Good afternoon Glass Cannon Nation. It’s your old buddy Troy coming to you with some very exciting news for the Network. Exciting is the word we’re going with because we, the Glass Cannon five, could not be MORE excited at the prospect of what this announcement may mean for the future of our business. Knowing the naish as we do, though, this news may also be a little bit controversial. Have I piqued your interest yet?

When Joe and I went full-time with the Network, one of the first things we did was take a step back and evaluate what we’re currently doing – how is everything we’re spending our time on contributing to the growth of the Network, how can we continue to expand efficiently and where do changes need to be made. Taking this business from a Mom & Pop lemonade stand to a fully operational Death Star has involved reassessing everything from the ground up and starting over in many ways. Once we had a chance to examine everything and do a detailed analysis of what needs to change, a spotlight fell on Androids & Aliens as a product we felt we could experiment with in order to grow our audience and revenue in new ways.

I mentioned in the State of the Nation video last year that advertising was something we were considering. As we approach a year of producing Androids & Aliens ad-free like all of our other shows, we think now is an optimal time and Androids is the perfect show to experiment with ad placement. After several conversations and wanting to ensure that any new venture is handled with the same care and attention to detail that we give to everything on the Network, we are thrilled to announce an upcoming partnership with Starburns Audio.

If you’re not familiar with Starburns, I urge you to check out their website. They are the company behind Harmontown and they are owned by the studio that produces Rick & Morty. To have Androids join their lineup of comedy podcasts is a huge boon for all of us because if this helps us to bolster our footprint, it means more of what you love coming from the Glass Cannon Network in the future. If we want to compete with the shows that are getting 1 million downloads per month, partnerships like this have the potential to increase the speed at which that can happen.

I’m sure a lot of you are curious as to whether an ad-free version will be made available either on Patreon or via a subscription service. At the moment, I don’t have any plans for that because, frankly, that’s not what this experiment is about. I also don’t want the story we’re telling with A&A tied up in that one RSS feed we have for the Patreon where their platform does not offer the functionality yet to have separate shows with their own feed. That’s not to say we won’t offer it in the future, but for right now, we need to see if this is going to work as is stands. There is a lot more at stake now than there was a year ago when people’s livelihoods didn’t depend on the success or failure of the Network. The Patreon itself is going to be undergoing changes soon as we add another show to our lineup with our upcoming Emerald Spire playthrough GM’d by Joe. We’re bringing new personalities onto the Network as well. All of these changes cost more time and money. For the cost of a cup of coffee, I want people to feel like they’re getting more than their money’s worth with Raiders and soon Emerald Spire, not bummed out about what they’re not getting.

We understand that some of you have expressed trepidation with ads disrupting the narrative flow and we want you to know that we hear you. We wouldn’t be taking this amazing opportunity if we didn’t think it was a good decision for the future of what we’re doing. That’s why I want to be as transparent as possible right out of the gate, explaining why we’re making these changes and what it may mean. We have a lot of exciting plans that are slowly but surely coming to fruition, but we need your continued support to make it happen. If you have questions or concerns, I encourage you to reach out and ask them. There are a lot of loud voices out there in the interweb that make assumptions about what we do that others take as fact. Please let us know your questions and we’ll give you the facts. We take customer feedback very seriously.

Thank you for continuing to go with us on this journey. We are pumped for what’s coming up and hope you will continue to take the ride with us.