We’ve tweaked the King Cricket crowdfunder – and you might want to make a tweak too

3 minute read

Most of you know that this website is largely funded by donations. There are a few ads, but most of the good stuff that appears on the site appears because a few dozen patrons pledge a bit of money each month and that money gives us an excuse to spend time writing about part-time bowlers or Mike Atherton getting run-out for 99 in 1993 or whatever.

This crowdfunding is done through Patreon and back when we launched our campaign, all of the monthly funding ‘tiers’ were priced in US dollars. This was slightly annoying because we do not live in the United States and do not pay for things in US dollars, but that’s the way the site was set up and at the time it was our only option.

Patreon is a good and useful thing for people undertaking creative endeavours though and as such it has become internationally popular. This means that they’ve started allowing pricing and payments in other currencies too.

As a little over half of our readership is from the UK and we too are based in the UK, it seemed to make sense to switch to GBP, so that’s what we’ve done.

What does this mean?

Well it doesn’t have to mean anything. If you’re currently a patron paying $1 a month and you want to carry on paying $1 a month, you can carry on doing that – you don’t have to change a thing.

If however you’re feeling generous or nationalistic or something, please feel free to increase your pledge to £1 because then we won’t have to pay a conversion fee on it. The same goes for all the other funding tiers.

Quite a lot of you randomly increased your pledges after we posted about this change on Patreon earlier in the week. Thanks very much for that.

You can also make payments in Euros now, if that’s of any use to you.

Patreon do provide an option for us to offer people a discount if they pledge for a year. We seriously considered this and then realised that offering a discount on an entirely voluntary amount doesn’t actually make any sense.

Our funding tiers

Here’s a link to our Patreon page.

We have three monthly funding tiers, but you can actually pledge any amount you want (over $1/£1).

1. Shiny coin – £1 a month
2. Have one on me – £2.70 a month
3. Honorific – £10 a month

The last one is the only one that delivers any kind of benefit (you get to become Sir or Dame in the comments section) and pretty much everyone who pledges that amount has declined that benefit.

Far and away our most popular funding tier is the “Have one on me – buy King Cricket a pint” tier. The price of this one – the cost of a pint in our local about eight years ago – is now correct.

The standard “Have one on me” price is quite the bargain, so feel free to pledge slightly more if you wish us to be adequately watered.

How has the campaign gone?

Pretty well.

We’re largely devoting the additional time to features so it’s quite easy to measure what your pledges have done for the site. (And it’s worth pointing out that even £1 a month adds up to a useful extra bit of time over the course of a whole year.)

In the 14 months since we launched the campaign, we’ve done about 25 features, plus all the Sim Series stuff.

We’d have done maybe half a dozen features without the crowdfunding – probably not even that – and each of them would have been slightly crapper as well. So all in all, good stuff. Thanks.

You can pledge here if you’re not already a patron and fancy helping out.

You can also sign up for our email for free if you don’t already get it.