Since it launched seven months ago 5Pillarz has been an editorial but not a financial success, writes Roshan Muhammed Salih.
During the last month we had over 64,300 unique visitors to the site, nearly 83,500 visits and nearly 110,000 page views. We are now among the top Muslim websites in the UK in terms of visitor traffic and frankly this is quite an achievement for a website that is run on around £150 a month by a team of volunteers!
However, we are simply not receiving enough financial support from our readers to achieve our goals of keeping this site independent and to grow it in terms of its journalism.
In the short-term we need to raise £500 a month to deliver good content on a site which loads quickly. In the long-term we are looking for investors to put in much more money to put this site on a professional footing.
We have asked our readers many times to donate just £5 or £10 a month. If we could get 50 readers to donate £10 a month that would ease our financial worries, or alternatively 100 readers to donate £5 a month. But unfortunately not enough people have responded to our call.
So in April or May this year, when the site is a year old, we intend to put up a PARTIAL PAYWALL. This means that around 20 percent of the site’s content will still be free but readers will have to pay for 80% of it. We intend to charge £2 a month to access all of the site’s content.
However, those who already donate to the site (or have donated) will of course still get ALL of the content for free and so will students. But those with the ability to pay will have to pay.
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We have decided to make this move with great reluctance. We had hoped that our readers would be more forthcoming because they would believe in the site’s aims – independence, professionalism, honesty and diversity. And we do think that you share those aims because of the feedback that we get. But obviously not enough to part with your hard-earned cash!
Finally, there is only one way to avoid this fate and that is to donate to this site – which you can still do via the following link by PayPal, direct debit, credit or debit card. Thank you.
https://5pillarsuk.com/support-our-site/
