet in the office.

Outside of that example, the daily questions, moderation, issues and even the rare complaint are fairly exhausting together with my already limited free time. The time I spend on the website is a very on/off regiment. Sometimes I work full workdays on it per week, sometimes it is barely an hour of moderation. I am currently in the on regiment, working many hours a week on trying to improve things. 

Some friends tell me I put too much time into it, but somehow I believe I can improve things and convince people to donate some of their hard earned money on my hobby project. I start to see why some call that "delusional".

rant end

So, that makes me say there is a chance to bring InflateVids to a third anniversary, since I am not sure where things are going. One thing is for sure, I can't keep losing money like this and I'm going to have to come up with something to either get more people signing up as patron or to lower the bandwidth used by the website. If I do decide to do something drastic, you guys will be the first to get a heads-up, because you are awesome.

Thanks for believing in the website, and my ability to host it.

Cheers,
Birthday boi Rick