the ask@AAR: Will you support AAR in 2025?
It’s no secret that today’s world is brutally hard on media sites. In the past several years, most of the other long running sites who reviewed romance have either shut down or predominantly gone up behind paywalls. Most readers increasingly turn to BookTok, Goodreads, or Amazon for book reviews where, honestly, YMMV.
It’s frustrating because so many come here for reviews, blogs, and connections. In 2024, AAR had well over a half a million active users and was visited almost two million times. (according to Google Analytics) Through our links, readers bought almost 25 thousand books and other items. And many of these are engaged readers–every month, youall post 500 to 1000 comments on our reviews and blogs. (We published 333 reviews and 115 blogs!)
I remain determined to keep AAR online and available to all but I need your help. Could you commit to–as many of our FABULOUS readers do–making a monthly contribution to AAR? You can do so here. Could you consider sharing AAR and our links as much as possible? And could you, every time you go to Amazon, start with our links? We’d be grateful.
Thanks.
Curious–is it a problem if AAR makes money? If they say they want to pay staff, isn’t that OK? It looks like work–most earn money when they work.
…This website makes $9 thousand a year (way more than I thought it did based on your earlier pleas) and is mainly a text-based service and thus shouldn’t cost that much to host, especially because whatever backend wordpress service you’re using should come with PERL and other kinds of scripting. How on earth are you not meeting your overhead? It doesn’t pay its staff and yet somehow it’s still in danger of going under? This just isn’t passing my smell test, but then again the way you’ve always explained this website’s finances never has.
What does your hosting plan look like? What are you facing on a monthly basis? Could you try a cheaper hosting package? You’re not itemizing your costs and giving people donating to your website goals to tackle. Paying your staff should be the most important next step but this never comes up as an idea when you make your plea, just “throw money at a hosting service so I can keep treading water because (vague economic reasons)” This is not a data-intensive website, where is all of this money going?
>> In the past several years, most of the other long running sites who reviewed romance have either shut down or predominantly gone up behind paywalls.
I’m trying to think of competing sites that have done this and I can’t? Dear Author is still 100 percent free and public, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has a paid level but most of its content is public.
The website earned just over 20K this year. About 60% of that is spent on technical support and development. The rest is saved for the future. This site is wildly data intensive and complex–we keep our costs as low as possible by working with a team in India–friends of my son’s–and by me doing much of upkeep and maintenance.
We appreciate your support and insight. Thank you.
Hmm. Fascinating, and interesting to know.
All the sites offer commission for links. We used to do all the vendors but found that our readers didn’t buy KOBO or APPLE books in any great numbers and it was a lot of work for not enough reward. In general, if you see a link that you can buy something with, the site gets a cut.
AAR is a large and complex site and one that was built over many years. We also are continuing to add features and content–it was quite a work to incorporate all of the Audiogals reviews into our databases, for example. We are currently working on a better search bar using AI–we are trying to stay relevant for the future. Additionally, we have to pay licenses for a lot of the software we use as well. It all adds up, for sure.
AAR is a large and complex site and one that was built over many years.
I’m not involved with that side of things, but I know that maintaining access to content that is almost 30 years old is tough – I can imagine that trying to find fixes and software that is compatible with things that are obsolete is hard and expensive.
I just checked–the current site has almost 85B of data!
85 bytes, terabytes or gigabytes?
Thanks for catching that. It should have said 85 GB.
I’m still shocked that she’s even spending a thousand dollars a year on security for this place. To a security company that has under thirty clients, it’s worth noting.
I’ve done some work in the internet sec business, and that is flat-out price gouging.
?
I wasn’t speaking to you, but you should not be spending tens of thousands of dollars to host only 85 GB of data, which spacewise is peanuts.
RE the “under 30 clients” was supposed to be about something else I deleted and should have been deleted before I posted, but the most expensive cloudflare package is $2,400 a year? And I only know you use Cloudflare because I’ve had to do their catchpa when the site’s having difficulties.
We pay Cloudflare a fraction of that.
Aha! Thank you for that information.
Dabney, to offer a counterpoint, thank you for your pro bono efforts here. Those of us who have enjoyed AAR for years are truly appreciative. I’ve seen so many blogs and websites fade into obscurity, but you and your team have ensured that this one continues to thrive. Ignore those who have nothing nice to say.
Gee, I wonder if my continued skepticism will get you to donate your entire retirement fund to the site in my name.
What are you skeptical about? Do you think I’m pocketing the big bucks and defrauding AAR?
