Back at the end of March we ended up celebrating our 18th year of working this particular kind of job. Way back in 1998, I had started with a little sliver of a page on a Netcom personal account that ended up becoming AnimeOnDVD.com. Life has taken us in some interesting places along the way and I’ve been utterly blessed with knowing so many people over the years – and as I find at conventions and elsewhere, I’ve been a big part of a lot of other people’s lives by the continual presence and even personality as some have told me.
As you can imagine, things change a lot over the years from when we were able to generate revenue from DVD Express back in the day along with Right Stuf as affiliate partnerships were the way most sites survived and funded their operations. The changing nature of the advertising landscape has been difficult for a lot of places in the years since as affiliate deals are largely gone and advertising is even harder. I have always worked the goal of being 99% anime/manga focused in terms of our advertising, never doing pop-ups, pop-unders, banners with sounds, and all that other problematic junk that I hate myself. I wanted advertising that was relevant to the readership.
Sadly, it’s just not a sustainable side anymore.
I ended up quite humbled last year when I needed a bit of help with a medical bill from some surgeries I had and part of that was because the advertising side just doesn’t cut it anymore. In doing my tax prep this past month, and I’ll be quite honest here, we made about $15k last year. And this site is my primary job. Suffice to say, with two teenage girls, it’s just not going to work this way much longer. So I want to try something that I’ve seen some other sites I frequent have done over the years, such as Penny Arcade back in the day, by making us fully powered by you, the fans.
As you can see, we’ve set up the GoFundMe page below with a goal of $25,000. That goal will take us through this time next year, which with where I live is essentially a hair above the poverty line according to the government. And I’m more than fine with that because I love what I do and I want to do what I love. That’s why I’m crazily up at 5:30 in the morning and plugging away at stuff throughout the entire day. It’s why I write reviews in the late afternoon, monitor news throughout the day, watch and write about primetime shows, dig into comic books and manga, follow conventions, review new releases of movies, DVDs, and Blu-rays. It’s why I post throughout the day on FB, twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest – so I can keep information available and fresh for my followers. It’s why I spend time each week distributing materials to our wonderful reviewers who can offer different viewpoints so we have variations in material. I live and breathe this stuff. And I love sharing it with you all.
At our current settings, we’re producing between 30-40 articles per day during the week and about a dozen each day over the weekend. That’s what we do and that’s what you’d be funding. The news, the opinions, the reviews. The social media interactions.
If we hit our goal, I’ll eliminate all Amazon advertising in banners and won’t add any going forward within articles (it’s impossible to edit the thousands of articles from before; we’ve produced under 60,000 articles in the last five years!).
We’ll also randomly grab people from the donation list and contact for addresses so we can send some anime DVD/BD prizes that I’ve got as I continue to purge my own library.
Having done this for 18 years, it’s definitely a hugely difficult decision to do this because I’ve found a lot of ways to make it work over the years. But it’s becoming impossible to do so and this site, this audience, is not something that I want to lose, so I want to try this route and see what we can do.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the support, interest, and friendship over the years from so many of you.
I’m surprised you made 15k off of the few ads you have. Didn’t know so many people visited this site since there’s not much participation in the comments sections.
I really enjoy this website for its chill environment. The volume and variety of articles you produce a week is truly admirable. There’s few(if any) articles here that’s there to supposedly promote healthy discussion(when in reality they know it’s just going to inspire flaming and shit flinging) that I’ve seen on other sites. Big plus for also keeping this website free of the toxicity of politics that geeky websites are embroiled in these days.
25k is a longshot but I’m more than happy to donate to a fantastic site like this.
How about setting up a Patreon? Wouldn’t that make more sense than GoFundMe?
Heard there’s a big issue of fake pledges and the number not being truly representative of what’s actually given
Well, I support a lot of websites that way, and would be happy to give a few bucks a month to this one, too. Heck, do it via PayPal recurring charge if you don’t trust Patreon. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think more people will be willing to toss a buck or two every month towards the site than will be likely to cut substantial one-time donations via GoFundMe.
I’ve tried Patreon before and it generated literally nothing. Then again, the GoFundMe isn’t doing all that well eitehr at the moment.
Most of the conversation hits more in the forum itself. 🙂