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I Need Your Help

Updated: May 14, 2017 14:02
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help

It seems every time we get big corporate sponsor for the site, readers get upset about it. And I get it, if it was up to me, I would never run an ad again. I don’t love having to do it. But for me to not have ads, it’s gonna take a lot of help from you. I’m hoping you’ll donate at least $6 a month (monthly donations are better than one time donations because it better allows us to have a predictable budget).

I don’t think many of my readers realize how expensive it is to run BrokeAssStuart.com. I pay out thousands of dollars a month. In fact, I’m in a lot of debt for doing so. Even all my bartending tips and the money I make from freelance writing goes to keeping this thing afloat.

For every article you read (for free) I pay for author fees, editor fees, hosting fees, website maintenance, domain name renewals, electricity, and more. And I don’t even pay my writers as well as they deserve, because I can’t afford to.

Spreading the word about social justice issues doesn’t pay the bills. Neither does helping raise the rallying cry when your favorite bar or restaurant closes down. Listing your event on our calendar to make sure it’s successful is something we do for free.

I get that this is the cost of doing business, but the flip side is that nearly all media, from music to writing to photography, is now expected to be free. So the traditional business model has failed, but a new sustainable one for media doesn’t exactly exist yet.

Nearly every single media outlet you read is either funded by venture capital or owned by a media conglomerate. Broke-Ass Stuart is 100% independent, which is difficult considering I pay a lot of people and I’m in debt from doing this.

So wanna help this thing survive? Please start kicking in a monthly amount. If every single person who followed my FB page donated $6 a month, I’d be able to afford the best journalists in the world, be able to expand to a bunch of cities, and never have to run an ad again. Hell if even 10% of my readers kicked in $6 a month I would probably never have to run an ad again. But we all know the likelihood of this isn’t very high.

The truth of the matter is that if you don’t want to kick in, and you don’t want me to have advertisers, then you can’t expect my website to continue to exist.

Thanks for understanding and thanks for donating.

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Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Stuart Schuffman, aka Broke-Ass Stuart, is a travel writer, poet, TV host, activist, and general shit-stirrer. His website BrokeAssStuart.com is one of the most influential arts & culture sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and his freelance writing has been featured in Lonely Planet, Conde Nast Traveler, The Bold Italic, Geek.com and too many other outlets to remember. His weekly column, Broke-Ass City, appears every other Thursday in the San Francisco Examiner. Stuart’s writing has been translated into four languages. In 2011 Stuart created and hosted the travel show Young, Broke, and Beautiful on IFC and in 2015 he ran for Mayor of San Francisco and got nearly 20k votes.

He's been called "an Underground legend": SF Chronicle, "an SF cult hero":SF Bay Guardian, and "the chief of cheap": Time Out New York.