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"thumb_medium_noncustom_x": "120", "thumb_medium_noncustom_y": "91", "thumb_large_noncustom_x": "200", "thumb_large_noncustom_y": "151", "thumb_huge_noncustom_x": "300", "thumb_huge_noncustom_y": "227" } ], "pools": [], "description": "[i][b]TLDR:[/b] Do you have feedback about YCH commissions. Are there things you wish I was doing? Are there things you see me doing that you think are a mistake?\n\n[/i][i]Please let me know! <3\n\n[/i]❤❤❤\n\nA few weeks back I put up my first YCH auction! This was pretty exciting, but I also didn't really know what I was doing, which.. shows in the result. X3 Out of three sites I ended up getting one bid, which ended up falling through. So I definitely have more to figure out about doing YCHs. UwU\n\nThat's okay, every part of my commission process has been a learning experience since I started offering commissions, so I'm expecting it to take a while for me to start to figure out how to do this. But I won't learn unless I keep asking for feedback, so this is the \"tell a fox what it should be doing\" thread <3\n\nI'm going to go over some of my thought process: what my goals are, the assumptions I made, and some ideas I have about possible reasons why it didn't work out. I'd love for additional feedback from anypony willing to give it. Even if you have no interest or funds to buy a YCH yourself, if you have opinions or thoughts about typical YCHs that you see or things that maybe jumped out at you that I might have been doing wrong, let me know! <3\n\n[u]What I'm trying to accomplish[/u]\nRight now I charge about $30 an hour for my general commissions. For polished commissions I charge $50 an hour, but those are much less popular than my sketch commissions (which probably has something to do with the price X3). One downside of this approach is that [b]the per-hour cost[/b][b] makes polished commissions pretty expensive and inaccessible[/b] - most floofs can't afford to spend 400-500 dollars on a single piece. And that means I draw fewer polished pictures, because as I've ramped up commissions I've had less time for the 10-12 hour pieces that I used to more regularly release. On top of that, to get my art income to a point where it's sustainable long-term, at some point [b]I will need to figure out how to get more than $30 an hour out of commissions[/b].\n\nI have a few ideas about how to do that while making my art more accessible, and YCHs are one of the most obvious. [b]Selling multiple slots on a YCH means I can draw a 10-12 hour piece and then split the cost between multiple critters who want to be featured in it.[/b] If 2 floofs buy a slot in a piece that ends up taking 10 hours, I only need to charge $150-250 before the piece is effectively \"paid for\". If 3 slots get purchased in a piece that takes 10 hours, that drops to $100-170. A lot more manageable in terms of price, while still allowing me to get really ambitious with the overall piece. And if any bids go over those prices, then that just makes it easier for me to hit my monthly income needs.\n\nYCHs also are a lot more predictable, both for me and for the commissioner. A commissioner knows what they're getting ahead of time (in comparison to my normal commission process which is very open-ended and collaborative). As an artist, I also don't have to worry as much about last-minute changes or adjustments, or changing scope. And I have a chance to try out new ideas and get a little creative with scenarios.\n\nTo sum that up, I'm trying to:\n\n- Figure out how to make my polished artwork more accessible (and cheaper :3)\n- Figure out how to make my income a bit more sustainable.\n- Find a more predictable commission tier I can offer.\n- Get an opportunity to work on more polished artwork.\n\n[u][b]What I did[/b][/u]\nMy first YCH was of a Vaporeon diving into the water. I asked for some feedback about which YCH floofs were most excited about, and the Vaporeon came in very middle-of-the-road. However, I went with the Vaporeon anyway, because it seemed like the most generally accessible YCH. Pokemon are very popular, and the piece could work with endo, fatal, and lewd vore, allowed for multiple genital combos, and didn't carry any species or body-type restrictions.\n\nI went with an auction-format to start: an $80 minimum bid for 3 different slots (one on Aryion, Inkbunny, and Furaffinity). I did this mostly to get more information about what price I could charge (since I still don't have a lot of experience with pricing), but I did also add an instant buy option at $350. I also decided to throw in a teasy description at $130, and the entire auction lasted about a week.\n\nThe last decision I made is a little bit less typical for a YCH offering - I (mostly) finished the entire piece except for the YCH part. I did this because I don't have a lot of YCH examples, so I wanted bidders to know what the baseline level of quality they were bidding on was - and not just to see a sketch with no other info.