I’m gonna continue to embrace the desire for transparency about where money comes from and where it goes on the site, so this post includes a lot of details on that. But the very short version is: we need more revenue from member subscriptions in order to meet our monthly operating costs. If you’d like to start or increase a subscription, you can do that from the funding page . Thank you.1. Short-term: Getting back to a stable break-even pointWe have a significant shortfall to try to cover, about $7K/mo right now. If we can, through fundraising and other new revenue, get our monthly budget up to about $33K/mo, that will stabilize things and give us more flexibility to work immediately on long-term funding/revenue projects. $35K/mo would mean building back some savings as well. If we can close some fraction of that gap, it will at least give us more breathing room while we figure out how ultimately to deal with the shortfall or adjust to a permanently reduced budget and different staffing arrangements.2. On-going: covering new spendingIf we're able to stabilize finances and reach a point of steady month-to-month net income, there are several things we'd like to put most of that spare cash into:- Hiring additional mod staff (especially re: recent discussions about working toward a more diverse MeFi staff)- Professional development/consulting for existing staff and site processes (likewise see recent discussions)- New focused site development (paying frimble for more work; paying outside contractors for supplemental dev work)3. Long term: becoming a fully community-funded siteI've talked before about it being increasingly clear that community funding is what will make MetaFilter work financially in the long run; the last year only underscores that. If we're going to avoid these recurring ad revenue setbacks, we need to move from where we have been, of looking at community funding as a major supplement to the site's traditional ad-based revenue, to looking at the site as a fundamentally community-funded operation independent of the ad market.The baseline goal there for full financial independence from the ad market would be reaching $35K/mo in recurring community funding. It's a big step up from where we are now; whether and how quickly it'll be possible to reach that threshold, I don't know. But that's the goal we're setting our sights on for the long term.What's changed since this time last year:Mid-late 2018, our monthly revenue looked about like this:- Google Adsense: $14.2K/mo- Amazon affiliate: $4.2K/mo- Paypal contributions: $12.0K/mo- Stripe contributions: $4.5K/moCurrently, it looks like this:- Google Adsense: $7.8K/mo- Amazon affiliate: $3.1/mo- Paypal contributions: $10.1K/mo- Stripe contributions: $3.9K/mo- Carbon Ads: $1.0K/moThere's some month-to-month noise in those figures, but the general picture is correct: a drop from roughly $35K/mo to $26K/mo. I reduced my salary some last year and have kept it at that lower level since, and we managed to cut some incidental costs along the way, but there's also been some increase in insurance premiums vs. 2018. What it comes down to is we're running about $7K/mo short of break-even right now.The Adsense drop is by far the biggest thing, out of proportion with any dropoff in total site traffic. Amazon's falloff is also frustrating but they're a much smaller chunk of our revenue these days. Both PayPal and Stripe falloff are within what feels like normal attrition levels without us having done specific pushes to re-up or check in on funding since last year. I'll talk more about fundraising stuff below.The new Carbon income is welcome if a pretty small share of the picture. Those ads have felt like an okay compromise where they're running on the site; I'd be curious to hear any new thoughts, concerns, etc. about them now that we've had them running for several months.MetaFilter operates as a 24/7 moderation team + part time tech/dev person, with good living wages if not remotely "tech" wages. Almost all of our monthly budget goes to payroll for seven people: me, LobsterMitten, restless_nomad, taz, goodnewsfortheinsane, Eyebrows McGee, and frimble. The level of budget I've tried to maintain for us the last few years is enough to keep pay levels steady, though with incremental bits of belt-tightening along the way.Right now we're in a similar place to middle of last year: several thousand a month in shortfall and a few months before our savings (built up again some through community funding last summer, thank you all again because it means we have some time at all here) draws down to the point where we'd be operating at a critical threshold where our cash on hand isn't more than our monthly costs.So if we need to cut costs to get back to, or at least much closer to, a monthly break-even, there's a couple major cuts we can make without letting anyone go:1. Eliminating company-paid benefits costs. If we move those costs from company to employee responsibility, that'd reduce our total payroll costs by about $4K/mo.2. Across the board pay cuts. If we further cut pay proportionally for all staff by about 12%, that'd save us another $3K/mo.Whether those cuts are sustainable for anyone or everyone on staff long-term is a whole separate question, but in the short term we've discussed it as a team as a way to stop the bleeding and give us longer to plan for whatever comes next, if we're not able to close this current revenue gap.There's some ad strategies and ad products we haven't pursued on MetaFilter before. I'm revisiting some of those, as well as looking again at variations on some of the ad stuff we have been using. If there was easy and ethically palatable money out there we'd be on it already, but it's possible some of the stuff I've preferred to avoid would be okay enough to experiment with some and get community feedback on. I'll update folks about any such possibilities with MetaTalk announcements. If folks have additional ideas or