Welcome to Day 2 of Reason’s annual Webathon, in which we invite you, dear consumers of our articles, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and art, to consider making a tax-deductible donation so that we may manufacture more and better libertarian products for all the insufficiently free world to see. If you would like to get to the chorus before I bore us, here’s the link to…
DONATE TO REASON RIGHT THE HELL NOW!!
But wait! You should know that, as of this here posting, we have a very generous donor—none other than the great Reason Foundation Chairman of the Board, Gerry Ohrstrom!—who will match the next $100,000 in contributions. Here’s how that works: If, from this second to the end of the Webathon, you people give us $75,000, then we will receive a total of $150,000, and Gerry can then spend his extra $25,000 on worse stuff, like, I dunno, statism. (I keed, I keed.) But! If you match that full $100,000, that brings us $200,000 more to produce Remy videos, deep-dive investigations into government malfeasance, and how-to guides for taking illegal narcotics. If you max that match, then—who knows!—maybe another donor will throw down a challenge grant, and we’ll be on our merry way toward the 2023 Webathon goal of $400,000. Bottom line: Give right now, and your impact gets doubled.
Perusing the available swag at various donation points, I’d like to direct your attention to the $1,000 level. There, for the first time in our seven-year history of podcasting, we are offering our four-figure friends a seat at the Zoom table as we convene a privatized version of The Reason Roundtable. Watch those Katherine Mangu-Ward eye-rolls, hear all those Nick Gillespie snorting noises, suffer through Peter Suderman dad jokes, and puzzle through my (allegedly) mixed metaphors in real time! Do it today; you’ll be glad you did.
Since I know you people over-index ever so slightly (*cough*) for mathematical mental processing, and since we were already talking numbers, let me take you down Webathon memory lane. Back when we started this annual pledge drive, in the inauspicious month of September 2008, the haul was modest if—and I cannot stress this enough—miraculous to our eyeballs: 152 donors totaling $13,000 (worth $19,000 in today’s debased scrip). In 2009 we got greedy and asked for 500 donors, and you instead quadrupled the whole shebang, to 625 for $56,000 ($80,000, adjusted). Then in 2014, while reflecting on that season’s opinion-journalism upheavals (a perennial hazard in the biz, alas), we argued that the broader your base of support, the more smooth our sailing: “[Y]ou are adding to the resilience and stability of an institution you value. The more donors we have, at whatever giving level, the better able we are to withstand and avoid tumult.”
That year the donor pool nearly doubled, to 1,178, a level that has been essentially matched or exceeded every year since….Except last.
Sure, the bottom line is the bottom line, and the last three years have seen us crack north of half a million dollars, for which you have our eternal gratitude, and have in return seen batches of new editorial products, which we’ll be bragging about over the coming week. But I’m addressing here especially you newbies, you fence-sitters, you people who have been consuming the product for however long but haven’t yet pried open your digital wallet. You don’t have to be a $1,000 star, baby, to be in our show (figuratively, I mean; you literally do need to pony up four large to grab a seat at the Roundtable); we would be tickled to the point of giggles if we boosted the overall donor number with a bunch of $50 first-timers. A little today could lead to a lot tomorrow after you emerge, dirt-faced, from the Bitcoin mines.
This is how the institution perpetuates, without losing its mind, without turning on an ideological/partisan dime, without zig-zagging wildly to the whims of a single erratic donor.
WON’T YOU PRETTY PLEASE CONSIDER BECOMING A FIRST-TIME DONOR RIGHT THE FLETCH NOW?
The magazine ecosystem these days more resembles a killing field than a garden of earthly delights. Texas Observer, gone. Popular Science, presto. Lapham’s Quarterly, napping. Jezebel, jazzoinked. We don’t dance on graves (OK, maybe excepting the latter); we instead count our blessings that we have you, once and future donors, giving us critical fuel to keep making libertarian journalism, commentary, and yuks for 55 years and counting.
In summary: 1) $100,000 matching grant! 2) Private Roundtable Zoom call for the Thousand Dollar Club! And 3) Let’s get you first-timers off the fence, to build a bigger and more stable boat.
DONATE TO REASON TODAY! AND THANK YOU!!
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