The Perks
Making something and putting it out into the world is terrifying. Will anyone like this? Will anyone care? Will I be able to do this for a living? When I made the decision to create this website and write independently, I asked myself these questions over and over again. In a brief moment of clarity, I realized my bigger regret would be not reaching for my dream and taking the leap. That doesn’t mean I’m not scared shitless I’ll fail. But it does mean I’m willing to try.
I’ve been writing and publishing online for over 15 years and starting Chorus has been the most fulfilling and exciting work of my entire life — I want to keep doing it for as long as possible. When I first started AbsolutePunk.net, the business model was I write, I sell some ads, and the money we made from ads was how I made a living. But publishing and the online landscape has changed a lot since then and we’ve moved into a world where online advertising just doesn’t bring in the same kind of revenue as it did in the past. And chasing pageviews leads to pumping out content where quantity matters more than quality. No one wins in that scenario. Instead, I want to be completely upfront with how we make money here. The first is through display advertisements on the website. The second is through direct support from our readers.
I firmly believe that if you love something and want it to continue, the best way is to help support it. I want to keep writing about music, technology, pop-culture and, hopefully, you want to keep reading what we put out. To make that happen we have put together a way for you to directly support this website by becoming a patron. Your support allows us to keep existing. Compared to the entire internet we’re a small website, and instead of aiming to be the biggest website, we want to be your favorite. And we believe that if we can find a group of dedicated readers that love what we do and want to visit us on a regular basis, and a percentage of those readers help support us, we can keep doing it indefinitely. That means if we get enough support from our readers we don’t have to worry about advertising. We’re not interested in chasing pageviews and clickbait. And we’re never going to compete with Facebook or Google either. Instead we can focus on producing the best content for you to read and the best community for you to participate in.
I want to always be completely upfront with everyone about how we make money and what our goals are. We’ve put together a few tiers of support that range from basically pennies per day to going above and beyond. Most of the packages can be purchased on this page in under a minute using a credit card and all of your information is completely private and we will never share it with anyone.
Here’s what it all boils down to: I love running this website and what we’re building, and I’m committed to making the best website I possibly can for as long as I can. I’d love your help and support on this journey.
As always, thanks for reading and thanks for your support. If you have any questions at all please reach out to me via email.
Sign in to manage your supporter membership. You can update your payment information, change plans, and make all changes to your plan. You can manage all your supporter options on this page (or from your forum control panel).
Your membership will renew one year from the date you purchased (unless you’ve signed up for the monthly option, then it’ll be one month from your purchase date). An email will be sent a few days before renewal to remind you about the upcoming yearly charge, and you can turn off auto renew under your subscription tab.
Yes. All payments on this page are processed via Stripe, an industry leading payment processor. Your email address and personal information will never be given to anyone for any purpose and we do not store your payment information anywhere on our servers. In fact, we never even see it.
Stripe can take any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB) as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay. PayPal is also available.
Yes, send any amount over $25 for each package you want to gift, then email jason@chorus.fm the username(s) you are gifting.
Of course! I’ll never say no to beer money. You can easily send any amount here, or use Venmo, Square Cash, or PayPal.
All of our membership packages have the same perks. You pick the package that works best for you. The tiers are simply to offer different price points you can choose to support the website with.