particular things from past discussions they’d like to re-up, let us know.We've also talked before about outside fundraising, aiming for folks beyond just those who already follow MetaFilter closely and who will put up with our home-rolled funding pages. I'm going to revisit some of that. One big disappointment for me this last year on that front is a crowd-funding platform that was in development by some XOXO community folks; I'd hoped to try a MeFi page on it once it launched, but they ended up shutting the project down before launch because they weren't satisfied that it could be profitable in an ethical way. Hard decision by good folks trying to do the web well, which boy does that resonate.In the last month we've talked again about the possibility of hiring new staff to help build a more diverse MetaFilter team, specifically bringing on people of color. Folks have asked about the idea of doing fundraising specifically toward that goal, and I think that's a reasonable notion. We don't have a structure right now for doing any kind of partitioned giving, but we can talk about how that might work best, and I can have frimble look into what might work technically to support it as well.In thinking about this, we need to be conscious of:1. Durability of funding - We’d need to be able to offer a potential hire a job that will last, not just disappear or get a sharp pay cut after a few months. That'd mean something on the order of $2500/mo in new ongoing funding for a part-time position, more for full-time. It's important to me that we not hire someone without being able to assure them of some job stability.2. Stability of site situation - The site needs enough baseline stability to make it feel like we’re bringing a new person into a reasonably good situation. If we're making major cuts and returning to 60+ hour work weeks as the norm, that’s not a great situation to put someone new into, on top of the training and stresses any new mod faces.But those are concerns, not show-stoppers. They're addressable, and I would like to talk it out more with folks especially as we see where we are over the next days and weeks.I apologize for letting things go as long as they have without a formal update on site finances. We carried through the rest of 2018 in pretty good shape after last year's update and fundraising; this year started out alright but has seen significant ad money downturn in the last few months. I talked last year about wanting to make more regular updates. I didn't get that done.It's a theme with recent MetaTalk discussions that the mounting stresses and difficulties of the last few years have led to us, and to me, being so busy putting out fires that we've gotten distracted from some larger site goals, and more frequent financial updates was one of those goals. I'm sorry that it fell by the wayside this last year.So I'm committing to us having a financial update at least quarterly. October 15, January 15, April 15, July 15, repeating. There may be other updates in the spaces between as necessary or useful, but I want to set that explicit expectation as a minimum starting now. Y'all should know how things are going, even if the news is just "pretty steady still" but especially if there's any inkling of trouble or downturn. Regular updates will also almost certainly help cut back on incidental recurring payment losses (people's cards expire, etc).We haven't given a thorough overview of what mod schedules are like in a while, so I want to sketch out how this stuff breaks down, what's being paid for, and how staffing levels plays into what additional work we're able to get done in any given period.We have four mods working full-time schedules (me, LobsterMitten, restless_nomad, and taz), and two mods working part-time (goodnewsfortheinsane and Eyebrows McGee). frimble doesn't do any traditional mod work, and works a part-time schedule doing web development and maintanence work.The full-time schedules involve 32 hours of scheduled active moderation time weekly in 8-hour shifts, but in practice 40+ hours of actual work: a lot of non-schedule work following and contributing to email and slack discussions, giving second opinions to the on-schedule mod if something tricky comes up, having one-on-one discussions with users, and discussing ongoing metatalk threads, site development and strategy issues, plus weekly team meetings.The part-time mods have 2 standard 8-hour shifts a week, plus those various extra things above, and sometimes take extra paid shifts to relieve schedule stress when a full-timer needs a day or partial day off.frimble as the part-time dev person does necessary weekly/monthly/yearly maintenance tasks, and then in what time they have available after that does development work on bug fixes, new site features, site text/template updates, fixing/updating code that interacts with external APIs and services, responding to questions and requests in MetaTalk and at the contact form, and whatever else comes up.The full-time folks are all on flat monthly salaries; the part timers have a base salary for the standard scheduled shifts / maintenance needs, plus some monthly slush hours to cover predictable non-schedule work, and then extra hourly compensation for whatever additional work they end up doing that month.We don't have the size of staff that allows for more typical at-will vacation scheduling. Those are things we manage together as a team, working out shift swaps for incidental days off, fill-in shifts from gnfti and Eyebrows (and jessamyn and vacapinta every now and then) for things like multi-day trips or sudden health/family/etc. emergencies. Our 168 hours/week scheduling needs complicates that process. For more significant schedule disruptions or someone needing extended time off, we all just work extra shifts to cover the gap.Ultimately, with our current staffing levels, this all...works. It's better now than before we brought EM on to get rid of our 16-hour weekend