Paulunteer housekeeping

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 

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I’ve been putting off doing this for a while now but I feel the need to open some dialogue on a few things relating to the website. Please skip this if you were hoping for any news or other important tidbits.

As the regulars are keenly aware, updates to The Paulunteer have decreased dramatically in frequency lately. Just a few weeks ago I was posting as many as 15 updates in a single day; recently I have been posting few or none. The reason for this is simply that from mid-November through February 5th I dedicated virtually every waking hour to some aspect of Ron Paul’s campaign. I worked on the website from sun-up to sun-down and I volunteered 35+ hours per week at the official campaign office. It was a great experience. I learned a lot and I’m glad that I had the opportunity.

Since Illinois’ primary I have been focusing the majority of my efforts on some projects that will actually make me some of that…. what do you call it? It’s been so long since I’ve seen it… money.

Unfortunately the advertisements you see on The Paulunteer net me, on average, $1.00 per day. On a good day, and there have been only a handful of them, I can get anywhere up to $7.00. I haven’t done the math because it would just depress me but I seriously doubt that I have even recouped my expenses so far. (Thank you very, very much to the generous individual who donated $20 several weeks ago. As you can see, that was nearly a whole month’s worth of revenue.)

I simply don’t have the option of spending as much time on the website as I would like. It would be great if I could somehow make it my full-time or even part-time job but with the current declining trend in web traffic and politically-related ad revenue I just don’t see it happening.

Where does that leave you and I? Hopefully in a pretty good place. I will continue to update the site to the tune of roughly one or two posts per day, mostly due to the generous contributions of material by a few well-informed regulars. The decreased posting rate is probably a good thing anyway because people don’t typically like to be overwhelmed with subscription material.

There is another option that I hope you will consider. I would love it if some of you would like to start posting articles directly to the site on your own. With adequate participation this could really turn the site into a vibrant community more in line with the vision I had when I set out to create this venue. It would have the added benefit of generating more traffic which would equate to more advertisement money which would subsequently allow me to spend more time working on the site. If you’re interested please email me and we’ll get you set up to post.

Since I’ve rambled on so much at this point I’ll end this missive here and we can pick it up again some other time. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on the state of the website whether they are related to the points raised in this post or not.

Thanks,
Brian