\n\n[b][u]Some theories I have about what went wrong:[/u]\n[/b]\nVaporeon wasn't the most voted-for YCH that I offered. The most popular auction option was \"Top or Bottom\" with Mal. I didn't go with that because it felt so hyper-specific, my theory was that floofs were voting based on which finished YCH they'd like to see, not which one they thought would be most popular. But, maybe I was wrong about that. So one pawsible theory is:\n\n[b]1. Maybe I just chose the wrong picture to offer[/b]\n\nI'm still skeptical that Mal would have done better - in addition to being a lot more constrained, it also has two slots in it; and multi-character YCHs are their own can of worms to navigate. But there is something to the idea that my most popular pieces are cruel vore art, rape, and disposal - especially related to the Forest. With some rare exceptions, polished Pokemon pieces that I've done have never really been as popular as the rest of my art. And there are few other issues with this specific piece that could also contribute, especially:\n\n[b]2. Maybe the YCH aspect of the picture was too small/obscured[/b]\n\nThis is a YCH piece, but the subject of the piece is definitely the Vaporeon. The YCH portion only takes up around a 10th of the picture, so it's possible that commissioners felt like they weren't really bidding on a piece [i]about [/i]them, and more just on a piece that would have them in it. If this is the case, a piece like Last Ride would have been a much better picture for me to start with.\n\n[b]3. Maybe the price is still too high[/b]\n\nI'm less inclined to think this is the reason - if it was, I think slots would have gotten snapped up at the last minute. $80 is expensive, but is not that far out of the range of what I charge for timed sketch commissions. But I might be thinking about value incorrectly: a timed stream sketch is a lot more flexible and you get to see it drawn live - and sure it won't be polished like the Vaporeon offering (the finished piece I uploaded took around 10 hours), but polish might not be the most important thing to most commissioners.\n\nIf it is an issue with price, then I'll need to figure something else out and explore other styles that are faster to draw; but there are still fun things that I could do.\n\n[b]4. Maybe the auction format isn't right (or clashes with my other commission types)[/b]\n\nI'm not a huge fan of auctions myself, but they seem to be very commonly used for YCH pieces. One difference might be that the artists who use auction formats tend to be less available for other commissions. If an artist is only doing YCHs, then there might be more reason to bid on a monthly piece.\n\nIf that's the case, I should move to fixed price slots and I should adjust my overall commission prices to balance with them. The next YCH I'm thinking about offering (One by One) might be a good experiment to see if fixed-price slots work better. One potential issue is I'm charging about the minimum I can charge for timed sketches right now (I didn't originally expect them to be very popular X3); so it's hard for me to offer deals on YCH slots that would be competitive with just commissioning me for an hour on stream unless a lot of slots get filled. But there are still interesting things that I could do.\n\n[b]5. Maybe it's just a timing/audience-size issue[/b]\n\nIt's important for me not to discount the idea that YCHs might just require a larger audience. I've grown relatively quickly as an artist (it's been a little bit surreal >w<). But I've still really only been around for about a year, and especially on sites like Furaffinity my artwork isn't going to show up in thousands of feeds if I publicize a YCH.\n\nSometimes time is genuinely the answer - it is pawsible that if I offered the same YCH even two or three months from now, I might just get more responses as my audience grows. As an artist, I never want to rely on that being the answer - I want to be thinking about things I can control that I can do better. But I also don't want to panic or dismiss a concept just because it doesn't work the first time I try it. There are parts of my art process and commission strategies that just take time to work. I've been getting a lot more sketch commissions recently, not because I think I'm doing anything differently, but because my audience is a bit bigger now, I have more commissions under my belt, some of my artwork is showing up in more diverse platforms. Sometimes things just take a while to work, and I expect that anything new I try is going to have at least a small period where it's not working.\n\n[u]What I'm planning to do/Any ideas?[/u]\nThe next YCH I'm planning to offer will be \"One by One\". I'm still thinking of the details, but this will be a multi-slot fixed-price YCH where your fursona/OC can hang out with other OCs and all get turned into shit one-by-one-by-one~\n\nThere'll be a few different tiers for having multiple characters per-jar or having larger characters that aren't just micros, and part of the delivery will be PNGs and animated gifs of the two frames of your character pre-and-post vore, which you can use for profile pictures anywhere that allows that kind of thing :3\n\nI'm pretty excited about it, and I think this will be a good way of testing out a few of the theories above at the same time. It'll be a different format, a lower price, and more aligned with the type of artwork that I'm most known for. And depending on how it does, I can adjust and try new things again <3\n\nBut I really want to get feedback and to be regularly asking for both critique and ideas as I figure this stuff out. I'm not an expert on any of this; I am making up my commission strategy as I go along. And there is a [i]lot[/i] I still have to learn. So I'm more than eager to get input from anypony with opinions. If you're an artist who has more experience with this, if there's a format that you've been wanting me to offer, or if you just see YCHs and have opinions about what does and doesn't work: please let me know! <3", "description_bbcode_parsed": "TLDR: Do you have feedback about YCH commissions. Are there things you wish I was doing? Are there things you see me doing that you think are a mistake?

