Here's the thing-
We don't want to shut down. Every single person who works to put a show out each week is here because they love what they do and they believe in the mission. We believe it means something to us, and to you all as a listener. For as long as we are running, and open, we want to continue to put out the best product we can for you. That means better quality stories, better quality productions and more. But the point of the Metacast was that if things did not change, we would have to shut down. We would have no choice.
Cutting a podcast or two out to save costs would be a potential solution. But it only works if there’s no demand for the podcast. Our metrics show that we have tens of thousands of listeners to every show. Now if we chose to cut one at random… say Escape Pod. How many listeners/donors/subscribers would we lose? If we cut out escape pod for example where the majority of our listeners and donors are... we lose 33% of the product, 40% of the cost and 50% of the revenue, for an example. That doesn’t help us. It would just delay the inevitable.
The fundamental reality is that, as a listener, you are required to pay nothing to experience our content. However, in order to provide content to you we are required to pay others. It would be a lot different if we went to a more traditional pay model where you would not be allowed access to any of our content (product) until you purchased it. However, that runs contrary to our mission and the original concept of this company.
As far as our financial needs, since 2011 and projecting through the end of 2013, we incur an average of $42,000 in costs per year. That covers stories, staff payments, web hosting, advertising costs, merchant fees, tax costs, and more. That is also the extent of the financial situation I intend to reveal at this time. If we intend to expand, we will need more funds to make that happen.
You're right, it did come on suddenly and we've been aware of this problem for several months but (as I said in the metacast), we've been trying to reorganize and trim our costs as much as possible. We know the economy sucks right now. We know that we fell off the horse a while back and it hurt our relationship with you all. We had hoped that as we corrected the problems we were in control of, donations would increase. They did not. So here we are.