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Posted on 07.01.09 by Thomas L. Knapp
Update, 07/01/09: Thanks to HW, who became final new subscribing contributor to sign on during this drive! HW’s $5/month commitment brings our total recurring revenues to $412.50 against our goal of $2000 (I’ve been accidentally misreporting our numbers $5 to the low side for several days, and just caught it on the wrap-up). This drive is now OVER, which means you’ll stop seeing daily updates, etc. Thanks to everyone who supports the freedom movement’s daily newspaper! Here’s what comes next: - Because we didn’t reach our goal of $2000 per month in recurring revenues, we’ll continue to run lower-impact monthly fundraisers in an attempt to make up the difference between what’s coming in and what we’re trying to bring in. Our July goal is $1587. You can see our progress (and click through to help) at rationalreview.chipin.com. - We’ll also be focusing on how increasing advertising revenues. This may mean that you see more ads, or that those ads are more prominently placed. Once we get those ad revenues up to $100 per month, we’ll start reducing our fundraising goals by the previous month’s ad revenues. Thanks again to all of you who continue to support RRND/FND! - TLK —– Dear readers, As promised, I’ve tried to keep RRND/FND’s fundraising activities “low visibility, low pressure” for the last few months. I was even hoping to push this particular fundraiser farther down the road, but recent events have forced my hand. If my smooth sales pitch has already sold you, click here to skip the dirty details and go directly to the part where you send us money. The dirty details Since late 2004, Rational Review News Digest has “re-branded” itself as Freedom News Daily for a separate audience, on behalf of the International Society for Individual Liberty. We intend to continue doing so. Since some time in 2005, ISIL has paid us — to the tune of $1,000 a month — to produce FND. Due to its own financial requirements and fundraising imperatives, ISIL has had to at least temporarily cease that support. Repeat after me three times: This is not a divorce. It’s not even a breakup. We remain on good terms with ISIL. We intend to continue serving up daily helpings of Freedom News Daily to ISIL’s web, email and Facebook readers. But, as you can see, this puts a big dent in our already very understated revenue model. Here’s how it breaks down: Our current revenue model calls for us to bring in $2,000 a month. Before transaction fees, web hosting, etc., that would come to $720 per month in pay for our one full-time staffer (me), $360 per month for our three part-time editors (R. Lee Wrights, Mary Lou Seymour and Steve Trinward), and $200 per month for our tech support guy (Brad Spangler). As you can see, we’re not in this to get rich. But, as I’ve mentioned before, we have to eat. Of course, we generally don’t bring in $2,000 a month. Until lately, we brought in $1,000 a month from ISIL, $237.50 per month (as of right now) in recurring payments from our beloved “subscribing donors,” an average of, oh, $25 per month in advertising commissions, and whatever else people send in “one-time” or “occasional” payments that aren’t tied to our “subscribing donor” system (another amount that fluctuates). On average, call it $1300-1500 per month — total. That amount just went down to $300-500 per month with the ISIL developments. Time to get it back up, and moreover on a reliable basis. That means increasing our number of “subscribing contributors” … those of you who are willing to commit to sending $2.50, $5.00, $10, or $20 every month. Goal: Get our “subscribing contributor” number from $237.50 per month to $2,000 per month by the end of June. Does that sound hard? It shouldn’t. Our total readership via email, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter comes to nearly 7,100 readers. That’s excluding web edition readers. RRND’s web statistics say we exceed 2,000 unique visitors per day; I don’t have stats for ISIL’s web edition of FND. I could make a good case for there being 10,000 daily consumers of this newsletter. Even excluding all duplicates, I think it’s a fair bet that we’re talking about more than 5,000 daily readers. If only 705 of you were to sign up at our $2.50 per month level, we’d be there. So, I’m going to drag out the dreaded “thermometer” graphic and start hectoring you on a daily basis to get us there. Sound familiar? Let’s not have another one of those six-month ordeals. The sweetener is this: If we can make this goal and stay within shouting distance of it (e.g. we don’t drop down below, say, $1,800 per month in “subscribing contributor” revenues), we’ll be content to do a short (probably one week long) “push it up a little” fundraiser once a year instead of coming back at you again and again with short-term goals that end up taking months to meet. [Note: I’ve moved the thermometer graphic “up top”] And here’s where you click to make things happen:
