The Engineered Network: Tier Tweaks and Breaker

27 January, 2019

With the New Year well underway now, I thought it would be a good time to review Patron rewards, and adding more flexibility for supporters of the network. It’s been 18 months since the last tweak to Patreon Tiers and there have been a few tweaks, though the values for each tier have not been changed in any way and no rewards have disappeared either. The following changes current starting January this year:

  • Supporter: Unchanged
  • Named Supporter: In addition to your current rewards, you’ll also get ad-free episodes of Analytical early release!
  • Enthusiast: In addition to your current rewards, you’ll also get ad-free episodes of Analytical early release as well!
  • Major Enthusiast is now known as Premium: The benefits to this level have not changed, I just tidied up the description to simplify it a bit
  • Backer is now known as a Silver Producer: Thinking about it, producers provide funding for music albums, movies and such, so it makes sense to credit the level of support where Producers have their names read out at the end of every episode. In addition, at this tier Patrons will get a named thank-you in the Show Notes of every episode!
  • Gold Producer: A new tier with all the benefits of Silver, however you’ll be able to choose a specific topic! In the past when I’ve had topic suggestions it was hard to pick a winner since it had to overlap with the sorts of topics that I personally found interesting. Hence here’s how I see this working: Twice a year, a Gold Producer will get to pick a single topic from a list of topics on ANY of the shows I make on TEN and that episode will be produced for you in the next six month period: guaranteed. If there’s no topic in the list of interest then we can discuss options for alternative topics. So if you’ve ever wanted some control of what’s covered - this tier might interest you!
  • Major Backer is now known as a Platinum Producer: This tier has the same benefits as a Gold Producer, with the choice from a list of topics on ANY of the shows I make on TEN and that WILL be the NEXT topic recorded for that episode. Every month. That’s right: EVERY MONTH. So if you’ve ever wanted control of what topics are covered on one of the shows then this the best way to do it.

I’ll be gradually sifting through the backlog of episodes on Patreon and updating the episodes so they show up in the Named Supporter and Enthusiast Audio Feeds so if they don’t show up immediately, please be patient. In addition during the many tweaks of episodes on Patreon, Episode 25 Nostalgia needed to be deleted and re-created, so now it’s showing up out of sequence (apologies).

I also updated the reward tier artwork to something more colourful because, well, why not? Also a minor point: All ad-free “Premium” episodes will now have the Premium gold seal in the top right corner of the show art.

Breaker

Previously TEN added ad-free, pre-release audio and full back-catalogues of Analytical and Causality, with a recent back-log of Pragmatic. Over the next week this is being extended beyond Patreon thanks to a new partnership between Patreon and Breaker. If you listen to podcasts through Breaker on iOS or their web-player, you’ll now find four more podcasts you can subscribe to:

  • Pragmatic - Premium is the same content in Patreon’s audio link (although for Pragmatic only) for Premium Patrons and above
  • Causality - Premium is the same content in Patreon’s audio link (although for Causality only) for Premium Patrons and above
  • Analytical - Premium is the same content in Patreon’s audio link (although for Analytical only) now available for Named Supporter Patrons and above
  • TEN - Patron Episodes is the same content in Patreon’s audio link that’s currently available to all Patron levels

If you visit any of those URLs you’ll be given a choice: you can subscribe to the podcast monthly if you’re already a Patron of TEN via Patreon, and for non-Patrons they will be directed to Patreon to the support level for that show to sign-up. The tiers work like this:

Tier / Breaker Pragmatic Causality Analytical TEN Patron
Supporter - - - X
Named Supporter - - X X
Enthusiast - - X X
Premium X X X X
Silver Producer X X X X
Gold Producer X X X X
Platinum Producer X X X X

Today this allows for something that Patreon doesn’t currently support: individual feeds for each show. However, there is one thing to be aware of with Breaker. With Patreon it’s possible to grab your personal RSS Audio link and import it into ANY podcast player app you might choose. With Breaker this is not an option. You can’t listen to any audio in any app other than Breaker, or via their Web page audio player. For some people this is a deal breaker (not funny?) and hence I’ll maintain the Patreon common audio feed just as it stands today.

One final note about Breaker: the Patreon integration is currently in Beta and whilst it works most of the time, I’ve been testing it for several weeks now and although it seems more stable this week than previously, if there are issues with the login/tier levels there’s little I can do about it at this time. By all means though, give it a try!

Thank you everyone for your continued support and I hope you enjoy the extra rewards and more flexibility in listening to our shows.