Years from now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to adequately explain to someone that didn’t live through 2020 precisely what it was like. It’s been a year unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime. Things I never thought I’d see are happening on such a regular basis that I feel myself fluctuating between numb anxiety and flashing white-hot anger. When the pandemic began in March, I reacted by tackling some projects I had on my list for a long time. I redesigned and rebuilt the entire main website and launched that in May; I then brought back hundreds of pieces of old AbsolutePunk content and got that part of the scene history back in our database. Over the past eighteen or so weeks, I’ve also been writing weekly articles that first re-ranked all of the “best of” lists from 2005 through 2015, and then deconstructed my entire musical journey starting in 1998 and tried to tell the story of how I fell in love with music and the history of beginning AbsolutePunk. These have been welcome distractions in these weird-ass times.

Usually, in August, I do some kind of “supporter pitch” on the website. I’ve done it the past three or four years to remind people about our membership program and talk about how it’s because of the supporting members that this website can exist. I try not to be too annoying about this because I’m not great at self-promotion, but if I don’t do it, I always feel like I’m not trying as hard as I could be. This year, with all of the racial injustice, pandemic, and so much more going on, I never could find the time that felt right to do it. After finishing my article project last week, I spent some time brainstorming what other kinds of articles I could write that I think would be fun to tackle, and I also did my annual deep dive on the state of the website and how I’m feeling about everything. The bottom line is the pandemic really fucked with my plans.

From the end of March through this month, on average, the website’s ad revenue was basically cut in half. We saw more traffic than usual, and virtually half the income from the ads. That’s not great. I don’t know if, or when, the ad revenue will return to something resembling what it looked like at the beginning of the year. So I realized before I can start thinking about my next article series, I have to write up some pitch about our membership program. So here I am.