i have noticed for a while you have been running a pop up ad campaign which essentially says “pay us what you think we’re worth” and my guess is that you are probably not getting the numbers you were hoping.

Ever since Alan Rubbisher made it his mission to make The Guardian Free you have been stuck in a funny position to keep the money rolling in as advertising alone isn’t cutting it and circulation is going down as expected as people go digital.

Here is an analogy on why people close the pop up window for the most part. There is website called EDLhacker which is used by the large archive television community (including me) and the chap running it relied on donatiopns to keep the site up to date but face it, hardly anybody in the community paid. We just used it for free. Then suddenly the site was archived off until he got some donations and this set the entire community into a panic. That is how vital this site is. Suddenly people including me put in donations and now the site has been updated. It took that kind of desperate threat to make people wake up to what they should rightly be paying for.

Now i am not saying you should do anything drastic but people aren’t going to donate as the purse stings have been tightened.

I suggest and this is a BIG thing to attempt, Put all the news websites under a paywall… You, The Sun and even The Daily Mail should join the NYtimes and do it in unity. We know smaller sites like Huffington Post will stay free because of their chronic use of free labour but let’s face it… it’s rubbish, right?

Donations won’t bring in the big bucks… subscriptions will and I subscribe to Broadcastnow and Private Eye. It can be done.