Some readers might imagine that we make a lot of money with this website, RoboticsAndAutomationNews.com. But, unfortunately, that is not true.
We want to make money. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Several people work long hours putting the website, magazine, and newsletter together, and then there’s the many contributors and supporters – to whom we give our thanks – and it’s only fair that we all want to make a living, like everyone else.
However, this website happens to be running at a loss – despite our best efforts.
We are a subscription website and we carry ads, for which we ask visitors to switch off their ad blockers.
Some readers might imagine that brings us a lot of money. But that’s probably because they don’t know what the media business is like – it’s very tough.
There are literally millions of websites out there, actually hundreds of millions. Even in our specific, very niche market, there are many dozens of very reputable, high-quality and long-established sites.
We are a new website but we are doing well. We are competitive. We have a lot of readers – more than 200,000 unique visitors last month – but that does not mean we make a lot of money.
If you really want to know, we make around $500 a month from subscriptions and approximately $100 from automated ad networks which, needless to say, pay extremely low rates.
That’s a total of $600 a month.
It’s not much, but it’s something. If we didn’t ask for subscriptions and ask you to switch off your ad blockers, we’d make exactly zero income. So we are very grateful to those who become paying subscribers and read our site despite ads they’d rather not see.
While many people probably unconsciously believe that websites should provide them with information free of charge, we don’t think that’s right or realistic in some cases. We’re not a propaganda outlet for any government or corporation or anything – we’re independent.
The regular journalists and other professionals who work on this site each have around 30 years’ experience in the media. This ain’t no amateur blog, bro’.
We understand it might be difficult from some readers’ point of view – there are so many sites and so many ways one can spend money.
But we need your support to keep going.
And we know for an absolute fact that the number of readers who appreciate the information we provide far outnumber the one or two who complain.
But even the people who complain only complain about the money and are paying us a compliment in a way. To us, their complaints mean they like our site and want to read it, but want it to be free and not to have ads.
We just can’t do that right now – we’d actually like to. Maybe in the future when we have more or better-paying advertising clients or enough subscribers to pay all our bills.
For now, we ask that you understand that we are trying to keep this website going – and it will keep going – with your support.
Thank you.
