A few days ago we launched a campaign to raise $20,000 between now and August 15 to pay for the build and launch of AMERICAblog 2.0, an updated and upgraded version of AMERICAblog that will offer you far more content and options. We've already raised 1/4 of that money, over $5,000, but we need to raise more. Here's why.
Among the things we plan for AMERICAblog 2.0:
- Every one of you will be able to create your own blog (diary) and host it on AMERICAblog for free.
- We'll have a separate home page dedicated to YOUR blog content, and visitors will be able to vote on the user-created content they like best.
- More up-to-the-minute news on the AMERICAblog home page.
- More open threads.
- Better ability to ban trolls, for good.
- Enhanced social networking, so you can better organize and fraternize amongst yourselves.
- Polls.
- Email action alerts to harness the power of our community.
The goal, quite simply, is to make the blog more interesting and fun for you, and more powerful for our community.
But we need your help to do it. As I've detailed at the top of this page, with a highly-trafficked blog like AMERICAblog - we get 2.5 million page views a month (and spikes in traffic three times that) - it costs real money to build a site that won't crash six months (or six days) after we build it, and especially one that can handle the expected traffic surge come next election. The detailed breakdown of the budget is at the top of the page, but the total comes to $20,000.
As an aside, you may have noticed that I haven't done a fundraiser on the blog (for the blog) in a very long time. Our ad sales finally became sufficient to cover our costs. Well, ad sales have plummeted the past three months - there isn't a single ad on the site right now that is being paid for (update: we just sold one ad for $800 - that's great, but it's not going to break the bank). That means my salary, the salary I pay my writers (and I do pay my writers, to the tune of $30,000 collectively last year), is coming out of my savings and other work outside of the blog. But still, I'm not asking for your donation for our salaries, or for anything else unrelated to AMERICAblog 2.0. I've started consulting again to help cover those costs. I'm asking you to contribute to a fund that we will use to rebuild AMERICAblog into an even more powerful, more exciting, and hopefully even more fun community (as Al Gore would say, I'm putting your donations into a lock-box for the build and launch of the new blog).
And finally, as a small token of our appreciation, everyone who donates to the AMERICAblog 2.0 campaign will be invited to be a beta tester for the new site. That means that before we launch, we'll give a few (or a lot of) guinea pigs a sneak preview of the blog so they can play with it and test it in order to make sure it works as advertised. You aren't obligated to help, but if you'd like to, we'd welcome the aide.
We've done a lot of great work together since our launch over three years ago. We started by taking on Mary Cheney and making her a household word in order to shame the Bush administration for their gay-baiting, we outed GannonGuckert's extracurricular activities, we challenged Microsoft and Ford when they caved to anti-gay religious right bigots (and we won), we highlighted the perils of cell phone privacy (or the lack thereof) by buying Wesley Clark's cell phone records. We also raised money for a number of needy causes, including $5400 for the American service member who was forced to pay for his own body armor. And finally, we raised over $100,000 for Democratic candidates last election with only 2 weeks of fundraising.
I'm proud of what we've all created together, and look forward to all that we can do in the future. If you like what you see, if you enjoy the community we've built here, and if you agree that we're finally at a turning point in taking back our government and our country, then I hope you'll join us in our campaign to raise $20,000 for AMERICAblog 2.0
You can donate quite easily and safely online via this link.
You can also write a check to "John Aravosis" and send it to:
PO Box 21336
Washington, DC 20009
Note: Donations are not tax-deductible, and I cannot cash checks made out to "AMERICAblog" - please make the checks out to "John Aravosis."
Thank you in advance, and again, for all of your generosity and support in building a really unique community. But more importantly, thank you for believing that your individual and collective voices CAN make a difference. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, it's the only thing that ever has.
Or, if Margaret Mead isn't your cup of tea, perhaps the following descriptions of AMERICAblog will inspire your generosity:
"Peppered with obscenity" - Concerned Women for America (the men at the)JOHN
"A particularly angry activist" - Family Research Council
"Bunch of wackos" - Rush Limbaugh
PS Dr. Laura hates us too.
Main & gay blog