We’ve had a really bad week. 

First, a new editor quit.

As any of you small business owners know, losing a wonderful teammate you’ve invested 6 months of money and training in is tough. It sets you back another 6 months, as you have to find and hire someone new and retrain and training takes time and money and slows down those who are doing the training. But sometimes folks are happier elsewhere and that’s that.

Then, we made the big bold great decision to cut all these ad networks that have been serving you, our readers, bad ads from random companies. We don’t work with bad companies and didn’t like these bad ads. So that cost our (small) company $15,000 a month, which means we’re struggling to pay our editors to do good work for you. (Note: we already forgo the most lucrative partnership that net sites our size upwards of $40,000,000 a year—last year we grossed just over half a million for the first time and paid 95% of that to staff).

Finally, we lost 7 million readers in three weeks. Maybe all of you went for a hike. Maybe you hated those bad ads. In any case, I’ve doubled down and have been working until 1:30 a.m. again and our editors have been trying their best to offer you good articles with nice intros.

Losing 7 million readers means we lost another $20,000—which makes it hard for me to pay my editors…really hard. Luckily we had two months of savings.

The good news? We’re transparent, so we can share our successes and failures with you, and hopefully you care because you know we’re trying, we’re independent media, we’re mission-driven to be of benefit beyond our choir. The good news? That $20,000 loss is because we lost readers who might have become subscribers, if our articles had been more popular.

Why is that good news? Because it means we’re dependent on you, not bad ads.

So that’s where you come in. If you want us to continue, please consider subscribing to read unlimited elephant articles. It’s a buck a month. 

If you already subscribe, please consider copy-and-pasting elephantjournal.com/join-the-cause on your Facebook or in an email to friends and family. That’s our free newsletters, like this. If we get more newsletter subscribers, our readership will steady.

If you do either one, thank you from the bottom of my tired, inspired heart.

Yours in the Vision of an Enlightened Society,