eBooks & Videos 
It has been a rough six months, well, it actually started eight months ago. In October 2024, we suddenly couldn’t accept PayPal payments for our products any longer. That is, Gumroad — our marketplace/storefront provider were we sell our eBooks and Video Workshops — was ditched by Paypal. It was from one day to the other, without any warning.
I will not elaborate on the reasons why Gumroad was denied handling sales through Paypal, because that’s another (long) story. Yet, the bottom line for us was that we were forced to look for another storefront provider to sell our products, at least for the PayPal part.
We also realized that we had become too dependent. By just having one storefront provider to sell our through we could run out of business if — for whatever reason — we couldn’t do business with them any longer. So, it meant we needed to look for alternatives, say, backup sales channels.
That led us to adopting three additional marketplaces: Itch.io, Marketsy.ai, and Payhip. That was a lot of work, because we needed to duplicate our 80+ products on three additional platforms. Moreover, each new platform has its own good points and weak points, some accept adult content and others not or only some, some work with bundles and videos and some support those halfway, and so on, and all platforms need quite a learning curve to work properly with them.
Then in January 2025, the U.S. Trump administration came into effect, which brought a whole lot of uncertainties in (global) markets and among consumers, well, until today. That didn’t really help and still doesn’t help our sales figures, to say the least.
Then, in February, one of our new storefront providers (Marketsy.ai) shut us down. To be honest, the payment processor Stripe (a card payment processor hooked into the storefront provider/marketplace) did, because allegedly we would sell “explicit adult content” which they don’t accept.
Now, we don’t sell explicit adult content — it’s more like informative and educational stuff in the sensual, sexual, and somatic sphere — and it took us two weeks of negotiations and proofs to make them change their minds. Luckily Stripe did change their opinion, and we could continue selling through them, and hence, through Marketsy.ai.
In April 2025, we hit on the most difficult moment for our website since its inception in 2018. Our hosting provider (the tech company we host our website with) suddenly suspended our website and hosting environment. The reason was that — apparently — our website was running excessive CPU and memory resources on their system. It meant that from one moment to the other we couldn’t access our website any longer nor the hosting system. You can imagine that it was quite a shock for us, especially because we make a living from our website.
It took us 7 hours of back-and-forth discussions with our hosting provider’s legal team to get at least permission to get a chance to look at the technical issues (we needed access to our hosting environment to do so), and try to find a solution so that our site would run within the allowed resource limits. As we couldn’t immediately find the culprit, we were forced to shutdown parts of the technical functions of our site, to bit by bit restart functionality in the days after, while monitoring and testing our site’s behavior.
It also caused that we needed to debug and reprogram parts of our website, just to make sure. The thing is that you don’t always know what causes technical issues. Sometimes problems only appear when a certain number of website visitors access the site or certain parts of the site, and so on. Anyway, it took us two months to finally identify the problem part, and only in June we had a definite proof of what caused the problems.
Another big issue for us — a continuous one — is the changing world of searching the Internet, that is, the rise of AI-powered search engines. The effect is that independent websites like ours have gradually been receiving less website visitors because of the so-called zero-click searches caused by AI overviews in Google, Bing, and other search engines.
It works like this: search engines have been stealing (and keep stealing) website date from millions of websites by using AI-bots, compile it and store it in their databases, and serve it to website users who search for info, while those search engines don’t send those users to the originating websites (or they just show a little link symbol a bit hidden, which users don’t click or tap on). Now, it’s a bit more complicated than I just sketched, but it comes down to the fact that millions of websites just receive much less traffic, which of course hurts sales.
This AI-story isn’t over yet — far from — it’s still a domain that’s heavily in development, and I don’t know where things are heading to and what it will finally mean for our website. But you can imagine that if you don’t receive enough website visitors, there’s no point in running a website any longer. In fact, already thousands of websites shut down in the past two years, because it wasn’t economically viable any longer to publish content and receive no or very little traffic in exchange.
Then, a few months ago, Gumroad could again accept PayPal payments, so we can again sell our products through Gumroad, that is, website visitors can buy our products with debit and credits cards and PayPal. The whole storefront provider circus we went through also caused that we needed to implement a smart programming solution to be able to instantly change from one to another storefront provider on our website, or just use two instead of four, or three instead of four, and so on.
The most hilarious part is that Itch.io — one of our new marketplaces — was banned two weeks ago by Stripe, because Stripe accuses them of selling too explicit NSWF (Not Suitable For Work i.e. adult content. It means that — ironically enough — we can still sell through PayPal with them, but not through Stripe (card payments), which is the opposite of what happened with Gumroad in October 2024. Luckily enough, we now have backup storefront providers so it doesn’t hurt us too much, but you can imagine that we need to be on top of things and it keeps us busy, to say the least.
Well, I think you get the gist of it. It meant that we couldn’t do as much in the past six to eight months as we would have liked to do and what we like most: writing and publishing articles and eBooks.
