One last note before the New Year begins. When I was asked a little less than a year ago what our ambition was for revenue in 2013, I grabbed a number out of the air. It was our combined editorial budget at the Beast in 2012, which was $900K. Maybe it was unreasonable to think we could make the same salaries independent as we did under a corporate umbrella; maybe I should have made the goal higher – because we also had to find staff and time and resources in 2013 to do all the administrative, business and technical work that the Beast had done for us; maybe I should have set the goal considerably higher if we were able to corrall enough resources to start commissioning and publishing more long-form pieces. But, hey, I didn’t know what to expect, and $900K seemed fair enough if I had to pick.
Well, we kinda did it. As the hours tick down on 2013, here’s a graph of our new subscriber revenue month by month, after the initial massive wave:
That’s what you call a strong finish. We end the calendar year with gross subscription revenue of $851K. We have no debt. We have almost 34,000 subscribers. Almost 9,000 of them are now on auto-renew, and if our 25,000 original supporters renew next year in numbers comparable with the very beginning, then we’ll finally have a solid basis for a ongoing, entirely-online blogazine with no sponsored content and (so far) no advertizing.
To coin a very 2012 phrase: you built that. And we’re incredibly grateful to live in it.
Thank you. And a very Happy New Year from all of us – me, Patrick, Chris, Jessie, Matt, Alice, Chas, Brian, Brendan, Jonah and Tracy – to every single one of you.
The Dish 