As we just wrapped up our 21st year of writing about anime and more, things are getting tougher than ever. If you follow the news, you see lots of layoffs, lots of advertising reductions, and other changes that are tightening things everywhere. And as an independent site not owned by anyone else, it’s even tougher there. Having lost our main big advertiser recently, we’re in a tight bind and need your help in order to continue bringing the site to you.
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. 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.
As you can see, we’ve set up the GoFundMe page with a where we’re doing monthly runs with a goal of $1000 and have gotten July 2019 underway with a whole lot of new rewards added in recently! While I had been upfront with the overall yearly goal, I suspect this format will work better and we’ll be keeping it stocked with a lot more rewards as well. Doing this will help us to basically get 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 Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest – so I can keep the 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 a 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.
Those that donate will be able to choose DVD/BD rewards that I’ve got as I continue to purge my own library with $15, $25, $50, $100 levels. You can see the spreadsheet below that you’ll be able to choose from after donating!
Having done this for 21 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.
Help spread the word!
