Cord Cutters News (CCN) is growing, as we do more than ever before. With growth comes more expenses. (Don’t worry- we will always be 100% free).
Two years ago I left my job and started working on Cord Cutters News full time. I do this to help millions of people save money and break free from high monthly bills; however, I still have monthly bills and need to support my family.
So to help cover costs and, more importantly, to help the site grow, we have been looking at adding new revenue options. Every week I get messages from ad companies asking to put more ads—often the more annoying ads like pop-ups—on my site. That is definitely not what I want to do. Plus, sadly, ads don’t bring in revenue like they used to because more and more people use ad blockers. (I don’t think people know the damage they do to small sites with ad blockers.)
Even more painful, Amazon announced that its affiliate program is cutting what it pays sites like CCN. (This was not aimed at us, Amazon just redid the payouts for everyone and, unfortunately, it will lower what we get.)
So after many readers suggested it, we are taking donations. Cord Cutters News will always be 100% free. But although it is free, we would greatly appreciate a donation if you enjoy and have been helped by CCN. We will be using Patreon to allow our readers to support CCN for as little as $1 a month.
Want to support CCN? Click HERE to find out about Patreon or send a one-time donation to our PayPal account.
Now if donating is not what you are interested in please consider turning off our ad blocker on CCN.
So what is all this money going to? The following is a short list (I’m sure I am missing something):
- Posting 3 to 5 stories a day 365 days a year all about cord cutting
- Writing and distributing a weekly newsletter on all things cord cutting
- Running and managing the Cord Cutting Tech Support Facebook group; this takes a lot of hours to keep spam out and keep it on topic
- Running our social media on Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, etc.
- Producing weekly Facebook Live and YouTube Live Q&As to answer your cord cutting questions
- Reading/Answering thousands of emails every week
- Traveling to conventions, such as CES, SXSW, and AEB, to cover all things cord cutting; this easily costs $1,000 per trip for food, hotel, flight, etc.
- Let’s not forget the fact that I’m a sole proprietor, which means I pay crazy high taxes.
We also have monthly costs such as the following:
- Website hosting. We get a lot of traffic and this is not cheap. Yes, I did shop around for the cheapest/best option out there.
- Editor. I pay a freelance editor to help bring you high quality posts.
- Website help. We have a freelance website guy who helps improve the website and fixes issues.
- Miscellaneous expenses. These include buying review units and equipment like cameras and memory cards, etc.
- Business Class Internet. For unlimited data and more consistent performance because when you are trying to break news you need to make sure the Internet works.
- PO Box. This is required by law because we need an address on our newsletter.
- Random costs. There are many other random costs like getting my work PC power supply fixed last year when it went out. You never know when a cost will pop up.
So what will you get from these donations?
We have a few things we want to do to help grow the site, but they all cost money.
If we can hit $2,000 a month in donations we would first like to publish a daily cord cutting newsletter. Some members have used Word Press email notifications, but as we post more often some are getting annoyed about receiving 5 or 6 emails a day. We want to offer a daily email newsletter with the previous days’ stories sent every Tuesday through Saturday morning. (Monday will still be the big weekly newsletter.)
This will be a new newsletter that you will have to signup for.
I would also like to hire some full-time site help. Just running the social media and keeping it free from spam and trouble makers takes 3-plus hours a day. Sometimes more… Writing posts takes a lot of effort—not only the time writing the posts but also digging up stories, contacting companies, and doing our very best to make sure content is accurate.
I would love to help create a job for someone and in turn get assistance so I can do even more to help people break free from high cable TV bills; however, this costs money and with the new higher costs and lower payouts from places such as Amazon it is something I don’t think I can do yet.
Finally, the more we get the more time I can put into CCN, because it will free me up from having to find revenue to support the site. I would also like to someday redo the website to load faster and offer new features. This all costs money.
So what do you think? Would you donate a $1 or more a month to support CCN? If you are not able to donate, please consider turning off your ad blocker. Thank you for your time and consideration.
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