Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

Bark louder, little dog.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

We still have time to mess this up!

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Let there be snark.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / It’s Been Nearly A Year With No Ads!

It’s Been Nearly A Year With No Ads!

by | 70 Comments

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Balloon Juice went ad-free not quite a year ago.  I think it’s fair to say that I am not the only one who is really happy we did that.    At least I hope so!

Can we take a quick trip down memory lane, before I suggest some fine-tuning of the process?

2021

If you’re the guy whose name is on all the bills, ditching the ads and losing $1,000 a month would have to feel a bit like jumping off a cliff without a net.

So here’s what it will take for me to feel good about having asked John Cole to do just that:

– $6,000 in one-time donations now – that would sit in an account, unused, as a safety net, to take the uncertainty out of the equation for Cole.

– no subscriptions, just recurring donations every month from those who can afford it, to pay for hosting and subscriptions etc.

– we need about $1,000 in recurring donations every month for that.

Safety net

It turns out that having the safety net has already been helpful, as John got clobbered with a tax bill for most of the PayPal donations.  And he surely will again this year.

So it would be super helpful if we could put some money back into the safety net, with one-time donations.  Before you ask me exactly how much the tax bill was, I do not know the actual amount and Cole hates to talk about money, so I am not going to press him on that.  So if anyone is in a position help build that back up to the original $6,000, that would be great.

You can donate to the safety net with Patreon, Venmo, Zelle, and paper check.  And even PayPal if that’s your only option, but please mark it as personal / gift and not payment for services.

Fine tuning

Not everyone can afford even $5 or $10 a month, but this is a community and those of us who can afford that have been helping make the site better for everyone.

If you have signed up for a monthly donation but you’re in a different financial position than you were when you signed up, please feel free to cancel your monthly donation, with our thanks for having supported the site for nearly a year.

If you keep thinking you’ll set up a monthly donation, but haven’t gotten around to it, or if the timing is right for increasing your donation, this would be a great time to do it.

If you have a monthly donation set up through PayPal, please consider switching that to Patreon. Patreon takes taxes off the top before the funds go into John’s account, so there are no surprises at tax time.

If you want to support the site with a one-time check, send me an email message I will send you Cole’s address.  (P.O.box)

Memory Lane

In case you want to relive the good times, here’s the post from me on Nov 3, 2021.

Good News: Who Wants a Balloon Juice With No Ads At All?

Followed by this post from John a couple hours later:

So I Guess We are Going Ad Free (With Venting and Explanation)

If you have any questions, let me know!

Update:

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo or Zelle

Reader Interactions

70Comments

  4. 4.

    Kelly

    I am not a tax guy. However I’ve been handling the road maintenance money for our neighborhood for nearly 20 years. I keep all the road maintenance contributions in a separate checking account named road fund for our road. I write all the checks from that checking account and keep all the receipts and I’ve never reported it as income hopefully this won’t come back to bite me at some point.

  9. 9.

    different-church-lady

    For the amount of mental health maintenance this joint provides, 10 a month is an absolute bargain.

  11. 11.

    cain

    I tried to sign up on Patreon to start a monthly give and it turns out that I’m already doing that – haha

  13. 13.

    Ken

    @Major Major Major Major: The thing is, people pulling in $100K+ per month aren’t committing “tax shenanigans”; they are taking advantage of all available opportunities to minimize their tax burden through use of applicable IRS code and rulings.  “Shenanigans” is for nearly-top-10000 blogs that barely scrape in enough to pay for the hosting services.

  16. 16.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Ken:

    The thing is, people pulling in $100K+ per month aren’t committing “tax shenanigans”; they are taking advantage of all available opportunities to minimize their tax burden through use of applicable IRS code and rulings.

    Right, they’re paying income tax on their income, which is good, is my point.

    If on the other hand you run a free nonprofit service that takes donations in order to remain free, from which you don’t see a dime, you should structure it thusly.

  18. 18.

    randy khan

    Done.  I do think it would be helpful for people to have the payment links in the OP, not just in the sidebar or comments.

  20. 20.

    WaterGirl

    @Major Major Major Major: If you’re suggesting non-profit status, there are a lot of hoops to jump through, attorneys to hire, tax forms to fill out, etc.

    I don’t see how that gets us ahead in any way.

    But if there are any tax peeps out there who have one neat trick for us, that would actually work, send me an email message.

  25. 25.

    Joy in FL

    I did not know the advantage about Patreon donations regarding taxes. I had been donating by PayPal. I just cancelled that and added Balloon Juice to my many Patreon donations; almost all of those are for animal rescues, so BJ fits right in : )

    Thanks for the information, WG.

  29. 29.

    randy khan

    @Major Major Major Major:

    As someone who’s involved in several non-profits (and served two of them as treasurer), there’s a bunch of bureaucracy involved in non-profit status.  It’s not so bad for a relatively small organization (that is, in dollar terms), but you still have to convince the IRS you qualify and, among other things, I think the political fundraising here probably makes it not a realistic option.

  31. 31.

    Fair Economist

    Why not incorporate as a for-profit? It won’t have any profits and if it did it would probably be in a lower tax bracket anyway. There’s also incorporating as an S corp which would allow writing off the hosting fees and such.

  34. 34.

    Elizabelle

    I really appreciate the no ads.  We are called on to give our attention to so much.  Not every advertiser deserves our captive eyeballs.  Enough.

    Also, very OT; not sure if this has been mentioned on earlier threads.  For once, it’s not us with a deadly school shooting.  It’s Russia.  Tragic, all the same.

    The Guardian:

    A gunman with a swastika on his T-shirt has killed 15 people, including 11 children, and wounded 24 at a school in Russia, investigators have said.

