Happy Birthday to Us!
By 
LGM went live 13 years ago today. We’re old enough to drink, if we can find an older blog with a fake ID to buy beer for us.
This last year has seen the highest traffic in the history of the blog; we often get in a day what we got in all of 2004. It’s obviously more than we could have imagined when we started this thing. We remain an old-school, direct traffic driven blog, with an astonishingly high percentage of traffic coming from repeat commenters.
Accordingly, we wish to thank you very much for the time and effort that you’ve committed to making this blog what it is today.
A bit about our funding; 89% of our revenue comes in through advertising, 12% through donations. We would love to run the site on donations alone, but it’s just not practical. We do try to minimize the obnoxiousness of the advertising, although unfortunately a few bad ads do slip through. We have made it a point, however, to avoid the most aggressive types of advertising, including pop-ups and quasi-pop-ups.
Paying out, the biggest line item is salary. The second biggest is server fees, followed by a host of smaller costs (accountant, taxes, fees, etc.). We are also on the very cusp of a redesign that should improve site speed and operability; this will necessarily represent a capital investment on our part.
In that spirit, please indulge us our annual fundraising appeal. Any amount is appreciated; if the button below does not work, then try the one on the near right sidebar. If that doesn’t work, or if you’d prefer an alternative avenue of donation, please contact us directly at the e-mail address on the far right sidebar.
