Anime Herald

State of the Herald: 2018 Patrons Edition

Added 2018-11-26 19:24:04 +0000 UTC

Good evening, everybody.

I hope you've had a fantastic 2018! As we get ready to enter December, I wanted to take a few minutes to sit back and talk with each and every one of you. I’ll be dropping the “presidential tone” act that tends to permeate the public-facing State of the Herald pieces, as I feel that being candid works better in this case.

This is the first of (hopefully) many annual reports for you, our backers, as we’re working for you, now, and we’re accountable to you.

As this is the first actual annual report, I wanted to give a quick rundown of the overall flow of things. The report will be broken into four core sections:

Where your money goes
What we’ve done in 2018
What we’re doing now
What’s in store for 2019

Where the Money Goes

Over the course of 2018, we’ve raised a total of $518.29 in total funding, after Patreon fees. The funds we’ve raised have been used toward funding the following:

Hosting package with SiteGround (3yrs.): $450
Secondary support staff (“Sam’s Day Off” Newsdesk) & Other Editorials: $780 USD
Domain Name Renewal: $15.17 USD
Software licenses: $129 USD
Royalty-free media (stock photos, audio, etc.): $15.50 USD
Review copies: About $200
Total Cost: $1,589.67

I’d like to note that this isn’t a complete cost breakdown. This is mostly a top-level listing of the higher-profile items. Not included are things like mailing receipts, or more granular line-items. This is mostly to provide a big-picture look at how things are playing out.

I should note that, while the $450 cost is the biggest item on the list, these costs are basically a fixed constant for us. I was able to negotiate a deal with Siteground, who should provide us with the infrastructure we need to maintain the growth trajectory we’re on.

If not, then I will seek better solutions elsewhere.

I should also note that the redesign that we completed in June was not listed as a cost, as this was something I had overseen and implemented personally. We should be on good footing for the overall design through 2019, but I will reevaluate later in the year to see if we should keep things as we are or reach out to an outside party to evolve things further.

2018 Progress

Accomplishments

From January 1, we published:

2,002 non-review, non-interview articles
- 1,855 news posts
- 2 long-form journalistic pieces
- 36 editorials
- 35 Herald Anime Club meetings
- 23 AniWeeklies
- 51 other articles and op-eds
11 reviews
25 interviews
96 Patreon postings

In total, that’s 2,134 pieces that have hit the Herald and beyond, starting January 1. By the end of 2018, I expect this to be closer to 2,300, due to the current pace of the newsroom.

Over the course of 2018, we’ve published numerous articles that we’re proud of, including:

Cancellations

In 2018, we saw the discontinuation of our Media Create sales analysis articles. These gargantuan pieces (2,200 words on average) took between 10 and 30 hours to compile on most weeks, as they were heavily reliant on data and hard analysis.

Readership on these pieces was incredibly limited, bringing in just 6,600 views across all analyses through 2018. Because of the time involved and the low readership, this feature was scrapped.

Opportunities

2018 saw us fall behind in three cornerstone content areas:

AniWeekly
Patreon Articles
Nerdy Talk podcast

First off, I’d like to personally apologize for the Patreon article stoppage. This was not intentional by my part, and it is something that I should be prioritizing. I’m currently at work on an extended article, which will be an entry into the “Forward to the Past” series. As with all FttP articles, you will get the first access to this piece, and you will always have priority on delivery.

AniWeekly: I fully intend to return to the AniWeekly series soon. This was shelved mainly due to time constraints caused by a project that I’ve been working on outside of Anime Herald. I apologize for putting this on hiatus.

Nerdy Talk: Nerdy Talk, sadly, is on hiatus until April at the very least. I injured my voice earlier this year. Since then, I’ve had some difficulty returning to a cadence that I feel comfortable with without causing harm to myself. We will begin anew with Nerdy Talk once I am full-time in my transition, and I’m able to really maintain my own voice once and for all. I apologize for the inconvenience.

2019 Plans

Ah, 2019. To be honest, that’s… where you come in!

In May, we hosted a survey among readers, patrons, and, well… pretty much anyone who was listening at the time. In the piece, we asked three questions:

How often do you visit Anime Herald?
What types of content do you prefer to read?
What format would you prefer to see in the future?

At the time, we learned the following:

Most of our readers visit every few days, with only about 9.5% of our readers stopping by every day.
The vast majority of readers popped in every few days, to monthly, with about a quarter of readers being folks who stop in “Rarely.”
Only 19% of our readers are here for daily news updates.
About half of our readers wanted us to become more like a digital magazine - a new-age Animerica, if you may, that focuses on the biggest news updates of the day, but gives far more focus on those crunchy extended features.

Now, let’s look at the actual data.

With this in mind, let's break our output down a bit further.

Since the beginning of June, we’ve published:

828 news articles (4.65/day)
22 editorials (0.85/week)
4 reviews (0.75/month)
13 interviews (2.6/month)

Clearly, there’s a bit of an imbalance, here. And, well… we need to fix that!

Rather than comb J-blogs for the latest scraps of content, we need to focus our talents where they would work the best for you, the readers, and where you will have the most fun reading our content.

And, look, I’ll be 100% honest with you. I’ve worked the news desk since February 2003. Most people in this end of things tend to last two… maybe three years, tops, before the churn gets to them. So, really, I’ve had a good run in the trenches.

I’m well aware that Anime News Network and Crunchyroll are both better-funded and better-optimized for the daily news rush. But, well, I’m hyper-competitive as an individual, so this is something that’s eaten away at me for a while. Just ask Matt Brown, my former EiC and long-time friend, about how often I gripe about this. 😛

Now more than ever, though, it’s a fact that I’ve come to accept both as an editor, and as a 15-year-veteran of the news desk. It’s time to stop trying to beat ANN and Crunchyroll, who employ full newsrooms to handle what they’re doing.

I’m willing to cede that role to them, and keep things to the top 3 or 4 stories, period, going forward, at least until we can reach a balance of 2-3 editorials and longer articles per week.

That said, in regards to subjects, I’m kind of at a loss, here. I’ve been writing about anime for close to two decades now, so what I find interesting might not be the same as what you find enjoyable. With that in mind, I’d like to ask: What types of articles would you like to see on Anime Herald?

If there’s anything you’d like to see, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments, and I’ll see what it would take to make it happen!

Thanks so much for your time today. To each and every one of you, who placed your trust in us to make your investments count, I want to say “thank you.” You’ve helped us to really grow and become something better over the past year, and I hope that we can continue to earn your trust and your support as we enter 2019.

Happy Holidays,

Samantha Ferreira

Editor-in-chief, Anime Herald