Two years ago now we launched our Patreon and since then while support from our community has been encouraging, we’re still only half way to our goal to get back to firing on all cylinders. As you’ve likely noticed, there haven’t been any new names on the site since Brad Nicholson left quite some time ago, as we’re largely treading water trying to stay alive on the incredibly limited resources we have. I personally think third party editorial outlets like TouchArcade are very important to the health of online ecosystems like the App Store, and I believe we provide a significant value to our readers and iOS developers every day. All we’re asking for is a value for value exchange, and if you feel you derive any value from reading TouchArcade (or anything from the TouchArcade community), please support our efforts to continue doing what we’re doing. Here’s all the ways you can do that:
Advertising
If you’re an iOS developer looking to raise awareness of your game, advertising on sites like TouchArcade is a great way to reach a hyper-targeted audience of iOS gamers and industry influencers who view the site multiple times a day. We offer options ranging from sponsoring our podcast, advertising on our forums, or even completely re-skinning the site. Apple’s editorial featuring games team constantly visits TouchArcade, along with (obviously) our whole staff, so having well-placed ads on a site like TouchArcade can be exponentially more effective at getting word out about your game than paying a PR person (likely way more money) to send us emails. For more information, contact our ad sales manager at [email protected].
Supporting Us on Patreon
Patreon is our primary funding source these days. If you’re unfamiliar, you’re able to more or less “subscribe" to creators (like us) whose content you value. We offer several different tiers of support, which grant things like cosmetic rewards on our forums, as well as access to a Patreon-only chat channel on our Discord server. All Patreon backers also get a video version of our podcast. Developers who support us on Patreon on the “Indie Developer" tier and above get access to a developer chat on on Discord for direct access to TouchArcade staff (and other developers), along with other developer-exclusive content like a business insights email newsletter, event reports, and more. We’re also in the process of working with a few different highly relevant companies for exclusive discounts for Patreon backers, although nothing has been finalized just yet.
Overall, a good way to look at our Patreon is to think of TouchArcade as a magazine you’d subscribe to. If you used to pick up a copy of GamePro every month for five bucks (back when magazines only cost five bucks), kick us $5 instead. We provide way more content than print magazines ever could, in an infinitely more timely manner. If you’d like to support the site for more than that because we’ve saved you money over the years by helping you avoid bad games or by highlighting games you wanted when they were on sale… Even better! The way we look at it is that there’s nothing more valuable than time, and we work well over a full time schedule to try and save YOU time by not having to sort through the crap on the App Store. If we’ve provided value to you in any of these ways, please consider giving back to us with your support.
Amazon Prime Members Can Subscribe to Us on Twitch for Free
If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you get way more benefits than fast shipping that you might not even be aware of. One of those perks is Twitch Prime. Once you link up your Amazon account with Twitch, aside from a bunch of random gaming-related freebies, you’ll also be able to subscribe to one Twitch channel per month for free. We hope you use that free subscription on our Twitch channel. Something to keep in mind with these free Twitch subscriptions is they do not auto-renew. You’ll need to manually re-subscribe every month, so if you’d like to go one tiny step further for us, set a recurring reminder on your iPhone’s calendar to remember to do this.
Subscribe on Twitch and/or Cheer with Bits
If you’re not an Amazon Prime member, you can still subscribe to our Twitch channel, it just costs $4.99. Something to keep in mind with this is the Twitch revenue share is 50/50, so if you just want to support the site and don’t really specifically care about Twitch, your dollars go way farther over on Patreon as they take significantly smaller payment processing fees. But, hey, if you just love Twitch and want the perks that come with a subscriber, rock on.
Another thing you can do on Twitch to help us out is cheer us with Bits. It’s a new thing Twitch recently added that let you more or less “tip" the active streamer with a Twitch-exclusive currency that gets added to our account which Twitch eventually pays out on. Much like subscriptions, the revenue share on Twitch Bits isn’t great, but you can get them for free if you’re willing to view some ads on Twitch. Cheering is pretty fun while streaming as there’s a whole lot of fanfare when Bits come in, they get added to a tip cup, and Twitch chat gets all excited.
Shop on Amazon Through Our Affiliate Link
If you do a lot of shopping on Amazon, visiting the easy to remember URL toucharcade.com/amazon and clicking through our link gives us credit as the referral for everything you buy. Amazon then gives us a very tiny percentage of the sale, which they’d otherwise just keep for themselves. They have widely varying commission rates, but everything (short of just buying cash gift cards) awards us something.
Amazon Pantry items are among the highest commissions Amazon pays, so if buy a lot of non-perishables and other home goods on Amazon, clicking our link first would be amazing- It also helps keep the joke alive that TouchArcade is in part supported by toilet paper sales since mobile gamers spend a lot of time playing on the toilet.
One-Time Contributions via PayPal
One thing a lot of people have asked us for is the ability to do one-time payments via PayPal. As part of setting up everything to make our Twitch channel work, we also have a more user-friendly way to do one-time payments. Click here, fill out the form, and it’ll toss you over to PayPal to complete your payment. All of your PayPal information remains confidential, so we’ll really only know what you fill out on the one-time contribution page. If you want to cover PayPal fees, there’s a checkbox for that too. One thing to keep in mind with this is that since this whole thing is built with Twitch in mind, it’s outside of all the automated stuff we’ve built for Patreon. If you don’t care about those rewards, rock on. Additionally, if we’re streaming when you donate, it’ll automatically read your note on stream.
Whitelist TouchArcade on Your Ad Blockers
I know this is a ultra-touchy subject for some people, but if you use an ad blocker, please whitelist the TouchArcade domain. We (to the detriment of our own success) run the site with minimal ads which are manually screened to avoid anything that spawns pop-ups, auto-plays sound, or anything else annoying. We respect our readers, and while we’d be doing tons better if we had full-screen and totally irritating interstitials, I think all that does is encourage more people to block your ads. If you just block everything because you assume all sites these days have in-your-face ads, just try whitelisting us. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. And, hell, if you really want to block our ads, just kick us a few bucks in one of these other ways and we’ll be square.
Tell Your Friends and/or Share Our Stories on Social Media
If you love TouchArcade, but really just aren’t interested in supporting the site financially, you can still do us a solid via word of mouth. If a friend of yours just got a new iPhone, recommend they check out TouchArcade to find some great games to download. Additionally, we go out of our way to produce great long-form content which typically doesn’t generate that much search traffic. For instance, Shaun’s amazing RPG Reload series, which I think is some of the best content we publish, are among the worst performing articles on the site. If you read something here that you find insightful, or otherwise interesting, please take a moment to encourage your friends to check it out on Twitter or Facebook. You might think one share doesn’t mean much, but we can clearly tell the difference in site analytics.
Thanks for Reading
As always, thanks so much to everyone who has supported us over the years. You’re the main reason we’re still around, and we hope to keep doing what we’ve been doing for years to come. Hitting our original Patreon goals would allow us to hire more writers, attend more events, refresh the site, and potentially even explore options with our iOS app. We’ve managed to successfully fight against the tide of needing to run SEO-bait listicles, get involved in sponsored content, and all the other gnarly things web sites are doing to stay alive all because of you.
Thanks everybody!
