[Pillowfort] First Half of 2024 Donation Goal Update

[anacedragon]

(Crossposted from Pillowfort.)

so, we're 7 months past Pillowfort's emergency fundraiser at the end of 2023. when the fundraiser ended (successfully!), Staff announced that the site had about 6 months of funding left, with a promise to remain online through June 2024. each month that meets the funding goal of $5,000 extends that buffer. January did not meet the funding goal, but every month since has, meaning that the site is currently (as of July 31st) funded through December!
i haven't done a proper analysis of donations since the middle of the emergency fundraiser, so let's get into it!

The Numbers
from the July 2024 Community Update:

January 2024: $4,078.58
February 2024: $5,586.22
March 2024: $5,627.57
April 2024: $5,515.81
May 2024: $5,281.50
June 2024: $5,536.35

and a graph showing the progress to the donation goal throughout each of these months (taken from my donation tracker):

we saw a general trend of increased donations from January all the way through March. there are a few reasons that it makes sense that January was a relatively "slow" month: first of all, it was the first month after a huge fundraising drive, when clearly a lot of people gave more money to the site than they usually would; it was also right after a major holiday period, when a lot of people were probably also spending money on non-Pillowfort expenses like gifts or holiday trips. the next two months were both significantly better than January, due in part to some things i'll get into below. April started out very similar to January, before jumping way up when the annual Pillowfort Premium subscriptions started coming in– see the post i made around that time for more detail. May started out really strong and remained pretty consistent; June and July were very similar and pulled off a strong ending as well to meet the goal.
i do want to point out that users are able to pay for Pillowfort Premium on a recurring monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis. as became apparent in April, a good number of people signed up to pay for Premium annually. it's hard to suss out how many people are subscribed on what frequency otherwise (and how many people are giving one-time donations) without numbers from Staff, but we can still look out for patterns on a 3-month and 6-month cycle, when those subscribers renew. a lot of donations also come in on the 17th-19th of every month, because those are the days after the Premium Suite originally launched, and a good number of people seem to be paying on a monthly basis.
for the sake of illustration, here's another graph, with the different colors representing different periods since i've started tracking donations (May 2022):

this might not be the clearest illustration, but what i want you to notice is: the grey section (May-August 2022) is the oldest section, and the lowest overall. the purple section (January-April 2023) is almost entirely above the grey. the green section (May-October 2023, after the launch of the premium suite) varies a lot, but is mostly either on top of or above the purple section. the blue section (January-July 2024, after the emergency fundraiser) is also sort of on top of, but is mostly above, the purple section; it's also almost entirely above the grey section.
particularly if you exclude January, the "worst" month this year, every other month in 2024 is entirely above any given month in 2022. recent months are also mostly above any other month before the Premium Suite launched in April 2023. (i'm excluding the orange lines [September-December 2022] because that was around when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, which makes them very much an outlier: see my post for October and November. August was also the launch of the new UI update, which is a major reason the second half of the month saw such a large jump; see my post here.)
i'll stop playing with jpegs now, lol, but it really does go to show how much better Pillowfort is doing now compared to two years ago.

What has Changed?

one major factor was the launch of the Premium Suite in April 2023, which i have talked a bit about before. at the end of last year, i didn't think the Premium Suite made as much of a difference as i hoped it would, but since the emergency fundraiser, we've been much more consistently meeting the donation goal.
in addition to Premium, since the latest official fundraising drive, it seems to me that user-driven fundraising drives have become much more common (see the Pillowfundraising, Pillowfunds, and Pillowfunds After Dark comms for lots of examples). many of these were posted during the emergency fundraiser (e.g. 1, 2), but the tradition has continued into this year as well! sometimes these are themed around a holiday or time of the year (e.g. 1, 2), sometimes they're for someone's birthday, and sometimes people specifically post them because it seems like donations have been slow for a while (e.g. 1, 2, 3).
there have been some leaps in donations because of other internet shenanigans, like changes made to other social media sites (e.g. Tumblr's own Premium suite), but not nearly as many as extreme as there had been over the past few years (as mentioned above).
overall, the donations seem to be more organic and sustainable, by which i mean that they originate because of actions taken by Pillowfort users asking other users to donate, or personally encouraging people from other sites to try Pillowfort, rather than a mass exodus from another site going to shit. i think this bodes well for the future of the site, and i really hope we're able to keep up this momentum and keep extending the life of the site!