Please let me know! <3

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A few weeks back I put up my first YCH auction! This was pretty exciting, but I also didn't really know what I was doing, which.. shows in the result. X3 Out of three sites I ended up getting one bid, which ended up falling through. So I definitely have more to figure out about doing YCHs. UwU

That's okay, every part of my commission process has been a learning experience since I started offering commissions, so I'm expecting it to take a while for me to start to figure out how to do this. But I won't learn unless I keep asking for feedback, so this is the "tell a fox what it should be doing" thread <3

I'm going to go over some of my thought process: what my goals are, the assumptions I made, and some ideas I have about possible reasons why it didn't work out. I'd love for additional feedback from anypony willing to give it. Even if you have no interest or funds to buy a YCH yourself, if you have opinions or thoughts about typical YCHs that you see or things that maybe jumped out at you that I might have been doing wrong, let me know! <3

What I'm trying to accomplish
Right now I charge about $30 an hour for my general commissions. For polished commissions I charge $50 an hour, but those are much less popular than my sketch commissions (which probably has something to do with the price X3). One downside of this approach is that the per-hour cost makes polished commissions pretty expensive and inaccessible - most floofs can't afford to spend 400-500 dollars on a single piece. And that means I draw fewer polished pictures, because as I've ramped up commissions I've had less time for the 10-12 hour pieces that I used to more regularly release. On top of that, to get my art income to a point where it's sustainable long-term, at some point I will need to figure out how to get more than $30 an hour out of commissions.

I have a few ideas about how to do that while making my art more accessible, and YCHs are one of the most obvious. Selling multiple slots on a YCH means I can draw a 10-12 hour piece and then split the cost between multiple critters who want to be featured in it. If 2 floofs buy a slot in a piece that ends up taking 10 hours, I only need to charge $150-250 before the piece is effectively "paid for". If 3 slots get purchased in a piece that takes 10 hours, that drops to $100-170. A lot more manageable in terms of price, while still allowing me to get really ambitious with the overall piece. And if any bids go over those prices, then that just makes it easier for me to hit my monthly income needs.

YCHs also are a lot more predictable, both for me and for the commissioner. A commissioner knows what they're getting ahead of time (in comparison to my normal commission process which is very open-ended and collaborative). As an artist, I also don't have to worry as much about last-minute changes or adjustments, or changing scope. And I have a chance to try out new ideas and get a little creative with scenarios.

To sum that up, I'm trying to:

- Figure out how to make my polished artwork more accessible (and cheaper :3)
- Figure out how to make my income a bit more sustainable.
- Find a more predictable commission tier I can offer.
- Get an opportunity to work on more polished artwork.

What I did
My first YCH was of a Vaporeon diving into the water. I asked for some feedback about which YCH floofs were most excited about, and the Vaporeon came in very middle-of-the-road. However, I went with the Vaporeon anyway, because it seemed like the most generally accessible YCH. Pokemon are very popular, and the piece could work with endo, fatal, and lewd vore, allowed for multiple genital combos, and didn't carry any species or body-type restrictions.

I went with an auction-format to start: an $80 minimum bid for 3 different slots (one on Aryion, Inkbunny, and Furaffinity). I did this mostly to get more information about what price I could charge (since I still don't have a lot of experience with pricing), but I did also add an instant buy option at $350. I also decided to throw in a teasy description at $130, and the entire auction lasted about a week.

The last decision I made is a little bit less typical for a YCH offering - I (mostly) finished the entire piece except for the YCH part. I did this because I don't have a lot of YCH examples, so I wanted bidders to know what the baseline level of quality they were bidding on was - and not just to see a sketch with no other info.

Some theories I have about what went wrong:

Vaporeon wasn't the most voted-for YCH that I offered. The most popular auction option was "Top or Bottom" with Mal. I didn't go with that because it felt so hyper-specific, my theory was that floofs were voting based on which finished YCH they'd like to see, not which one they thought would be most popular. But, maybe I was wrong about that. So one pawsible theory is:

1. Maybe I just chose the wrong picture to offer

I'm still skeptical that Mal would have done better - in addition to being a lot more constrained, it also has two slots in it; and multi-character YCHs are their own can of worms to navigate. But there is something to the idea that my most popular pieces are cruel vore art, rape, and disposal - especially related to the Forest. With some rare exceptions, polished Pokemon pieces that I've done have never really been as popular as the rest of my art. And there are few other issues with this specific piece that could also contribute, especially:

2. Maybe the YCH aspect of the picture was too small/obscured

This is a YCH piece, but the subject of the piece is definitely the Vaporeon. The YCH portion only takes up around a 10th of the picture, so it's possible that commissioners felt like they weren't really bidding on a piece about them, and more just on a piece that would have them in it. If this is the case, a piece like Last Ride would have been a much better picture for me to start with.

