I Need Your Help

It’s getting incredibly difficult and expensive to run this site and to be honest, I don’t really know what else to do. There are many days where I’m at my wits end trying to figure out how to continue to fund it.

I know that BrokeAssStuart.com is an important resource for the community and as one of the only independent media outlets left in the Bay Area, a much needed voice. But we’ve gotten to the point where, for BAS to continue to exist, it’s gonna take a lot of help from you.

I’m hoping you’ll become a member of my Patreon for least $6 a month. Monthly support is better than one time donations because it better allows us to have a predictable budget, plus it allows you to get some really cool perks!

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. See the little ads on this site? They have to get like 1500 views to make a single dollar!

Here’s a breakdown of what my average monthly costs are just to give you an idea:

Editors and Contractors (i.e. social media help, SEO help etc.): $2700 a month
Writers: $1000 a month
Legal and Accounting: $350 a month
Technology (Mailchimp, web hosting etc): $350 a month

That’s almost $4500 a month! And I don’t even pay my writers and editors as well as they deserve, because I simply can’t afford to.

Currently we’re bringing in around $1500 a month from Patreon and our supporters on PayPal. This is fantastic and I am SO grateful to everyone who supports us. But as you can see, we still need another $3,100 or so a month. This means we spend far more time trying to find advertisers than we do focusing on bringing you the best content.

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, then we can’t expect this website to continue to exist. And I’m starting to worry about if it still can.

Thanks for understanding and thanks for becoming a supporter.

I love you.

– Stuart