It would be a lot easier to just put my stuff on Instagram or Facebook. It took 2 months (worth of rare spare time) longer than I thought to rebuild this site. A lot more tech hassle than expected, and I’ve got plenty of chops there. It actually costs me real money to run my own site; I host it myself, and the server costs money every month, and I don’t want to run ads to raise revenue. It takes work to write articles, gather images, design layouts, etc, and time that I could otherwise be saving for the studio, which is hard to come by sometimes and always hard to give up.
I know many artists who just put their stuff on social media and leave it at that. It’s a lot easier. And you can pay to promote it if you want, to get it in front of more eyeballs and get likes and followers and all that.
But that’s not really my goal here, and I have significant reservations about social media:
- Facebook is making the world worse by knowingly running fake ads for political candidates, and declaring it’s not their job to police this deceptive content;
- All social media limit the formats and type of work that can be presented, and mix them in with ads
- You’re at the mercy of their algorithms for what gets shown to whom, and if you don’t like it, too bad, and
- Generally speaking, it’s all out of your control, and there are lots of ways that could play out badly that are hard to predict.
So I maintain a presence on Instagram and Twitter (I ditched Facebook shortly after the 2016 election), and I post stuff there occasionally just to be one of the cool kids, but mostly I’ll be directing stuff back here, where it’s more work but at least I’m in complete control of it.