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Thank You: a community saves elephant journal dot com from the brink.
Photo by Mae Ryan. Waylon Lewis taps away at his favorite ‘third place,’ the historic, Buddhist-cowboy-owned Trident Café & Booksellers in downtown Boulder, Colorado.
After 6.5 years, our next move as a print magazine was to grow nationally into mainstream distribution channels. Given, however, that conventional distributors only sell 3 out of 10 magazines, the rest being recycled after being milled and shipped six times around the country–even printing on eco paper, it was not an eco-responsible option. So we went paperless, as most of our readers know from our last issue, the one with Obama and McCain on the cover pronouncing a New War Effort! On Climate Change!
So, over the last month, it’s been my task to transition our many wonderful longtime and some new advertisers to our web site, elephantjournal.com. But I’ve been burned out, as my accountant Samara and editor Heather and ad manager Lindsey have noticed, and I’ve had limited success in doing more than crashing, building our traffic, starting a column on Huffington Post’s GREEN & LIVING sections and blogging five times a day. And while a few advertisers came on board, most said “Sure, but let’s wait until after the election. The economy’s rocky.” *
Which makes sense—except that elephant has no investors, we’re independent media, so at the end of the month, having suddenly voluntarily given up 6.5 years of print-based advertising relationships (just as Steve Savage of Eco Products had to do when he saw an opportunity to expand his mission and business, but had to leave behind his original core business in order to do so), I was staring down the barrel of my home/office’s mortgage and our payroll and my print bills (I owe approximately $40K, if you must know). So, today, with two days left to bring in money and save my house, credit, and what’s left of my staff, I sent an appeal out to our community:
From: waylon@elephantjournal.com
Subject: an appeal
Date: November 7, 2008 9:58:41 AM MST
Between you (our loyal advertisers and new friends) and me, in our transit from print to paperless I’m going from a steady revenue stream to a new revenue stream. Many folks have come forward and supported in the last month–but we have 20 spaces left to fill and today is last day before my month to transition is up. Basically, despite our rapid e-growth I’ll be forced to shut down–I’m out of options. None of this is your problem–it’s only to say that if you were wanting to continue to support elephant, today’s the time to consider reserving a clickable, cheap ad on every page of our site for $200/month, $150/month if you prepay a quarter or $100/month if you prepay a year.This is the last day to prepay and help us stay alive and continue to grow (we already have four times the readership than our quarterly print mag did). After Monday, I face some tough options with my staff and mortgage.Standard square ads are $100/month if you prepay a year – $1200 total (most of our print ads back in day were around $1200 just for three months). There are bigger and prime position ads available, but if you just did our smallest ad that would be a meaningful support–and we’ll support you right back with reviews, good and fast-growing readership (thanks to our weekly e-newsletter, my first Huffington Post and our facebook community, we had our biggest traffic week ever this week–on pace for 50,000 unique visitors this month, many of whom revisit and click on several pages each of course). By comparison, our print circulation was 30,000 over three months—and yet our web ads are 1/5 of the price, featured on every page, and clickable.Please consider: http://www.elephantjournal.com/Yours,Way
Herbal Roots
Samaya Designs
Jade Yoga Mats
Piyara Kutta $200
to bring together those working (and playing) to create enlightened society. To focus on ‘the mindful life’—yoga, organics, sustainability, non-new agey spirituality, conscious consumerism, ecofashion, the arts, adventure, wellness…anything that helps us to live a good life that also happens to be good for others, and our planet. To walk the eco-talk along the way. And to remain independent, that we might say what we think and never put our readership’s trust beneath considerations of the not-ultimately-so-Almighty Dollar.
Waylon
What a relief! My husband and I love your online format. It’s on our favorites list and gets checked for content nearly everyday. The video interviews are the best and we frequently click on links to various other sites. Through elephant.com, we discovered Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, first with John McCain and the Dalai Lama, then on to many amusing posts about Sarah Palin. I loved the video of Michelle Obama’s speech in Boulder. Where else would we have seen or even known about this? Thanks for some much needed laughs and insights during a very stressful time. Hang in there!
Way,
The thing is, Elephant Rocks!!
have you thought about a Donation link on the home page, to a paypal account?
I bet people would give.
Keep it up!
Jeff
http://www.giftedtouch.com
This is wonderful news!
Wow
this echoes my angst like looking into a broken mirror and seeing bits of me in every shard.
I incurred well over what your costs were in getting a fully scaled virtual magazine to work, ( its really a 6 step process and 4 software engines with 12 event listeners and 2 catchpoints and a streaming scaled video player in 3 languages and a buttload of flash and focus group testing ).. burnt me right out. Fortunately or not a poweroutage in Souther NH that lasted 14 days was my only salvation. I slept like the waking dead tossing logs into a fireplace to keep me and my stuff from freezing.
Just wanted you to know that one thing i did was read your blog when i was in an internet cafe for the occasional coffee fix.
Keep on keeping on, its worth it to know that someone knows.
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