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People don't like advertising almost as a general rule; Advertising is simply The Way It Is. People who make content learn to like it, because they want to make content, and they also want to eat food and sleep under a roof, and the opportunity to do both at the same time seems like a pretty good idea.

After the "dot com bubble," we ran the site entirely on donations for over a year. The word crowdfunding hadn't been invented yet; back then, people simply called it "begging," but I think it's clear that those days are long past. We look back on that period with incredible fondness, and I don't think we're the only ones. It was just two of us then, not the juggernaut that it is now; we have mouths to feed, as it were. I think we had assumed it wasn't possible to do it that way anymore - to operate a site at this scale without advertising dollars - but it occurred to us that we'd never actually asked. People often want to know how they can support the site in a way that doesn't involve t-shirts or looking at advertising, and I think we may have a way. What I'm saying is that we want to sell out, and we would love to sell out to you.