3. Maybe the price is still too high

I'm less inclined to think this is the reason - if it was, I think slots would have gotten snapped up at the last minute. $80 is expensive, but is not that far out of the range of what I charge for timed sketch commissions. But I might be thinking about value incorrectly: a timed stream sketch is a lot more flexible and you get to see it drawn live - and sure it won't be polished like the Vaporeon offering (the finished piece I uploaded took around 10 hours), but polish might not be the most important thing to most commissioners.

If it is an issue with price, then I'll need to figure something else out and explore other styles that are faster to draw; but there are still fun things that I could do.

4. Maybe the auction format isn't right (or clashes with my other commission types)

I'm not a huge fan of auctions myself, but they seem to be very commonly used for YCH pieces. One difference might be that the artists who use auction formats tend to be less available for other commissions. If an artist is only doing YCHs, then there might be more reason to bid on a monthly piece.

If that's the case, I should move to fixed price slots and I should adjust my overall commission prices to balance with them. The next YCH I'm thinking about offering (One by One) might be a good experiment to see if fixed-price slots work better. One potential issue is I'm charging about the minimum I can charge for timed sketches right now (I didn't originally expect them to be very popular X3); so it's hard for me to offer deals on YCH slots that would be competitive with just commissioning me for an hour on stream unless a lot of slots get filled. But there are still interesting things that I could do.

5. Maybe it's just a timing/audience-size issue

It's important for me not to discount the idea that YCHs might just require a larger audience. I've grown relatively quickly as an artist (it's been a little bit surreal >w<). But I've still really only been around for about a year, and especially on sites like Furaffinity my artwork isn't going to show up in thousands of feeds if I publicize a YCH.

Sometimes time is genuinely the answer - it is pawsible that if I offered the same YCH even two or three months from now, I might just get more responses as my audience grows. As an artist, I never want to rely on that being the answer - I want to be thinking about things I can control that I can do better. But I also don't want to panic or dismiss a concept just because it doesn't work the first time I try it. There are parts of my art process and commission strategies that just take time to work. I've been getting  a lot more sketch commissions recently, not because I think I'm doing anything differently, but because my audience is a bit bigger now, I have more commissions under my belt, some of my artwork is showing up in more diverse platforms. Sometimes things just take a while to work, and I expect that anything new I try is going to have at least a small period where it's not working.

What I'm planning to do/Any ideas?
The next YCH I'm planning to offer will be "One by One". I'm still thinking of the details, but this will be a multi-slot fixed-price YCH where your fursona/OC can hang out with other OCs and all get turned into shit one-by-one-by-one~

There'll be a few different tiers for having multiple characters per-jar or having larger characters that aren't just micros, and part of the delivery will be PNGs and animated gifs of the two frames of your character pre-and-post vore, which you can use for profile pictures anywhere that allows that kind of thing :3

I'm pretty excited about it, and I think this will be a good way of testing out a few of the theories above at the same time. It'll be a different format, a lower price, and more aligned with the type of artwork that I'm most known for. And depending on how it does, I can adjust and try new things again <3

But I really want to get feedback and to be regularly asking for both critique and ideas as I figure this stuff out. I'm not an expert on any of this; I am making up my commission strategy as I go along. And there is a lot I still have to learn. So I'm more than eager to get input from anypony with opinions. If you're an artist who has more experience with this, if there's a format that you've been wanting me to offer, or if you just see YCHs and have opinions about what does and doesn't work: please let me know! <3", "writing": "", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "", "pools_count": 0, "title": "YCH Feedback/Survey Thread :3 (scat)", "deleted": "f", "public": "t", "mimetype": "image/png", "pagecount": "1", "rating_id": "2", "rating_name": "Adult", "ratings": [ { "content_tag_id": "4", "name": "Sexual Themes", "description": "Erotic imagery, sexual activity or arousal", "rating_id": "2" } ], "submission_type_id": "1", "type_name": "Picture/Pinup", "guest_block": "f", "friends_only": "f", "comments_count": "0", "views": "139" }