When we launched this Substack in March we were not only launching a new era in Combat Sports Journalism, we were also effectively doing a fundraiser to build a new website.
Thanks to a truly humbling outpouring of support, both the Bloody Elbow Substack Newsletter (what you’re reading right now) and the Bloody Elbow Podcast hit the Substack best seller lists and we raised enough cash to pay for the site rebuild.
But there’s much more to do and we need your support.
The corporation I’ve formed to run BE, BE Presents Publishing Inc., had to take on debt to buy the Bloody Elbow assets from Vox.
If you want our site to truly belong to the fans, we will need 5000 of you to become monthly paid subscribers ($5) or 500 of you to become annual subscribers ($50) or just 25 of you to become founding members ($500) to help retire that debt.
As a prospective Bloody Elbow patron here is what you need to know:
- We have kept the core team together.
- We have acquired the trademarks, IP and archives of Bloody Elbow from Vox Media.
- We have built a new ad supported Bloody Elbow that has already served up almost ten million page views to almost four million readers and has already proven itself as a revenue machine for our ad partners.
- We have partnered with Snack Media who provides hosting, access to the IMAGO image library and sells advertising on the site.
- The ugly reality of the ad sales business is that we won’t get paid for our April traffic until June and we have payroll to meet before the ad revenue comes in.
- We have secured control and ownership of the Bloody Elbow Twitter account and its 170,00 followers.
- We have secured control and full-monetization of the 300,000-subscriber-strong Bloody Elbow YouTube channel. Thanks to long-time Bloody Elbow reader Freddy Damani.
- But it hasn’t all been wins and easy street. Far from it.
- We have not yet secured control of our 288,000 follower Facebook page despite the best efforts of myself and Vox Media. We remain optimistic but are proceeding cautiously. As many of you know from bitter experience, it’s way too easy to lose control of a Facebook page and not get it back. Losing contact with that many loyal readers (and dedicated trolls) would really suck.
- We lost access to the 78,000 strong Bloody Elbow member database and with it the entire history of the BE comments. These are both grievous losses that hurt us as a publication and community whose work and social interaction merits historic preservation.
- We lost access to every single photograph on the site. This is a grievous loss to sports journalism history. The work of those brilliant photographers was a huge part of the story we told in our work. And more personally to me, the craft of our bloggers in curating the photographic history of this sport has been lost.
- We lost most of the multi-media (gifs, video embeds) that had been part of our older stories. Another grievous loss as things like my 20 part history of MMA series were largely built on that kind of story-telling.
- We are still very much in our infancy as a fully independent company and remain determined to prove that you don’t have to take money under the table from fight promoters or play the access journalism game to survive as a media outlet in 2023.
- Why do I believe we can do this? Simple, because….
We have you.
Subscribers keep Bloody Elbow independent
That’s right. The thousands of you who have already subscribed and the hundreds of you who have become paying subscribers.
If you want Bloody Elbow to truly belong to the fans, we will need 5000 of you to become monthly paid subscribers ($5) or 500 of you to become annual subscribers ($50) or just 25 of you to become founding members ($500) to help retire that debt.
If you’re already an annual member, please tell some friends why you’re supporting Bloody Elbow.
Let’s Motherf**kers,
Nate Wilcox, Publisher
Bloody Elbow
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