    The attacker, a man in his early thirties who was named by authorities as Artem Kazantsev, killed two security guards then opened fire on students and teachers at School Number 88 in Izhevsk, where he had once been a pupil. He then killed himself.

    Russia’s investigative committee, which handles major crimes, said it was looking into the perpetrator’s suspected neo-Nazi links.

    “Currently investigators … are conducting a search of his residence and studying the personality of the attacker, his views and surrounding milieu,” the committee said in a statement. “Checks are being made into his adherence to neo-fascist views and Nazi ideology.”

    …  of the 24 people wounded, all but two were children. The regional governor, Alexander Brechalov, said surgeons had carried out a number of operations.
    He said the attacker had been registered with a “psycho-neurological” treatment facility. Investigators said the man was armed with two pistols and a large supply of ammunition.

    …  Russia has experienced several school shootings in recent years.

    In May 2021, a teenage gunman killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan. In September last year, a student armed with a hunting rifle shot dead at least six people at a university in the Urals city of Perm.

    In April 2022, an armed man killed two children and a teacher at a kindergarten in the central Ulyanovsk region before committing suicide.

    In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly fellow pupils, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

    Did not realize Russia was taking up the slack.  Don’t recall the 2018 Crimean college attack.  I think we in the US of cray cray are still #1 in school and mass shootings.  (Leaving out the war in Ukraine, of course. Peace be to the Ukrainians.)

    And, per Google maps: Izhevsk is “known for the Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms, which displays weapons and documents the Russian arms trade.”

    Refreshing that the school attacker did not have a Kalashnikov.  Pistols can do enough carnage.

    Izhevsk appears to be almost at the midpoint between Moscow (to its west) and Yekaterinburg (to its east).

  35. 35.

    Elizabelle

    I can move that Russian school shooting item to another thread.  But which one?  Did not want to insert into the previous Biden one …

  38. 38.

    West of the Rockies

    How would I make out a check?  What would be the mailing address?  I could also do credit card.

  43. 43.

    oldster

    Yup, I started making monthly Patreon contributions back at the start of this experiment.

    I’m glad to hear that it’s penciling out, more or less.

    One of my rules of life is: you always pay for your pleasures, one way or another. It’s usually better to pay for them up front, in cash. The other ways are generally a *lot* more expensive in the long run.

  44. 44.

    middlelee

    I just cancelled PayPal and signed up with Patreon.  In the past I’ve had discussions with Patreon that caused me to hate it but am thinking positive about this go round.

  45. 45.

    thruppence

    Okay, delurking to set up my modest monthly donation through Patreon. First time I’ve ever used it; seems painless. May many of my fellow lurkers do the same!

  46. 46.

    trollhattan

    @Elizabelle: Horrid. I’ll add one important detail, which I’ll recommend the moar guns solves guns crowd ponder.

    Eleven children and four adults were killed, including two security guards and two teachers, according to Russia’s investigative committee. All but two of the 24 injured people were children.

  56. 56.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    Please tell me that wasn’t real. I don’t think my sanity could withstand that

    No offence in the world, and I certainly don’t mean this to sound patronising, but I sometimes forget how young you are. By which I mean, those ads ran a number of years ago and probably had their heyday before you were a Juicer.

    Others may, if they care to, provide links and descriptions.

  57. 57.

    BruceFromOhio

    Pleased to kick in $50 one-time to Cole via Venmo. A site without ads is so very pleasant. Not fond of recurring, my fortunes come and go and I’ve been bitten by it, sorry.

  58. 58.

    Ruckus

    @sab:

    “PayPal (Peter Thiel) is bad? Who knew?”

    When it started it wasn’t bad. But, and it’s big, round, smelly but, Peter seems to have screwed it up, damaged it by being within 1/2 a million miles of it, and unworthy of having anything to do with, which your sentence clearly states.

  59. 59.

    Percysowner

    Well, now I feel good about switching from PayPal to Patreon way back when. I had set up a recurring donation through PayPal, but use Patreon for every other content producer that I use regularly. When I did it I felt bad because I knew there would be a Patreon fee and that they would take taxes. I thought the PayPal money would get taxed. Turns out I did the right thing. I’ll Zelle $15 for the rainy day fund.

  60. 60.

    Percysowner

    Well shoot. Zelle is getting pissy about your email. I made what I thought were the proper changes, but it keeps saying

    This is not a valid value

    I’ll up my Patreon for a few months to cover it.

  61. 61.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    My life has changed after I retired over a year ago, after I turned 72 yrs old. And now that I’m 73 and have seen living with a restricted SS income for over a year, I find that making any excess payments is not really in the cards. After January my VA status will change, given my wonderful retirement income level. I may be able to do something then, but I really have to be watchful of spending more than necessary, you know food and such. With gas here in SoCal back up to around $5.40$5.50 per gallon (or more) for cash/regular, just going to the store for groceries (also up about 20%) is how should I say it, almost out of range

    Getting old is so much fun. I recommend it for everyone just for the surprises.

  65. 65.

    WaterGirl

    @Ruckus: Don’t even think twice about it.  I still remember the year in college when I mostly ate tomatoes all summer that the lady next door grew and gave to me. Discretionary spending fluctuates for many of us over time.

    No one should feel obligated to donate!  I don’t even donate.  I figure I donate enough of my time that I don’t need to donate money, too. :-)

  69. 69.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @sab: ​There’s a simple solution: Disallow any nym with emojis. Or any other “special character” that bulletproofs it against the pie filter. Don’t even permit anyone to register such a nym. Give current posters with emoji-laden nyms a week to switch to an unoffending nym, then kill the old nym.

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