October 8, 2009

An Update on Response

Community Crier

With Thursday comes an irresistible urge toward honesty: None of our previous "blegathons" asking for donations have broken the bounds of "meager," and this week would probably best be described as "pitiful" (which, the conservative optimist must admit, is better than "utter failure" and "death.") And yet our readership continues to expand.

The economy surely accounts for the lion's share of that discrepancy, but a couple of other factors, unique to us, might come into play. For one thing, as a content base grows on the Internet (as Anchor Rising's archives grow every day), an increasing percentage of traffic likely comes by way of search engines and the ripples of links spreading out into cyberspace. Transient readers, like brand new readers, aren't likely to become instant sponsors.

Conversely, in certain cases, familiarity might lead to a hesitance to offer financial support. It would be a suspicious outcome, indeed, if readers didn't find somewhere, at some level, to disagree with us, and to do so very strongly. We're not here to hit some middle line of conservative thought (let alone Rhode Islander thought), making the occasional off-putting stand an inevitability.

But the fact is that a significant number of people read this site on a regular basis. Whether the motivation is political ammunition, enlightenment, a chance for rhetorical battle, or even just mild entertainment during a coffee break, please consider answering our voluntary work with a voluntary donation.

Subscriptions of $0.25 per day (payments of $7.60 per month) and donations of any size may be made using credit cards via PayPal (no PayPal account is necessary) by clicking the following:

Those who would prefer the more direct route of checks or money orders can make them out to Anchor Rising and send them to:

Anchor Rising
P.O. Box 751
Portsmouth, RI 02871

For advertising, whether along the sides of the blog or as one of these here Community Crier posts, email Justin.

Comments, although monitored, are not necessarily representative of the views Anchor Rising's contributors or approved by them. We reserve the right to delete or modify comments for any reason.

I tried to subscribe, but I haven't seen my credit card hit yet. I'll check into it.

Posted by: davidc at October 8, 2009 1:16 PM

Donated.

Keep blegging. It works for NPR, although they get a lot of gubmint loot also.

Posted by: chuckR at October 8, 2009 3:44 PM

Hey, why not go for a legislative grant? Everyone else gets 'em.

Rub and tug, baby!

Posted by: Patrick at October 8, 2009 7:22 PM

I'm curious as to how much the site costs, I've run sites with tens of gigabytes of monthly traffic for less money than I donated myself on your first request of the week.

Is AnchorRising a for-profit venture?

Posted by: mangeek at October 8, 2009 8:15 PM

Well, the hosting costs are a few times your donation, with pretty much unlimited capacity. (We use a lot of server space.) But the hosting costs are not all (or even most) of the investment required each year.

We're "for profit" in the sense that we're not "non-profit." We made that decision mainly in order to preserve our freedom from the sometimes tricky rules of avoiding taxes.

Posted by: Justin Katz at October 8, 2009 8:35 PM

I see. Is the site really that big? I guess I have no idea what the back-end is, so it could be monstrous. I just figured Wordpress for the dynamic content + pictures at Flickr, video at YouTube + cheap 1and1 hosting account = not much space/bandwidth.

Of course, you might have a huge readership... Which I suppose is cool. Get any hits from the State House?

Posted by: mangeek at October 9, 2009 12:23 AM
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