So… how many times have you come to iRunFar this year to get your fill of trail running and ultrarunning goodness? Not just the website, but think about Twitter and Facebook and, yeah, YouTube, too. There’s a good chance that you’ve spent a whole lotta hours enjoying something… or everything we’ve done this year. That’s awesome!
Behind the scenes, this was a rough year for iRunFar. Despite barely surviving the spring financially, we trust you and the rest of the iRunFar family didn’t notice one bit as we pushed through the season to cover 13 races in great depth, to share 148 on-site video interviews with athletes at those races, and to publish an additional 342 articles—nearly one per day, all year—in 2017. While I had a front-row seat for it all, I’m still blown away with what we were able to share with all of you!
With the year wrapping up, we’re turning to you to help support us as we head into 2018. In just the past five days, our view of 2018 has gone from one of uncertainty to one of growing hope of stability and of dreaming of ways to make iRunFar even better. How? Because of you! Why “in the past five days?” Because that’s when we joined Patreon.
So what is Patreon? In general, it’s a platform built to help people like you support creative endeavors like ours with monthly pledges. More personally, we see it as a way for iRunFar’s biggest fans to interact with us more closely. Should you support iRunFar on Patreon beyond the $1 per month level (even that helps!), you’ll get additional insight and information about what iRunFar is up to over on our Patreon page, where you can check out all the available membership perks.
What We Do
You know us from our world-leading race coverage and our magazine’s worth of articles each and every month. You may also love interacting with the amazing, insightful, civil community in iRunFar’s comments. We’re glad this is what we’re known for. However, we also try to do the little things to make iRunFar even better for you, such as:
- Publishing full transcripts of more than a 150-audio-based interviews and gear reviews this year.
- Never sending out a single piece of unsolicited email.
- Emailing out full versions of every single article to those who subscribe. Absolutely free.
- Never paginating our as-many-words-as-it-takes articles to artificially increase pageviews.
- Working as hard as we can to provide gender-equitible coverage.
- Never allowing pop-up ads, advertorials, auto-play ads, or any spammy stuff.
What Can You Do?
What can you do to help us make iRunFar even better in 2018? You can:
- Support us with a monthly pledge. Come join us on Patreon!
- Give a one-time end-of-year donation.
- Talk to or email a friend about supporting us.
- Post on Twitter or Facebook about what you like about iRunFar and how folks can support us.
What We Hope to Do
Again, in just the past few days, you’ve enabled us to buy a new laptop in the new year and we’re on the cusp of giving Meghan the long overdue raise that she deserves. [Updated!] Honestly, these two things were at the far edge of my conception just a week ago as I finalized our Patreon goals, and, even then, I imagined them cautiously. Now, with you behind us, we dare to dream a little more. Should we hit our next goal of 400 patrons, we’ll take two more steps forward.
- We’ll buy a new satellite modem—which helps us cover super-remote races—to replace our current and, ahem, well-used modem that failed during our Western States coverage this year.
- Reinstitute an audio-only version of all our video interviews, so you can listen to them on your favorite podcast app. This once-popular iRunFar feature died in 2014 when the service we used to provide it was discontinued. We’ll once again find a way with your help!
Personally, I prefer to be cautious in my dreaming, but I think the above are some great next steps. I’m also starting to dream about some pretty big future steps thanks to your support!
Thanks so much!
Bryon and the iRunFar team
Specialty Running and Outdoor Store Bonus Goal
We know a heck of a lot of staff and owners from specialty running and outdoor stores read iRunFar, we hope we get plenty of your customers excited about their running, and we’d like to team up with you!
We’re spitballing an idea here. How about if we can get 10 stores pledging at least $10 a month on Patreon, we take those damned Amazon links out of our sidebar. [Jan 4 Update: In good faith, we’ve taken the Amazon sidebar links down early. Hopefully, five more specialty stores still come on board!] Yeah, those links do make us a bit of money (mostly on non-running stuff), but we’d much prefer to work with you. As such, we’d create a separate Partner Stores (better name to come?) list on iRunFar’s Wall of Fame with a link to your store’s website and a note as to where you’re located. (You’d have to contact us to give us those details.)
Just throwing this idea out there to see if it might work for everyone! Thoughts? (Feel free to contact us privately on that one, too. ;-) )
Update 1/7: We’ve got Austin Trail Running Company, Seven Hills Running Shop, CyclovaXC, Rocky Mountain Ultra, Eastside Sports, The Balanced Athlete, The Ultra Running Company, and Crozet Running on board. Who else will join them?!
