Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had two terrific people come out of the woodwork with offers to assist TPN cover out running costs – Bill Liao from Neo.org and Tony Kynaston. These guys are fans of the network and wanted to help keep us “on the air”. They are our first “patrons”. If you want to help TPN keep producing intelligent podcasts, you too can become a TPN Patron or a member of the TPN 500. Email Cameron if you’re interested in joining Bill and Tony in becoming a patron!
You know that we spend a LOT of time producing our shows for you.
As we are NOT owned by a large corporation, or funded by venture capitalists, and we aren’t making a lot of money out of advertising, we’d like to ask for your support to help us keep TPN running. We have real costs in IT support, hardware, bandwidth, etc.
Now, we know that paying for online content is probably new to some of you. You are used to getting it for free.
However, we do ask you to think about the idea of the people funding their own media. We all know that if corporate advertising is the main source of funding for the media, it influences the kinds of media that is produced and the messages they carry. We don’t want that kind of media to be the only kind out there. We want an independent media, run by the people and for the people.
Please consider using the above widget to donate the cost of a CD or a book. If you’d like to make your donation come out of your account once a month automatically, then please visit our subscription page.
All we need is 500 listeners taking up the $20 a month subscription to secure our future!
I’ve just been hit with a large hosting bill for TPN’s servers and bandwidth and unfortunately I don’t have the funds to cover it this month. So I have set up a special fund raising exercise via ChipIn which will run for this week. Out of TPN’s hundreds of thousands of listeners, I’m hoping a few hundred will be able to chip in $10 to help us stay on the air. Please click on the widget below if you’re willing to help out.
We’re still re-building from the server crash in late December so if you notice any links or pages not working properly, please let Cameron know. Thanks for your patience!
Well it’s Xmas Eve (not that rabid atheists like me care much) and I think most of our active shows are back up. There’s still some theme issues which I’ve been slowly resolving today. And the hosts are all in the process of re-uploading their podcasts. Thanks for everyone for the kind emails and messages of support over the last week. I really appreciate it.
Well we’ve got new drives installed and we’re going to be rebuilding the old sites from backups as fast as possible. Unfortunately, we recently outgrew the service we were using to backup the architecture and media files (we have over 500Gb of media files) and this crash happened before I managed to get a bigger backup drive configured. It’s always the way. As a result we’ve lost the old media files, so we’ll be getting the hosts to re-upload as many as possible. In addition, we’ll be providing an FTP drop box for the audience to send us any files they have that we don’t. And I’m also hoping we’ll be able to find a data forensic service that can pull stuff from our old dead drive. So I think we’ll be okay. It’ll probably take us a week to get all of the current shows back up and running. Thanks for all of the messages of support I’ve been getting via email and twitter.
As most of you know, TPN is a bootstrap operation. In an effort to build a genuinely new and independent media company, we haven’t taken any funding and I’ve been paying for it out of my own pocket for the last four years, with assistance from a little bit of advertising and your generous pledge donations. On the smell of an oily rag we’ve built a range of shows with an average of 400 – 500,000 listeners a month who download about 800,000 episodes each month (12 TERABYTES of out-bound traffic) and provide about 8 million page views. When you run a site with those stats on sticky-tape and chewing gum, sometimes stuff happens. Unfortunately this year we’ve had two major disasters – we were hacked back in March and now this hard drive failure.
But I’m proud of what we’ve built with so little resources and I want to thank everyone for their continued support. We’ll be back shortly.
On Saturday Dec 20, the hard drive on TPN’s server suddenly died. We are in the process of restoring and re-building all of our sites and will have all of the shows back online asap.
I’d like to welcome a new advertiser to TPN – Audio Jungle.
Audio Jungle is a brand new audio community serving up thousands of stock music loops and audio effects by independent authors for use in your projects. Check them out now and thank them for supporting indy media.
In our effort to create a variety of revenue streams to support indy media, TPN is providing links to a range of affiliate deals where you can shop as you normally would from some of the world’s top online stores. However, if you use these links, every time you buy something, TPN gets a small percentage of the sticker price. It doesn’t cost you anything more than it usually would to do your shopping online and, in the process, you’re supporting indy media with your dollars.