Not at all, but I think that AH sees me as a skeptic, which is why I referred to myself as such.
Well, I think it’s fair to say that your comments imply mismanagement.
Not my intent here, I know something about website management and I’m trying to figure out what’s puffing your costs up.
I wouldn’t participate on this site if I thought you were mismanaging funds.
I guess I feel as though you don’t seem to understand that I too know something about website management. I’ve been doing this a long time!
Again, definitely not my intent.
There are many free websites that provide excellent content. And all free websites ask for donations all the time. I myself read the Guardian and Jewish Currents regularly. Both ask for donations and I support them because I think what they are publishing is worth supporting. And I have never asked them to explain their expenses—my approach is that if I don’t like what they are doing I can stop reading them and stop supporting them.
Similarly, AAR provides free content diligently every day. And Dabney as the owner/publisher is within her rights to ask for donations. AAR is not a publicly traded company and she does not have to open her books to the visitors to the site. We also do not have the right to demand that she explain her income and expenses. But, we do have the choice to not give any donations or simply not read what she puts out. There is no need to insult her intelligence or competence.
You realize that I didn’t say she or anyone else couldn’t or shouldn’t ask for donation. I am, at least in part, asking questions so I know where my donation money is going if I decide to donate. Besides trying to help figure out why it’s all so expensive because it made no logical sense to me at first – which I won’t do anymore since Dabney made it clear she’s not interested in hearing it or how to reduce costs. It’s not my business and I acknowledge that much, but it came from an altruistic position. I wasn’t insulting her competence or intelligence levels. The same way Amanda H can give Dabney ten dollars in my name or whatever the cost they did pay, I can ask questions.
The Guardian has itemized what they spend donations on publicly. Several nonprofit organizations I know have done that.
I reacted to publicly shared information used to stoke up donations, and information blatantly obvious to me from using the website. By the way – “Don’t Like Don’t Read” is a bad position to have whenever the donation pile is looking thin and the ads pay the bills.
Deleted comment –
Always say what you mean with your whole chest.
I never post but your generosity is actually unmatched. Inspiring even–that’s $10 a month in your honor I’ll be doing.
Thank you!
Is that like, supposed to upset me? It’s your money, not mine.
Wait a minute! Stop the presses! (As they used to say. . . )
Let me get this right: AAR readers bought 25,000 items at Amazon, and AAR’s income is $9 THOUSAND? That’s with the ads and all?
Is there a way to benefit AAR automatically when we buy items, not books?
I went on your site and wanted to contribute a monthly amount, but didn’t see anything that I could check off for automatic deduction. What did I miss?
I check AAR every day, as I know lots of people do. I would miss AAR if it went out of business and thank everybody associated with it.
So, I encourage people to donate. A buck a week is nothing for most people, but if everybody did it, it would mount up. However, AAR has to enable us easily to do this, I think.
Here is the link:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=9D72PPBYJRPRU
And, yes, we get $$ for items but ONLY if you begin at AAR and use a link to PUT SOMETHING IN YOUR CART. Then, any OTHER items you add will also be credited to us.
So, hold up. If I buy anything from amazon (for example, a coffee maker) and simply start my amazon shopping from AAR, then AAR gets a cut? Can you share the AAR link that needs to be in the URL for you to get a cut?
Yes. The link is at the top of the left sidebar on the home page – https://amzn.to/46OG7mN.
Is there a way of linking other amazon sites like .au or would that not earn you money?
Amazon will, for most countries, give us credit for other countries. It varies. If you start with out links and it send you to .au, that works.
I am presently living in India and I don’t use the links for a number of reasons: I don’t buy any solid objects from Amazon.com mainly because the hassle of shipping anything from US is too much and also complicated; second, the only thing I buy from Amazon.com is e-books. I have discovered when I go through the links provided here the books are priced higher and also I am not able to use my Mastercard bonus points for e-book purchases. So, I go to Amazon site separately and where I have found the pricing to be cheaper and where I am able to apply my Mastercard bonus points. Overall, this way saves me quite a bit of money in book purchases. Sorry!
Amazon in India will only allow payments to someone with an Indian bank account which I don’t have so I can’t make Amazon.in links. This is true for several countries. It’s frustrating.
Here in India I buy stuff from Amazon.in, but here is the kicker—I cannot buy anything ebooks from Amazon.in. I can buy ebooks from Amazon.com but cannot subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.
India has a lot of restrictions.