Regular site visitors will have noticed that we will have added a donation panel to the side of the website this week using our newly established page over on ko-fi. While this is a fan site dedicated to all things Mastertronic, we do have costs involved with running the site and we needed to find some way to try to address this.
Until now, the site has been subsidised from advertising and sponsorship run on the other three websites that we run but what we wanted to try to do going forward was not only make the Mastertronic Collectors Archive financially independent, but also look to how we can be able to invest more in the site and expand it beyond what we are doing with it right now. Unfortunately, that costs money and with a budget of zero, without funding it from our own pockets that’s not possible.
One thing we certainly don’t want to do is place any of our content behind a paywall – we don’t believe that’s fair on any of you – and no matter whether we get any help at all that won’t impact on the work of the site. But financial support will allow us to do more than we are right now.
Exclusive Content
While our ko-fi page won’t be locking anything behind a paywall, we will be using it to complement the content we are publishing here on the website. We’ll be running surveys to help us steer the content here on the site, bringing you exclusive previews of upcoming features, and behind the scenes updates on what we do here at the Mastertronic Collectors Archive. So even if you’re not able to support us financially, please spare a moment to pop over to the page at https://ko-fi.com/mastertroniccollectorsarchive and follow us for all the latest bonus content.
Budget Philosophy
As with Mastertronic, we want to keep our donation requests to an absolute minimum. While ko-fi defaults to a starting point of £3, we wanted to follow Mastertronic themselves and start with a £1.99 price point. Sadly they would only allow us to set the amount at £2 but for the price of a Mastertronic game, you can make a huge difference to what we are doing.
How Will Your Support Help?
As with all fundraising sites, ko-fi will take a small fee from donations, and a further percentage will be taken by PayPal before funds reach us but those are worth it to ensure that any donations are 100% safe and secure. In terms of how they will help us, this is a quick summary of the key things we can do…
To start off with, basic donations will help towards the day-to-day running costs for the site itself:
- 8 donations a month – all our website hosting and domain name registration covered
- 12 donations a month – as above but we will be able to upgrade our package for faster and more reliable hosting and better storage
Once we have done this, if we get extra donations, we will use funds for the following:
- making the site advert free
- purchase of software to improve development of the site
- licensing more music for our YouTube channel
- sourcing prizes for competitions for the website and our social media pages (Twitter, BlueSky and our Facebook Group)
- and much more…
As we said, it is our intention to remove ALL advertising from the site both in terms of banner advertising and any advertising in the Links section to keep the site as ad-free as possible. We may keep one or two small banner adverts live for close friends of the site such as SegaMags, but only those that we feel will be of interest to our readers and that will have relevance to Mastertronic collectors.
As always, we want to thank all of you for your continued support for the Mastertronic Collectors Archive, as readers, for sharing and liking our posts, subscribing for our free updates using the panel on the front page of the site (if you haven’t already done so, this only takes a moment), and hopefully supporting us in the future.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Simon, Site Editor
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