At the end of every second month, this site offers a gentle reminder of its reliance on your patronage. This can be provided through the “become a supporter” buttons at the top of the page and the bottom of each post. Some specific reasons why you might think this particularly worth doing at the moment:
• The site is now free of advertising. This particular income stream had in any case dwindled to practically nothing over the years — until a few months ago, when Google Ads added an exciting new pop-up ad feature (“vignette ads”, as it would prefer they to be called) that resulted in a surge in both revenue and user complaints. Responding to the latter has meant forsaking the former, and ad revenue has duly returned to where it was before, i.e. nowhere. So better to do away with them altogether and ask doubly nicely for reader contributions (albeit that these too are not what they used to be).
• I’ve been working especially hard for my diminishing earnings of late, thanks to two state elections. Much of this effort has been devoted to my acclaimed live election results features – including the one I have ready to go for tomorrow’s state election in Tasmania, which you can acquaint yourself with here.
• Resolving technical issues that caused the were causing the site to go offline intermittently a few weeks ago involved considerable hassle and a certain amount of expenditure, for which regular users in particular might think me deserving of a contribution.
