Help TAC Grow
Posted on July 31st, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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The American Conservative needs your help. In September, we’d like to distribute the magazine to attendees at the Campaign for Liberty’s Valley Forge conference. This will get the magazine into the hands of several hundred people highly sympathetic to the magazine’s positions on peace, sound money, civil liberties, and constitutional conservatism. It’ll cost us $200 to get copies to the event and distribute them; a tiny sum, but something we haven’t budgeted for. So we’d like to ask you to donate — obviously, just 10 donors for $20 apiece gets the job done, or four $50 donors. Include “Valley Forge” in the comment box, and any additional money raised will also go toward distribution at this or future events.
I think there’s an excellent chance that recipients of the magazine will become subscribers, so this is a great way to help the The American Conservative grow. (Naturally, another helpful way to expand TAC’s reach is by giving gift subscriptions.)
Filed under: Announcements, Events
Awesome idea!!! Warning - babbling ahead:
I wonder if there’s a way you could arrange to sell bulk copies to people like me who would love to pass them out from booths at political events, like Tea Party rallies and stuff? Even I can see trouble with logistics, but it’s something, as you may know, my husband would be most interested in.
Also, I have often thought about buying a subscription for my local library, but I know nothing about that business. Do they have to pay a premium for thier copies? Would they put it out, or do they have committees decide what literature should be available?
I used to teach Microsoft Technicians to answer the telephone for technical support. Any person who is the least bit computer-savvy, knows how dumb an idea it is to click on a “button” or “icon” presented to the viewer by a “popup”. You never know what you have been tricked into accepting (viral, criminal, or financial).
Instead, you change the page, and later return, hoping that the “popup creator” was savvy enough to leave a cookie, preventing re-displaying of the popup more than once a day. For webpages run by people too dumb to include this simple courtesy, they can expect to see traffic drop off over time.
Consider the simple arrogance of a “popup”. That is, “I know you don’t want to see this, so I will prevent you from seeing my material, until you pay obeisance by clicking on something that may be dangerous to you.”
People who like popups, are like people who like Obama’s Stimulus, CAP & TAX, and HEALTH DECEPTION. In other words, “We don’t care what you want, we just see this as a matter of ‘adjusting your preferences’, without your permission, for the ‘higher good’.”
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Now that we’ve gotten beyond 1/2 of my comments disappearing before being posted (did I learn what is acceptable, or did you widen your tolerance of “rigid-right” voices?), I think it is a good idea for everyone who enjoys your blog on a regular basis, to contribute. I will do so (in a small way), today.
Thanks, Angela! I’ll look into the prospect of selling bulk copies; the logistics might be a bit tricky. In the meantime, we have a big sale of back issues coming up in the next month or so which will be a good opportunity to pick up a lot of copies at a healthy savings.
Libraries do pay different rates for periodicals and tend to have publications boards to decide which magazines to carry. The best way to get TAC into your local library is to talk to a librarian and see what their procedures are.
(By the way, thanks for everyone who has donated so far. We’re off to a good start for a Friday afternoon.)
Barney,
Ads on (reputable) media blogs for the products those blogs sell are about as benign as popup ads can possibly get. They may not be nice to look at, but they’re no more likely to suck your computer into a virus or a phishing scam than the rest of any such site, which is to say almost not at all.
Anyway, I’m pleased to be a subscriber now. I had tried to do it online and couldn’t because of an irregularity, but the lady on the phone was helpful and polite, so who cares?
MattSwartz,
A good liberal should expect to have “wiser heads than his” make his decisions.
A good conservative will feel resentment at being “obstructed”, even if by some well-meaning streetperson who only wants to wash your windshield at a stoplight intersection.
The purpose, from a business model, of TV, Radio, and popular Websites with Ads, is, to attract attention long enough to feed advertisements. Now go pull up MSN, or Yahoo, or AOL, or MSNBC, or Microsoft. Popups? All these sites, “been there”, “done that”, “moved on”. Take a hint.
Simple fact - popups reduce traffic.
@TAC has a lot of “dead space”, colored a pleasant “deep blue”, on the side of the screen. Go there, experiment, and see what you can get readers to “click on”. Then you are a “partner”, instead of an “obstruction”. You reduce the sense of “adversarial relationship” between yourselves and the reader.
Great idea Daniel…I wish you these best in this worthwhile endeavor!
As an aside, I had a question about amconmag.com’s website performance. I’m not sure what the issue is, but it is generally very slow. I’m running on a corporate T-1 line and, for example, it took close to a minute for me to load this blog page. I’ve had similar experiences on different days of the week, at different times of the day (and using different computers.) The content on this site is very important, but most folks just won’t wait that long to read it.
Peace be with you,
Chris
I glanced at “T-1″ and thought I read “T-Shirt”, which is a fantastic idea. TACShirts could not fail!