Hello fans of GeekDad! I hope you won’t mind a moment of supplication from the team here:
By now hopefully you’re aware we’ve stepped out on our own, and out from under corporate patronage. While that’s bringing us a great deal of freedom, it’s also ended our steady funding and eliminated the SEO (search engine optimization) we had on over 14,000 previously-pubished posts. As such, the GeekDad team is working hard behind the scenes to replace what we’ve lost, and we need your help.
We are pursuing advertising (and a few cool folks are already talking to us). But we want to be very clear: our goal is not to fill up the GeekDad front page with a bunch of flashing ads or pop-ups that appear every time you re-fresh. Instead, we want to provide you with in-depth daily sponsored posts that will present products and services that will connect with you, our geeky parent readers. Hopefully you, our readers, will find value in this model of advertising. If you’re a potential advertiser who values this kind of engagement with an audience, please see the info on our sponsor page.
But we’re also looking to our community for support. We’ve added a donation button on the sidebar, and if you read GeekDad every day and value the effort we’re putting into this, a couple dollars every now and then would be greatly appreciated.
And just so you understand: no one at GeekDad is making a living off this. Myself, as publisher, and the editors each get a monthly stipend for the work we put into the blog on a daily basis, but we all still have day jobs. Core contributors get a small per-post payment that may be enough to pay their internet bills each month. And the Occasional contributors are volunteers. We also spend money on our server, and helping our members attend various cons and events through the year. Overall, we’re just here to have fun, write about the things we love, and connect with the greater geeky community.
You can also help us re-build our web visibility by taking a moment to re-tweet, Like, G+, add to Reddit, and whatever else you can think of to do with our posts to spread them around the Internet. We need to get our name back out, get our stories linked to in as many places as possible, and basically be rediscovered by all the cool people who found us before over the last few years. Your help in this is invaluable, and key to our survival.
One might say, you’re our only hope…
In any case, thanks for listening. We’re still here, still doing this thing we love, and hopefully with your help, we’ll keep doing it for a long, long time. Cheers!
~Ken Denmead
Editor-in-Chief, Publisher of GeekDad.com
I’ve turned off ad blocker for your domain, which is another easy way people can help.
That’s high praise right there – thanks!
Personally, I’d rather a few ads on the site than sponsored “articles” that might get confused with genuine site content.
It may also be worth looking into a premium membership model (ala Ars Technica), where subscribers get special perks but all the site content remains free.
One of the reasons I am excited about the move to an independent site is because I hoped we would see less thinly disguised PR (the constant Skylander updates, the recent Future Shock excerpts)!
I will pay to keep GeekDad as independent as possible (and I don’t think I’m alone)!
That’s excellent feedback – and be assured, any sponsored content will be VERY EXPLICITLY LABELED as such. It’s our duty and obligation to do so.
We’ll look int othe premium membership thing – have to brainstorm what we could offer to make it worthwhile. As a bunch of people doing this in the evenings and on the weekend, there’s not a ton of surpluss resources to devote to additional content, but… not out of the question!
Andy did get passionate about the Skylanders, and got some excellent access to news. 😉
Thanks for your support! We’ll keep working hard to stay worthy! 🙂
Why did you leave Wired?