Business News Media

Drowned In Sound raising money via Patreon

By | Published on Monday 20 April 2015

Drowned In Sound

Drowned In Sound has announced that it is using crowd-funding site Patreon to ensure its long-term future.

As previously reported, Patreon is a website that allows users to ‘subscribe’ to specific creators signed up to the service. A person states how much they wish to pay each time a creator creates something (within certain limits), and that money is passed over to the creator when their creation is created. The content is not actually distributed through the site – said content generally being freely available online.

Announcing the news last week, founder Sean Adams said: “Despite around half a million people visiting the site each month, we are finding it increasingly difficult to cover our running costs (it is £1500 a month just for our server bill!), let alone pay developers to fix various niggles with the website or pay for the majority of our submissions”.

This follows an appeal to users of the site a year ago to help cover bills for running costs, though presumably the hope is that going with Patreon will bypass the need for such appeals in the future and build a more sustainable donations-based income stream.

Adams continued: “We are reliant on advertising to keep going. Advertising is a bit unreliable to say the least and various things – from social networks driving the prices down to a lack of budget to invest in video ‘content’ – conspire against sites like ours”.

“The seasonal shifts in advertising really don’t help. Some months we sell all of our available inventory and our ad agency turn people away, whereas others we could use about 75% more ads. And yes, we do realise that this is boring, and we would far rather not have to think about it, let alone have wasted our time typing this paragraph, instead of another para about how awesome Lizzo is”.

He’s right, Lizzo is awesome. Find out more about how you can donate to DiS though Patreon here.



READ MORE ABOUT: |