State of The Blog

First, thank you to Miguel for creating this fantastic place. Thank you to J.Kb. for contributing. Thank you to both of you for allowing me to be an author here.

Just over a year ago, Miguel announced his retirement to J.Kb. and myself in a private email. We considered a couple of different options, one of which was to just move it to Substack with a Patreon style of support system. We all wanted to have some small amount of monetization from the blog.

I suggested a pay to comment with some content being restricted. Miguel and J.Kb. allowed me to try that.

It didn’t really work.

We pay for a number of things directly for the blog. The total for all of those services is around $1000/year. Those include the different yearly subscriptions for certain plugins and other direct paid support.

In addition to that, there is another $600/year for the servers that host the blog.

In prior years, there was an additional $600/year to me. The minimum cost for the blog per year was $2200. Miguel paid all of that out of pocket. He asked for money once a year to pay me and the hosting costs.

In other words, this blog cost him money.

I can no longer charge for my work on the blog. That’s good because I have spent countless hours, easily well over 200 hours. I work dirt cheap at $50/hour, that’s $10,000 of billable time. That does NOT include any of the time I spend writing.

We are seeing the renewals happening now. I did not break even last year. I won’t break even this year.

I do care. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been in love with this blog for many years. I lost it for a couple of years. Realized I was missing it, went and found it. I’ve never left.

The comments you leave help so much. It tells me when I get things right. I stumbled onto a new gun blog yesterday, went looking through their postings, and there was reference to one of my case analysis. That single back link made me smile through a rather shitty day.

So, I thank all of you.

If you want to help the blog out financially, please sign up for one of the membership levels. The lowest level is $1/month. The highest is $5/month. You do have to pay for a year at a time.

Here’s wishing all of you a great year. Remember that we do want guest postings, and I mean real guest posts, not the “If you say yes, we’ll spend 30 seconds and send you an article with the word “gun” in it and 1000 words talking about us.” Yeah, we get about 1 a week of those.

My standard reply to them is something similar to, “That sounds great, what is your favorite 45-70 load?” I’ve never gotten a reply to that question.

This is a feedback article. Comments are open to all.
P.S. OldNFO and dana950, please reach out to me at awa (at) troglodite . com