5/25/25: A mid-year check in

It's not quite mid-year yet but anything that gets us closer to 2028 is OK BY ME

We’re about halfway through a year of log cabin Sundays, which means we’re also about half a year into my Patreon experiment. I never know what people will find interesting about what happens on the other side of the screen for your favorite (top 10 maybe?) micro-influencer, but I thought today might be a good time to check in with myself and everyone about my experience on here.

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If you’re wondering why I don’t monetize Substack anymore it’s mainly for the big reason that people don’t monetize substack, which is the Nazi thing. And because I paused everyone’s subscription, if I tried to remonetize it would charge everyone all over again. I have no idea how I would avoid this so that’s where we’re at.

If you’re interested in subscribing to Patreon for a bunch of extra Howie’s Everything Club Style stuff, you can find it here. It has a paid membership option that is totally voluntary; no content on there is behind a paywall.

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If you’ve been around here for a while you’ll know I’ve struggled with trying out ways to make up for some of the costs associated with making online content. For a while, it was really easy. Tik Tok was working well for me and paying enough, which subsidized me putting reels on Instagram. And by “enough,” I mean a million-view video would net me about $700. I didn’t have a lot of million view videos, but I had enough that it ended up being about $500 a month. I’ve never paid the rent with social media, but it has given me the chance to create an emergency fund, get a handful of things I’ve wanted for a long time that hopefully will last my whole life, and be a little more generous with tips, gifts, and treating friends to meals.

I was perfectly content with this relationship with the internet, and then something shifted in the Tik Tok algorithm and videos that used to easily get 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands of views—with the occasional viral hit of a million or more—very rarely surpass 1000. More often they don’t even clear 500 views.

Around this time Meta launched threads. Real quick aside but how funny is it that they changed their name to Meta and then failed at everything Meta was supposed to be and now they’re just stuck with that meaningless name. Imagine if Microsoft changed their name to Zune and then a whole generation later kids didn’t know what that was.

Anyway, Threads wanted to get influencers using it and offered a bonus program. This happened about once a month and if you posted enough threads that performed OK, you would get $500. Howie’s everything club is still cruising along happily. I don’t have to ask for anything from anyone, and billionaires give me money. The only drawback is the mild feeling of ick from boosting a platform for a demonstrably bad company. But at least I got my little taste, you know?

Instagram Reels used to have a bonus, too, and it was similar to tik tok but a little less lucrative. A multi-million view post that may have been more than $1k on tik tok ended up being 250 on instagram. Still not paying bills but better than a kick in the teeth.

Still, though, between all of this I’m cobbling together a little side gig that is fun and profitable. Just like the ads to sell mushrooms I would see as a kid in the back of boys’ life magazine. I’m making friends online, people are telling my I’m handsome and funny, and I got a cool leather jacket.

That brings us to November, 2024, when everything dried up. No more Reels bonuses, no threads bonuses, tik tok still doing nothing, and my attempt to take my little show to Youtube and maybe find an audience there fails.

And I’ve put myself in a bit of a pickle. The videos I create probably look pretty slapdash and lazy, but even that level of production takes hours. I research and read papers, write scripts, I film many takes of them, and then I edit out the pauses and weird jokes and stutters. After I’ve edited it all together I will do a final fact check to make sure I can at least cite a source for everything I say. This is a level of effort that does not make sense for a few reasons: my videos about studies almost always underperform compared to something silly and short I didn’t put much thought into, and it’s hard to justify doing all that work for free.

That’s what lead to this platform you’re reading now. The initial pitch was for some extra money, you all would get deeper dives into my videos, a book club, and a few other extras like early access to posts that would go on instagram and tik tok for free.

The response was really great; better than I’d hoped. At the peak I was making around $300 a month from subscribers. Again, not a living wage but enough to justify all the work. Except to get there I was adding at least double the work that I was doing before. If I put together the time I was spending to create content, I was probably making about minimum wage. But I was still having fun chatting with you all in the comments.

