Sponsoring an Ad Free OJST... (Patreon)

Hey gang - It's Matt writing today! Writing about the scary business side of emailing people for money. For context, here's a post I wrote about the deal with our ads  back in February.

I don't think I've ever been so scared of sending emails out in my life. I think it's got to do with the fact that I'm ASKING for such a large sum from mostly strangers...

To update you: This week I'm hoping to email potential companies to see if anybody would like to sponsor and patronize OJST, to help it become ad free and a better place for community sex education. And I'm terrified. 

I'll be selling two "Sponsorship" slots, each one at $10,000 for a year of support. The end result ought to look something like this!

And on the mobile:

I dunno, I'm pretty excited by how it looks. A big apparent show of support and relationship between OJST and another! I hope you guys like it?

It's not so hard talking to people and asking them to pledge $1 a comic.  A free sex positive comic feels dollar-worthy, I think! But asking a few companies for 10s of thousands? That's some audacity!

Thing is, it's REAL hard to remove ads without help - they make us vital  money, and a lot of that money is recurring and naturally compounding. For example one porn website sign-up will net me about 60% of the immediate sale, and then for some companies it pays us 60% of every month they stay subscribed - which they tend to do, 'cause we pick GOOD porn to showcase. So ONE sign-up can land us a steady bonus $15-20 a month, and that seriously adds up!

But the times for change have been approaching for a while. Having sexy ads seemed like no-brainer when we first started. Now that we're 4 years in, we've accumulated almost 100 sex ed comics, in addition to all the sex toy reviews and adventure comics. OJST isn't just a bit of fun anymore, it's become a community resource, a place for people to get their sex ed. And we've been hearing more and more and more from folks that our ads are a very active deterrent from people linking to the site and scares away potential new viewers who might otherwise benefit from reading the comics.

We've heard from Planned Parenthood managers who actively send their 18+ volunteers to the site to answer their questions. Our monthly page views are in the multi-millions. We're being printed and used in doctors and gynos offices as a first glance resource. We're printed and given away to students at universities during freshers weeks. And we're showing up in more and more libraries. We've even shown up at a Tate Modern exhibit on sex and porn. The site's developed into something important, and it's time the face of it reflects that.

Going ad-free seems like the next step.

Asking for help to do it TERRIFIES ME.

Anyway, I'm not looking for feedback or anything. I just thought some of you might be interested in the behind the scene's goings-on. Maybe some of you can keep your fingers crossed for us?

And hey, if this piques your interest and you/your company happen to be interested in filling one of the sponsorship slots, feel free to email me! matthew.nolan@internationalhobo.com