Webathon Update: 31 Hours Left; 147 Donors and $84,000 Short!
Time for a frank national conversation about our fundraising numbers
So here's the good news, in a world plagued anew by the fascism of Donald Trump. As of 4:53 p.m. ET, our 8th annual Webathon—in which we ask you, beloved reader, to voluntarily spread the funding base for our libertarian news/analysis/commentary juggernaut—has already on this penultimate day zoomed past our second-highest-ever total number of donors: 1,031, well over 2013's total of 636. Not only that, our 2015 fundraising total is also already the second-highest ever, narrowly beating out 2013, $166,000 to $163,000.
For this we all thank you, from the bottom of our dark yet optimistic libertarian hearts. And like Howard Dean saying "Free speech is good," you just know this is gonna be followed by a big but.
We are short, tantalizingly short, of last year's totals, let alone this year's ambitions. We need you to put down the vape pen and/or mug of IPA (I mean, for like 90 seconds) and donate to Reason right the hell now!
Here are some numbers, for those of you (cough) whose frontal lobes are best tickled through gratuitous digitry:
2008: 152 donors, $13,000 (rounding to nearest thousand here).
2009: 625 donors, $56,000
2010: 505 donors, $47,000
2011: 522 donors, $69,000
2012: 341 donors, $49,000
2013: 636 donors, $163,000
2014: 1,178 donors, $224,000
2015: 1,031 donors, $166,000 (with 31 hours to go)
Obviously, we chose Going Big over Going Home in our fundraising target of $250,000 this year, mostly BECAUSE FREEDOM, but also because our friends at Mother Jones in their concurrent fundraising drive are asking for $200,000, and we seek to beat Mother Jones like a gong.
Really, though, we're asking for the quarter-mil because it was the next highest round number, and we think we've had a good year, dammit! To wit:
* Web traffic up 14%, to 3.9 million monthly visits, in Fiscal Year 2015.
* More than 40% of that web traffic was composed of humanoids younger than 35. In other words, Snake People. While every single think tank and opinion magazine and editorial page and cable news show sits around agonizing over how to get even a fraction of people with a different demographic than Matt's dad to consume their product, Reason is constantly grokking Millenials. Right in the face.
* Video views for Reason TV on YouTube and Facebook up 8%, to 1.1 million per month.
* Magazine circulation up ever so slightly, to 47,600. Believe me, in the print-mag business, flat, consistent circulation (which we've had going on a decade) is a positive, especially if you're getting the aforementioned eyeballs online.
Click here for reader/donor testimonials, and work your way backward at this link for other sound arguments for helping finance our journalism, but for now I want to focus your mind on numbers: We need 147 new donors in the next 31 hours to at least tie last year's record. This is not unheard of: Last year in the last 24 hours alone we netted 268 donations, worth $60,000.
So donate to Reason right the hell now.
If those 147 donors pledge $200 each, that is totally awesome, and we thank you so much it hurts our thankal chords, but that still leaves us $28,000 short of last year's total, let alone this year's audacious goal. We need a few random monocle-wearers and/or early Bitcoin adopters to get in the game, either with a challenge grant (thanks, the last one was subscribed!) or just a big-ass gift.
C'mon, it's fun! Don't you want to see that rectangle in the upper right go full-on orange? Don't you want to see your name in the scrolling banner up top? Don't you want Lobster Girl 2.0 to turn that frown upside-down?
Then donate to Reason right the hell now.
Giving levels, swags, forms, whatever, all of it here. These numbers are doable, people. BE THE SPARE CHANGE WE ARE LOOKING FOR!! And thanks….