I’ll be back with daily updates and neat little factoids (”our lowest subscribing donor level costs less than a large iced white chocolate mocha latte at StarbucksTM” and such) … when you get tired of seeing them, you know where to click. Yours in liberty, Filed under: Feature Articles and RRND News | | |||||||
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Posted on 06.19.09 by Thomas L. Knapp
Dear readers, Over time, we’ve tried to make it easy to contribute to RRND/FND in an automatic/recurring way, with optional levels ranging from $2.50 per month to $20 per month. There’s a reason for the lowest level being $2.50 instead of, say, $1.00: PayPal charges transaction fees of 30 cents plus a small percentage of the total. From a $1.00 payment, less than 70 cents would actually reach RRND. However, I’ve always wanted to offer a $1.00 per month level. PayPal’s subscription function got more flexible awhile back — or maybe it’s always been that way and I just missed it until recently — and by George, I think I’ve got it. Welcome, Ladies and Gents, to the miracle science of quarterly billing! Our new level of recurring support — The Buck Starts Here Club — lets you support RRND/FND to the tune of one dollar per month without transaction fees eating up more than 30% of that dollar before it ever reaches us. The long and short of it is $3, billed every three months. I’ve already added this level to our standard “subscribing contributor options” menu, but here it is a la carte for your convenience. This level of support is recommended for those who: - Value RRND/FND at one dollar a month; and/or - Can only afford one dollar a month; and/or - Can’t, or prefer not to, fork over $12 in one swell foop. Thanks, of course, to all of you who financially support the freedom movement’s daily newspaper at any level or frequency. We’ll continue to look into new and more convenient options to encourage that support. Yours in liberty, Tom Knapp Filed under: Feature Articles and Twitter-Worthy | |
Posted on 05.27.09 by J. Neil Schulman
I’m an anarchist. I’m supposed to be opposed to authority; but really, the commitment only requires me to oppose the State, because it is coercive. What of the authority of words then? It’s been pointed out to me that unlike the French I owe no allegiance to a government bureau that decides “Le Car” is a bastardization of their language, or forbids the naming of children unless the name appears on an officially sanctioned list. I opened this comment with a quotation from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” but I just as easily could have begun with a quote from Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” And we are behind the looking glass, my friends. When no common agreement can be reached on what a word means, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world — and I don’t mean anarchism, which is a self-organizing system seeking a natural order. I mean the inability to communicate through language because words have no fixed meaning thus there is no longer the possibility of reasoned discussion, only of spin and propaganda. Filed under: Guest Columns | |
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Posted on 05.14.09 by J. Neil Schulman
Bill Maher should have taken a course in firing full-auto weapons at Front Sight before he made his anti-religion documentary Religulous, because his method of shooting is what the military likes to call “spray and pray.” Maher points his weapon — in this case a movie camera instead of an M-16 — in the general direction he thinks the enemy is then fires wildly. The problem is that as a documentarian Bill Maher ignores both weapons safety procedures and military rules of engagement. Bill Maher fails to correctly identify his targets before he puts his finger on the trigger and fires. So while he can be scored for some direct hits, he both creates a lot of collateral damage and leaves half the real enemy unscathed. Filed under: Guest Columns | |
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Posted on 05.13.09 by Michelle L
My twin sister and I will be celebrating our 54th birthday this week; or as she likes to say “the silver anniversary of our 29th birthday.” As is often the case, this causes me to look back at both past birthdays as well as childhood memories in general — I think people who have attained a certain number of birthdays probably do the same. And because we grew up in a time that seemed to be trying to straddle the line between the puritanical fifties and the upheaval of the seventies, it isn’t hard to pinpoint exact moments in time with amazing clarity (given the fact that these days I’m doing good to remember where I put my glasses). (more…) Filed under: Guest Columns | |
