The future of Scot Goes Pop: an update

First of all, for those of you who have been asking, the reason blogging has been a bit light during most of August is that I was away on a family staycation last week and the week before.  In fact I may have some photos and videos for you at some point, because there was a slightly unexpected episode right at the start of the trip.

Since I got back home at the weekend, I've been doing some sums in my head based on the state of my bank balance and the current trajectory of the fundraiser, and I've been coming to the regrettable conclusion that we may be inching closer to the end of the road with Scot Goes Pop.  When I launched the 2023 fundraiser in May, I said that if the target was reached or even if we got well over halfway there, I'd be able to continue indefinitely, and that if nothing or almost nothing was raised I'd pretty much have to stop straight away, and that if the fundraiser was partially successful I'd keep going for however many months the funds allowed and then stop.  It's that third scenario we've ended up with - the fundraiser is over one-quarter of the way towards its target, and that has allowed me to keep going for the last three months and may allow me to keep going for a few weeks more.  But I can't keep lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis, so if substantial progress isn't made there'll come a point in the near future where I'll have to draw a line and start devoting far more time to other activities that will probably leave much less space for blogging, although I dare say you'd still see me pop up with an occasional blogpost every few weeks when I feel the urgent need to sound off about something!

Just to explain briefly how we've ended up at this point, until two or three years ago I was in an enviable position whereby the annual fundraiser was almost always hitting its target and I also had several other income streams from political writing that were essentially spin-offs from the blogging itself.  The combined funds from all of those income streams made it reasonably easy for me to devote huge amounts of time to the blog, especially during election periods and at other times of high political drama.  It also gave me the flexibility to just drop everything whenever a new poll came out and blog about it as quickly as possible.  I used to earn quite a bit by writing extensively for The National - in some years I was literally writing dozens of articles for them, but that more or less dried up after I joined the Alba Party in 2021, which I assume is not a coincidence (although admittedly no-one has said that to me directly).  For many years I was also earning from regular columns for the International Business Times, but that fizzled out gradually due to changes in the editorial team.  (One of them eventually ended up at the Talk Radio website and took me on again as a columnist there, although that time he wasn't able to offer payment.)  And in my early years as an iScot columnist, I was earning from that, but as many of you will know Ken has been walking an impossible tightrope recently trying to keep iScot financially viable, so for around the last three years or so I've been contributing my monthly column for free.  Basically what used to be an enviable position has become a perfect storm, with all of the income streams closing off more or less at the same time.  And even the part of my income that has nothing to do with politics or writing has taken a big hit over the last three years due to the pandemic - that's just a coincidence, but obviously it doesn't help.

I'm not quite ready to give up just yet, though, because I know from past experience that sometimes fundraisers follow odd patterns - they can appear to run out of steam and then there'll be a sudden spurt for no apparent reason.  So I'll make one final push via this post, and also at the bottom of every blogpost over the next few weeks, to see if I can raise enough to just about keep Scot Goes Pop going until next year, or at least to postpone the final decision for a bit longer.  Also if anyone has any brilliant suggestions that I may not have thought of about how I can find alternative income streams from the blog or from other forms of political writing, by all means let me know.  People always suggest a subscription model like Patreon, but my strong suspicion is that if there isn't the money out there to fund the blog by one crowdfunding method, it wouldn't be there to fund the blog by any other crowdfunding method either.  My guess is that Yessers are currently looking to fund blogs that tack to one of the two extremes, for want of a better word - either they want blogs that say the SNP leadership are saintly figures who can do no wrong, or they want blogs that say the SNP have stabbed the independence movement in the back and thus must be totally destroyed in an act of crazed revenge, even if that means installing unionist MPs and MSPs.  Scot Goes Pop has a nuanced position somewhere in between those two extremes, and I suspect that's why it's no longer attracting the scale of support that is still enjoyed by certain other websites.  I make no complaints about that - it's a form of market forces in action, and ultimately independence supporters will end up with whatever alternative media landscape that they think is worth having.

Once again, thank you to the dozens of people who have donated to the 2023 fundraiser so far, and if you're one of them please just ignore my ongoing crowdfunding efforts.  If you haven't donated so far and would like to do so (and please don't feel under any pressure to do it - I know most people are feeling the pinch right now), the preferable method is direct payment by Paypal.  That cuts out the middle man, which helps a lot because the payment usually comes through instantly and fees can be eliminated completely depending on which option you select.

For direct payments by Paypal, my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you don't have a Paypal account, payments can be made by card via the fundraiser page HERE.