Does that guy still heavily paywall nearly everything with 40 people on his Patreon ? Was a huge fan of his until around a year ago, where he decided to massively paywall his work... With around 40 supporters (not how you make a living out of patreon)
@petedash i remember when the artist gave their .psd files for free on gumroad, have a few but deleted now, its a shame they went to the evil side with miles-df
Sadly yeah this guy still payswalls everything, which is a shame since his art is great but like this he will never get the viewership if everything is behind a paywall, especially the billion edits he makes
Mate you are on a website that is full of leaked/paid content, you are here looking at paid stuff for free, while on your patreon you are crying about leaks.
Your art is great but your approach to it is just wrong, you are basically not getting any traction because you hardly upload art cause you hide it all behind a paywall, so here is my suggestion.
Common patreon benefits are
-polls -wips -OC art ruffles -speedpaint -original image file (whichever program you used to draw it in) -private streams
So if I were you i would not hide edits and high res behind a paywall, at least make it timegated, like after 2-4 weeks the images will be public and patreons get to see them right away which is the most common practice and it prevents art from being leaked because why bother leaking it when its public soon + more people get to see your art this way. After all you cant build up a following if you dont give anything to the public.
These are just my two cents on it, take it as you want.
With the exception of polls, these are all benefits I offer. And while there are some exclusive artworks and edits, most of the content is timegated and will be posted publicly. I think that puts what I do in line with the majority of creators. Guessing the main difference is I very rarely draw popular IPs, characters or trends.
While drawing popular characters can help, that does not mean that it will. I know artists who got popular with just drawing nothing but OCs while others who only draw popular characters got no following. There is no shortcut to anything, you already have +40k followers on twitter which is huge, you just gotta draw more and more often thats all, whenever OC or not, just draw what you enjoy because thats matters in the end.
But drawing what is trendy does not hurt, my friends drew the weedcat from pokemon and got a large chunk of following just thanks to that. Also you said that your art is timegated, yet I still dont see the edits of the coco + Elora anywhere despite that being posted on Jan 12
Like mentioned before I really like your art style, been following you since the old MLP days a decade ago, just draw more, dont focus that much on numbers and release more art to the public. I been on the internet for two decades, i know where to go for leaked porn whenever forums/websites but the average person will just look at paheal/e621, see a few pics and bail.