Posted by Most of you know that this website is largely funded by donations. There are a few ads, but most of the good stuff that appears on the site appears because a few dozen patrons pledge a bit of money each month and that money gives us an excuse to spend time writing about part-time bowlers or Mike Atherton getting run-out for 99 in 1993 or whatever.
This crowdfunding is done through Patreon and back when we launched our campaign, all of the monthly funding ‘tiers’ were priced in US dollars. This was slightly annoying because we do not live in the United States and do not pay for things in US dollars, but that’s the way the site was set up and at the time it was our only option.
Patreon is a good and useful thing for people undertaking creative endeavours though and as such it has become internationally popular. This means that they’ve started allowing pricing and payments in other currencies too.
As a little over half of our readership is from the UK and we too are based in the UK, it seemed to make sense to switch to GBP, so that’s what we’ve done.
What does this mean?
Well it doesn’t have to mean anything. If you’re currently a patron paying $1 a month and you want to carry on paying $1 a month, you can carry on doing that – you don’t have to change a thing.
If however you’re feeling generous or nationalistic or something, please feel free to increase your pledge to £1 because then we won’t have to pay a conversion fee on it. The same goes for all the other funding tiers.
Quite a lot of you randomly increased your pledges after we posted about this change on Patreon earlier in the week. Thanks very much for that.
You can also make payments in Euros now, if that’s of any use to you.
Patreon do provide an option for us to offer people a discount if they pledge for a year. We seriously considered this and then realised that offering a discount on an entirely voluntary amount doesn’t actually make any sense.
Our funding tiers
Here’s a link to our Patreon page.
We have three monthly funding tiers, but you can actually pledge any amount you want (over $1/£1).
- Shiny coin – £1 a month
- Have one on me – £2.70 a month
- Honorific – £10 a month
The last one is the only one that delivers any kind of benefit (you get to become Sir or Dame in the comments section) and pretty much everyone who pledges that amount has declined that benefit.
Far and away our most popular funding tier is the “Have one on me – buy King Cricket a pint” tier. The price of this one – the cost of a pint in our local about eight years ago – is now correct.
The standard “Have one on me” price is quite the bargain, so feel free to pledge slightly more if you wish us to be adequately watered.
How has the campaign gone?
Pretty well.
We’re largely devoting the additional time to features so it’s quite easy to measure what your pledges have done for the site. (And it’s worth pointing out that even £1 a month adds up to a useful extra bit of time over the course of a whole year.)
In the 14 months since we launched the campaign, we’ve done about 25 features, plus all the Sim Series stuff.
We’d have done maybe half a dozen features without the crowdfunding – probably not even that – and each of them would have been slightly crapper as well. So all in all, good stuff. Thanks.
You can pledge here if you’re not already a patron and fancy helping out.
You can also sign up for our email for free if you don’t already get it.
I’m not sure I understood you correctly- do you have to pay something from your pocket if it’s in USD? If that’s the case, I’ll gladly change it. If not, I’d much rather leave it alone as I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten my password for the Patreon site.
Not had a GBP month yet but pretty sure we now pay a fee for USD pledges, yes. The change would be appreciated but you won’t be exiled from the realm or anything if you can’t be arsed.
I wondered at first whether “features” might mean “features of the website” such as “built-in games that might require hiring someone to fix” but then I realised David Capel is sadly no longer with us and using him as the funny card would now make me feel bad about himself, plus all the controversy that the word “Trumps” inevitably brings with it, so I shall refrain from my occasional begging act. Wasted several merry hours on it while it lasted though. Top stuff.
Alas we are not yet at a “hiring people” level of funding.
£2.70 – yeah, completely just the totally normal price of a pint, nothing to do with A Certain Someone’s top first class score at all.
I was trying to tweak mine to the cost of my previous couple of USD amounts, so that it cost me the same but you get the extra few pence instead of them going on conversion charges, but it will only let me go to certain amounts, otherwise I get a disappointed fox appearing telling me that ‘something has gone wrong’, so I’ve changed it to a round amount. If I can figure how to change it again without disappointing the fox, I’ll try again.
How do you think we decided on our local?
Pretty sure you should be able to get more angular amounts because Geoff and Adam from The Final Word do Nerd Pledge where people do exactly what you just did with the £2.70.
I went for the “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” pledge so didn’t attempt mucking around with the numbers. I’ve had enough sources of aggravation this week, so do not regret my approach.
I was trying to find the antonym for nerd just now, which led me to this wonderful Venn, which I’m sure will please many KC readers:
https://mashable.com/2009/09/07/nerd-venn-diagram
Based on that Venn, I think the approach I used was “dweeb” rather than “nerd”.
Cheers!
Done. I think. Certainly no disappointed foxes, the prospect of which was causing some anxiety.
Cheers!
Meanwhile Langer has thrown an Elite Tantrum at David Boon over a spirit-of-the-rules issue. These are moments of joy to cling to.
Done yer maj.
Cheers!