A personal plea from the Admins [View all]

If you've been around DU for a while, you'll know that we've always tried to be respectful in the way we fundraise. We don't send out desperate emails begging for cash; we limit our fund drives to two one-week periods per year (and we try to make those two weeks fun); and you get something in exchange for your contribution -- a Star Membership with additional benefits. For this, we don't force you to pay a monthly fee which we gradually increase over time; we've always asked you to pay what you want, which can be as little as one dollar per year.

Thanks to the many generous DUers who purchase Star Memberships, this fundraising method, combined with standard web advertising, has served us just fine for two decades -- but recently, things have changed, and unfortunately not for the better. The fact is that advertising brings in quite a bit more revenue than Star Memberships -- it's something like an 80/20 split. And over the past couple of years, for macroeconomic reasons, ad rates (the amount that advertisers will pay to advertise on a website) started to fall -- and then fell, and fell.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, the social media giants deemphasized political content (wisely, many would argue). Even though we've never made it a priority to have a big social media presence, these global trends still affected traffic to DU -- and revenue -- just as they've affected many other independent sites recently, and even mainstream newsrooms.

I think some people have the impression that the DU Admins are independently wealthy and that this is all just a bit of a lark for us, but the truth is that DU is our job -- it's literally what we do for a living. We work hard at it every day, and we are incredibly grateful for the full time work it has provided us with, which we in turn put back into the site to keep it running, and improving, for you.

But like most people, we pretty much live paycheck to paycheck. And the problem is that the recent collapse in ad rates means that I haven't received that paycheck in a couple of months, and if things take too long to improve, I won't be able to give Elad his paycheck soon either.

What does this mean for DU? Well, we still make enough money to keep the servers turned on, so DU isn’t going anywhere. That’s not a problem.

But if Elad and I have to find other work so we can pay our own bills, it does mean we won’t be able to continue development on DU, right as we’d got it to the point where we were done fixing things and ready to start taking feature requests. There wouldn't be any more Pics Of The Moment. And more worryingly, emergency breakdowns, or issues that need immediate attention, would take longer to resolve because we wouldn't be here to keep an eye on the site every day. If we can't reliably conduct regular maintenance and stay on top of bugs, it really could cause problems and service interruptions that we can't immediately start working to fix. We do not want things to be this way! But there are only so many hours in a day that we can work on DU, and if we can't afford to pay our bills, we'll have no choice.

And so right now, we really need your help. I want to be clear: We are hopeful that ad rates, and therefore DU's overall financial situation, will improve as the year goes on. The trend lines are pointing in the right direction. But we don't know how long it will take before things get back on track, and we don't want to have to leave DU in the lurch, especially when we've got a presidential election coming up.

As mentioned at the top, I think most of you have known us long enough to know that this isn't some Trump-style BS just to cash in. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but it is what it is. So if you value what we do, please consider kicking in to the fund drive. What we would really like to see is an increase in monthly subscriptions, because that would help to stabilize our budget. But any assistance you can give us would be greatly appreciated:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/star

Thanks for reading

EarlG, on behalf of Elad -- the DU Administrators