2020 has been a year. And 2021 is proving to have its own challenges.
We’ll make this simple but we’ll also tell our story. Our only path to survival is Patreon and we’re looking for people who can pledge $1, $2, or even $5 a month to help keep us going. We’re pushing hard to reach the $1000 mark – which doesn’t even get us near the poverty line. But every dollar helps to put food on the table and to keep us producing the content we love and we hope you love.
Having started things back in 1998 and gone through a few transitions, we’ve been one of the more reliable destinations when it comes to the anime sphere for a couple of decades now. But now we’re at a point where I’m basically pleading with you to help us to reach the poverty line in my state in order to keep doing what we’re doing in providing news, commentary, reviews, and more for the world of anime and manga and a lot of other areas.
I’ve burned through my savings this past year while trying to figure out options and work different approaches. I’m down to my last real way of doing things at this point and that’s Patreon. We’re trying to do this a little differently because while we’re nowhere near our overall goal, I want to try and get us to our next incremental goal. And that’s taking us from just under $500 where we’re at to the $1000 mark. If we can do that in January, we’ll be able to start working more toward building from there and continuing on.
The reality is simple; there’s no money in advertising at this point anymore. I’ve run a slew of Amazon ads for the past year and have made $75 total from it. Anime and manga publishers and distributors aren’t advertising unless it’s something that’s more in the mainstream realm.. Most companies are “bought up” into other entities and while I always like to think we were one of the ones that came to the dance with everyone back at the advent or DVD and through to Blu-ray and streaming, we know they’re not the ones we’re going home with. We work with them plenty but there’s no advertising to be had there to help sustain and put food on the table.
I love what I do. I’m up at 5:30 in the morning and already writing articles for the day. I tap out at 5:30 in the evening and then catch up on things to watch or read and write about the next day. I live and breathe this stuff and I excitedly come to my desk every day in order to share it with like-minded people. But we’re down to the end of what I can cover to do so before the whole thing just has to go away because it’s unaffordable. And I really lament that, having seen so many places fold over the years and losing so much of that material. It’s not what I want to do.
But the places like this, the ones that I think still mean something amid all the big corporate sites out there that play at being friends and all, have an important part in all of this and can be funded by the readership. It’s admittedly harder for a site like mine because I’m not an artist that’s creating content that I can sell in that form, or a musician or other fields that Patreon works really well for.
But I’m now here, nearing the end, looking to see if the community is still there to support a project like this and material like this. I hope it is because this has been one of the best things in my life and the one thing I’ve been able to share more than anything else.
Thank you for your support.
