Initially, when I first started, I really believed that the ad dollars were going to migrate from print to digital. I bootstrapped the publication in the early days, thinking that day would come, but that day never came. At that point I was faced with the fact that we were winning awards, doing excellent journalism, being recognized by our peers, and we literally had no money in the bank. I realized that if I wanted to continue, I was going to have to go out and raise money. I did that through crowdfunding.
First I tried a small Indiegogo campaign. It was modestly successful. The next year I tried a Kickstarter campaign. At that time it was very successful for us. I started to realize at that point that cultivating a relationship with the readers and the community that valued that reporting was the only way, as a small media company owner, that I could go forward. That was the beginning. Then when I launched the National Observer, I was able to bring in investment money as well. But that's different from revenue, of course. For revenue, we do sell advertising; we have reader donations; and now we're really having success with our paywall, our subscription model. We just started that at the end of May. We had a technology system that didn't work very well, so we didn't get very far at first. We relaunched it on new technology starting in September, and our first three months have been, I think, very successful—enough to show that this can work for us.
But it's going to take time. Our goal is 10,000 subscribers. If we have 10,000 subscribers, we'll be fully self-sustaining. All of my effort to bring in investment money now, or fundraising—everything—is around the idea of our needing enough of a runway to get there, to 10,000. We will live or die on the quality of our reporting. If it's no good, nobody's going to subscribe.