January 21, 2012

Congressional Eyeballs are Worth More Than Yours

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This isn’t going to come as a surprise to anyone, but the chart below is instructive nonetheless. It comes from Matt Glassman, a fellow skat fan, and it shows the cost per rider to buy up all the ad space in a DC Metro station (i.e., “station domination”). For the most part the cost runs around $2,000 per thousand riders. The two exceptions are just where you’d expect: the Pentagon station and the Capitol South station, where all the congressional staffers get off. Those staffers’ eyeballs, it turns out, are worth about 4x what all the rest of our eyeballs are worth.

(I’m actually a little surprised that congressional staffers are apparently more valuable than military procurement folks, but I suppose the military suppliers have so many other outlets for their money that a Metro station is hardly worth the bother.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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