shifts. It's not great but it's a level at which we're able to operate with reasonable weekly workloads, and schedule wrangling is, if not ideal, at least manageable.It's been important to me to try and maintain this level of staffing because it's just about exactly the threshold where that's all true. If we have to find at some point a way to manage MeFi with fewer hands, we'll accomplish it somehow but not without reworking some significant assumptions about the base level of moderation energy available and what kind of beyond-the-bare-minimum stuff can get done.But even at that, one of the difficulties that comes from having just-enough scheduled labor is that major initiatives or extra pushes on projects or site stuff are drawing an already taut wire. It's the sort of thing that we can handle in short spates—let's tackle x intensively for a week, let's spend this month trying to rework y—but isn't generally sustainable over the long term. We have to pace long-haul projects carefully to make sure they're slow and steady, not long sprints. So we'll need to continue to look at what things on the site are sustainable and which are drawing more resources than we can manage and need to be reworked to improve the balance of time and labor on the site. That's stuff we'll talk through more in the coming weeks as we start additional MetaTalk posts to follow up on some of the recent site discussions the mods and the community have been having.We're doing some more work building up MeFi's subscription payment mechanisms, and in tandem with that we're going to do more work building up the presentation of community funding as an integral part of MetaFilter as a site. I want to do everything we can to support that process, to make it painless, and to make it a visible and well-understood part of how the community operates. I wish we had gotten more work done on this in the last year; it's something we're going to reprioritize.We've just rolled out some improved Stripe functionality; logged-in users should now be able to manage their Stripe subscriptions directly from the site instead of needing to reach out to the contact form, which is a really important improvement. We've got more polish to do on that particular bit, and we're aiming to develop that overall subscription management interface further as well and explore additional payment processing options.I outlined our current funding goals above. Right now, the most common recurring contribution levels are $5/mo and $10/mo; many in the $1-3/mo range, a significant number at $20/mo and some higher. There's roughly 2500 recurring subscriptions right now between PayPal and Stripe, at about $5/mo average.That totals to about $14K/mo total right now. To put that into specific monthly subscription context:If everyone currently contributing increased their subscription by 50%, that'd eliminate our current shortfall. If everyone doubled their subscription, that would leave us with several thousand dollars a month of new net income to put into new spending and building savings.If 700 new people started contributing $10/mo it'd eliminate the shortfall. If 1000 new folks started $20/mo, from that alone we'd be very close to outright financial independence.Those are big numbers, but if we're going to aim to make MetaFilter wholly community-funded in the long run those are the kind of numbers we'll need to aim for. I think it's time we start going for it.Now: it's essential to me that MeFi is a place where people can participate because they love it here, regardless of financial means. Contributions to the site will never be mandatory, or tied to access to site features. I am serious about pushing for community funding, but I will never consider financial contributions a qualifying factor of someone's membership here. Period. If you're here because you want to be here, that's always enough.But for the folks who are able to do some. For the folks able to do some more. For the folks who've spent time here, reading, writing, sharing, learning new things, gaining new perspectives, making new friends: if you are able to help keep MetaFilter standing, to ensure that this place that has been so important to all of us can march confidently past the 20 year mark and on toward the future, then, hey, this is where we are. Your embrace and support of the idea of community-funded online spaces is ultimately what today's MetaFilter depends on.Thank you for supporting the site with your contributions The site turns 20 on Sunday. I'll be making a post that day about where the site's been, where we're at, and where I hope to see it go in the years to come.I'll make an update post on financial stuff within the next couple of weeks, to reassess where we are after this fundraising push and talk about next steps and recap anything that comes out of discussion in here.This post is coming amid an unusually intense period of intracommunity discussion, and we're planning a lot of additional MetaTalk discussions over the next few months to talk more about how MetaFilter can grow and improve as a community, and how we can catch up on some of the things where we have, in a twenty year run on the web, fallen behind. Ordinarily a post like this one would be kind of all-consuming of my attention; right now, as important as it is, it's just one thing in among a whole stack. And on the one hand that's a challenge. It's a lot of plates to keep spinning at once.But I don't think the MetaFilter community has ever done poorly by its busiest periods of self-reflection. Whatever else we're doing here, whatever the prevailing conditions in the world and on the web, this is a community of people who are fundamentally trying to do good things and make a good place. When we're at our best, this site can be pretty extraordinary, and that's what keeps us coming back. That's worth pushing for. So if it's time to lower a shoulder and lean in extra hard, I'm glad you're all here pushing with me.