I hated having content behind a paywall, though, especially the book club. I hated promoting posts that most of you would never see. Perhaps ironically I have no issues supporting the handful of Patreons that I do, and the only reason I subscribed in the first place was for access to pay-walled content. I thought their efforts were perfectly reasonable to pay for. People are complicated, I guess.

I’ll talk a little about where we are now:

Deep dives: these are the least viewed things I’ve posted. They take a long time and extra effort and for a while I tried really hard to make them fun. I did yo-yo tricks while explaining the concepts, I knitted, I made a little Mr. Rogers-style intro. They failed so badly. Literally single-digit views.

Book Club: there’s potential here but so far unrealized. I know this is my fault but I don’t know what to do differently. People seem to read the books, but I haven’t fostered a community where we can talk about them. Maybe Patreon isn’t the platform for that.

This blog: this is the part of having this platform that I enjoy the most and have been the most consistent at because it’s a shift in gears. It’s not video content, which is how I built my audience, but is where I’m stretched the thinnest. On the other hand, for my whole life on the internet I’ve written long-form posts. There’s a draw to it that I can’t shake even when it hasn’t turned into anything more than a public journal.

Subscribers: since making all my content free I have lost about half the paid subscribers I had. I don’t resent that at all, I am being so serious. I get it. For $3-10 a month there are better value propositions. If I had to cancel one thing and it’s between say Disney+, which has a way that I can watch Marvel stuff and Star Wars stuff and also Robin Hood and Sword in the Stone anytime I want. Or the Patreon where I may read a rambly article once a month that I could also just read for free, that’s not a hard call.

Things are tough out there, and they have been for a while. The same thing that led to social media funding drying up, which was a probably unsustainable run of venture capital funds propping up platforms that have destroyed the fabric of democracies but haven’t figured out how to dependably make money, has also led to everyone feeling less confident about their financial futures. We’re in this together and in that case I’m extremely lucky to have an actual full-time and benefited job still.

All of this to say that if you’re one of the paid subscribers who has stuck around, I really appreciate it and I hope this doesn’t sound silly but I take that seriously. Money I got from Tik Tok or Instagram I spent for fun. A friends of mine called it “girl math.” I knew it was ephemeral and didn’t want to get to a point where I depended on it to feed my kids. So I bought some silly stuff. It was billionaire bucks, and it built a record library.

Patreon funds I use for necessities, save for a rainy day, or make someone’s rainy day a little less cloudy. It keeps my making videos for now, and writing about my Sundays, which I did not do today. Sorry. But if every one of you stopped today, I would still write this blog. So if you’re strapped or it’s just not worth it, please stick around for free.

Anyway, this post is a weird one, I guess. On to the report:

Saturday we had family visit and went out to lunch. I listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland, the soundtrack to the movie The Sting, and played The Sims.

Sunday I planted the rest of the garden (here’s what we’ve got so far: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, peas, carrots, radishes, strawberries, new cherry tree, serviceberries, lettuce, and a bunch of herbs) and moved some speakers outside and listened to records on the patio. We did our Memorial day grilled burgers (Impossible for me) and hot dogs out on the picnic table while listening to Bikini Kill Reject All American and The Bombpops’ Death In Venice Beach. We turned on the string lights and read on the patio, drank lemonade, and listened to Sarah Vaughn until it got too windy.

I couldn’t help but think of this quote by Kurt Vonnegut:

And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

I stayed up way too late reading Louise Erdrich’s new book The Mighty Red and slept in.

One perhaps downside of Log Cabin Sundays is that Sunday is my hiking day and often on hikes I create content. This year, though, I’ve been hiking with my phone in my pack for emergencies only. I don’t even take pictures, let alone plan social media videos. This week I went on a long hike on Memorial Day instead and made a bunch of videos that I was kind of disappointed with when I got home and rewatched them. The one I posted today seems to be doing quite well, though, which again proves that I don’t know what a good video does or does not look like. This is probably pretty apparent to longtime viewers.