The Direction of the Galactic Free Press

I want to discuss a few things with our readers and give people a chance to add their own input, the first thing being the status of our donations. We've had over 50,000 unique individuals visit our site in the past month. Over 50,000, that's quite a few people! You know how many people have actually donated? 13. 13 generous people out of 50,000. For the mathematically inclined that comes to .026% of our readers.

We're at $416 out of our monthly goal of $2,000, which we recently lowered from $3,000. We'd like to continue to make the Galactic Free Press our main “job” and have our readers assist us just as we assist our readers. However, with the way things are currently going we won't be able to pay our basic living expenses. Obviously something needs to change, so we're discussing a few options.

I don't much like begging for donations, but it's proven to be the most effective way by far of getting donations. I try to only put up donation requests once a month, as I don't want to make fundraising a major focus of the site. Here's this month's request: If you enjoy the site, please consider donating, if you don't enjoy the site, well what are you doing here? Our financial service, PayPal, offers things like recurring monthly donations. It would be great to get enough of those that I don't even need to mention donations anymore.

Other options would be to do things like put a monthly donation tally on our right-hand sidebar, or put up a banner that appears at the top of every page when we're running behind on donations. Neither would be my first choice, but it's a couple options we're considering.

Our last option would be to put up advertising on the site. Not really the way we want to go, but it's something we'd rather do than seeing the site not be able to pay for itself. The whole idea of selling portions of our site to the people who can pay the most does not sit very well with me. I'd much rather have the site represent a new paradigm of sharing and equal exchange instead of capitalism. I know most “free” sites feature advertising, but advertising itself is designed to create desire, and desire sure doesn't make people free.

Lastly, we're talking about changing the focus of the Galactic Free Press itself. We want it to focus more on our original writings and less on posting copies of articles from other sites. Don't worry though, we've got a new site that features articles from all of our friend's sites that we normally post up on the Galactic Free Press. It's also presented in a format that is, in my opinion, easier to read and much more appropriate for a newspaper. Here's a link to our new site, Awakening Daily: http://soundofheart.org/awakeningdaily/

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