Online advertising sucks.

You may’ve clicked an ad before getting to read this article. You may be seeing one just below this paragraph. Ads are usually a pain; sometimes they show dumb stuff, and a lot of the time they just get in the way of the clean, simple reading experience you deserve.

Here’s the sad truth: Advertising has to be annoying in order for it to generate revenue. Advertisers want to make sure you’re going to see the ad, or else they’re not going to pay for us to run it. So if we want to make money, we need to make sure you see it.

Making matters worse, all these annoyances don’t even earn us much. Online advertising dollars just suck. A brief lesson in the economics: A publisher will makes $X for everyone 1,000 page views, and that dollar amount is called the CPM. For the ads that annoy you most, we make about $6 for every 1,000 people who see the ad in America. This means that an advertiser with an ad values you, the individual reader, at $0.006. For the standard ads that don’t annoy you, we make a $2 CPM if we’re lucky.

We’ve done our best to balance the number of ads that appear with the fact that Hypable costs a surprisingly large amount of money to run, but we know you want fewer ads. We also know you want other features on Hypable (an app is the most requested feature) and more content. We also like to think that you’d be interested in supporting us.

So, what can we do to grow the site and give you a better experience? Today we’re beginning to explore the possibility of launching a Patreon.

Patreon is like Kickstarter, but it’s geared towards artists who share their work online (those who write, produce podcasts, create YouTube videos, etc). Supporters can “pledge” an amount to the creator via Patreon, and in exchange the creator can give you benefits. I love the idea of Patreon and the power it gives to creators and their supporters. I’ve launched two of them for podcasts I run and it’s been inspiring to see people supporting them. It’s a breath of fresh air for someone like me, who has had to rely on advertising revenue until Patreon came along.

Hypable is interested in launching a Patreon that will give supporters numerous, exclusive benefits like a completely ad-free site and deeper interactions with our writing team. Yes, you read that right: Zero ads. It’ll be the cleanest, fastest, most beautiful Hypable you’ve ever seen.

The few dollars you pledge per month will earn us way more than the ads we force on you. And here’s the thing: The money raised via Patreon will be going directly to our writers. This is a very important part of this Patreon because I believe you want to see the writers receive the money they deserve for their time. I do, too.

Our Patreon, should we see enough interest from our readers and we decide to create one, will allow us to do so much more for you than just take away the ads. We will be able to focus on less clickbait-y, news-of-the-day content, and write deeper features which’ll be available to everyone, whether you’re a Patron or not. When we know that a certain amount of financial support is coming into the site, we won’t have to rush around, always looking for the next thing that can generate some quick pageviews and ad dollars (although quick and accurate news coverage will remain a top priority for us).

We have a survey for you to take to help us gauge your interest. This’ll help us figure out what to price it at, exactly how many people are interested in joining us, and what features we should include.

We have a beautiful site, wonderful writers, and an amazing community. What we need now is financial assistance to help us give our team what they deserve, which in turn will help us grow.

Thank you in advance for your time!