Not Ad Supported

By Michael on June 12, 2008 at 5:19 pm | In Blog Posts | 1 Comment

I don’t know if you noticed that Slacker Astronomy does not have advertising. We did have a sponsor or two in the early days. But the web site is entirely devoid of ads and we do no advertising in the more recent podcasts.

What do you think of this?

We are entering a new age of Slacker Astronomy where we want to have the resources to travel and have support for acquiring the technology necessary to make interviews and other podcasts possible.

There are 2 main choices for this, that I know of:

1. Accept advertising
2. Solicit donations from listeners
3. All of the above

The only other possibility I can think of is a kinder, gentler version of #1 as is done by NPR and the like.

I think experience has shown that #2 is a hard nut to crack. People will show occasional financial support some of the time, but in terms of having on on-going revenue stream to support operations, everyone I know who makes money makes it via #1.

Which I think is both good and bad. The bad is web sites and RSS feeds which are littered with advertising. On some sites it is literally hard to find the content among the ads. Ads are annoying and advertisers getting more annoying all the time.

The good news is — I’m as reluctant to write checks as you are! If Meade or Swinburne can foot the bill, it makes it easier, in a way, for everyone. Most advertisers in the science/astronomy world are pretty good so you usually aren’t presented annoying, distasteful ads.

The bottom line for everyone doing podcasting and video podcasting is that you can achieve more with more resources at your disposal. So to the extent we want to do more and should do more, a little funding becomes important.

So brace yourself, I guess, for one of the above! We do want to do more with Slacker Astronomy so we will be thinking of ways to increase the resources at our disposal.