Oh boy, it’s the 15th! Time to remind you all how you can and why you should donate to the blog. And I signed up with a new system that should allow me to accept payments from overseas (oh boy!).
When you are in a restaurant and you tip your waitress, it tells her two things. First, “I appreciate you and your work, I value the pleasure you have added to my life, and I am showing that by putting a monetary value on it”. And second, “I know you receive less than a living wage for your work with the expectation that you will receive money through tips, I acknowledge and respect that social contract.”
The same thing is true here! If you donate money to me, you are telling me that my work has value to you. And you are helping me off-set the blog costs following the social contract between website and audience that expects donations.
That social contract may sound weird to you, but I swear it is a thing! Since the bottom dropped out of the online ad world, people are working for tips (essentially). I get around 100,000 views a month, which sounds great. But it nets me $50 a month in advertising profits. Like that waitress that counts on tips, I need the monthly donations from you in order to keep the blog afloat. Ad money just doesn’t do it.
There are now THREE ways you can donate! You can set up a recurring donation through Patreon, the link is below. If you do that, I will send you a lovely Margaret created card every month:
https://www.patreon.com/dontcallitbollywood
You can also set up a recurring donation through Stripe, which is supposed to allow for international transactions easily, including India (we’ll see):
Or you can do a one time donation of $1 $2 $20 $200, whatever you feel like, right here:
Donation
Donate to DCIB
$1.00
dontcallitbollywood 
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Tempus fugit! Has it been a month already? It seems like this important notice goes up every other day.
Anyway, I’m on it!
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I made mine monthly, yeah??
Also, perhaps a few tasteful ads would net you more money. NOT the ones that make it impossible to read the damn page, but you do what you gotta do. You put A LOT of work into your site, you deserve to profit from your hard work.
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Yes, you did! That is why you should have already gotten a card from me for this month, and will get it every month moving forward.
Most sites now use general ad services. They follow you (the consumer) around the internet and give you whichever of their suite of ads your browsing habits say you might like. You will know you have arrived in Indian fandom when you start seeing ads for Indian companies 🙂 I work with WordAds, but I’ve done research and I wouldn’t make noticeably more if I switched to any other service.
Really this has all just opened my eyes to where the issues with current media are coming from. The Ad money is so tiny, websites have to start doing paid promotional articles and other scuzzy things in order to stay in business, or just be the paid mouthpiece of a rich man to stay afloat. There isn’t enough money in simply relying on the audience to keep you going. Especially since there is such a reluctance to pay any kind of subscription for content, that’s why you’ve probably noticed Wall Street Journal, Chronicle, NYT, all have little notices saying “please please pay us money” before you can click through to read their content. That’s what I find most tempting, more than ad sales, if I can scrap together the money to hire someone to design my website for me and move me off of WordPress, I might have the option of putting up a pay wall, so people would have to pay me something if they wanted to read what I wrote.
On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 6:50 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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