State of the Herald, January 2022: New Year, New Opportunities

Good evening, backers!

I hope you all had a pleasant New Year. On Saturday, we returned from our three-week break, and we're gearing up for another outstanding year of operations. We have several articles in the pipeline for you, and we can't wait to surprise and delight you over the course of the coming year.

As we are entering a new year, I wanted to reach out to give you all the rundown on where we stand, as you're our backers, and - as I've said in the past - our employers, which entitles you all to know how we're doing on all fronts.

Our Content

As of now, the members of our editorial team are working with writers on eleven articles in various states of completion, and three articles are pending for publication in our weekly rotation with two more due to join that list shortly. Pitch discussions are scheduled to begin again on January 11.

Of our articles, the most popular category was overwhelmingly the Niche category, which saw 21 articles released across 2021. Of our content, our most popular articles through the year were the following:

1. The Many Faces of the Magical Girl: A Breakdown of Types and Subgenres by Ayumi Shinozaki
2. How Nen In Hunter x Hunter Impacts Your Everyday Life by John Rinyu
3. When Stars Align, A History of Queer Anime by Tynan Brooks
4. Devil's Candy: A Release Almost 20 Years in the Making by Red Bard
5. The Fine Print: Lessons Learned from TOKYOPOP's Original English Manga Empire by Priya Sridhar
6. Great Trash: Patlabor 3 and the Problems of Auteur Theory by Stephen Hero

Infrastructure

Since moving to our new host, we have seen fewer service interruptions overall, and all instances of throttling appear to have stopped. Moreover, our annual hosting costs remain at $240/year, which is being paid out of pocket; until we reach the break-even point of $750 per month, all server fees will be paid out-of-pocket by myself; we'll be using all funds to further improve Anime Herald's content until we reach that point.

Cash On Hand

Right now, we have $1,192.19 in cash reserves. Throughout 2021, we posted a gross revenue of $2,802.37 through 2021, prior to expenses. We paid a total of $2,608.48 in invoices, and Sam has been paying our hosting costs out of pocket; as such, we posted a total of $193.89 in profits for the year, which will be used to directly fund new content.

As of now, we have roughly $650 earmarked to pay our editorial team for upcoming content. The remaining $392.19 will be held for emergency cases: server exploding, blowing up space limits, etc., as well as to fund a few outstanding items, like domain name renewals.

In short, it's a safety net, just in case we need it.

In Conclusion

For now, we just wanted to take a moment to give you a brief heads-up on our current happenings at Anime Herald! We thank you for your support, and look forward to surprising and delighting you over the course of the year.

Best,

Samantha