As you may have seen alongside this week’s big news that ToughPigs.com is merging with The Muppet Mindset, we’re also launching our very first fundraising effort with our brand new Patreon. And I’m sure you have a question or two. Allow me to elucidate.
ToughPigs launched in 2001, and in the past 20 years(!!!), we’ve never officially asked for donations. We’ve had a PayPal link on our sidebar for anyone who chose to give through their own volition, but the donations given there have always been few and far between. We’re so very grateful for the help those donors gave us, but they never covered every financial obligation that came with running a site like ours.
And man, let me tell you. It’s a little terrifying asking for money. A part of me feels greedy or wrong for doing it. But we’ve been at this fan site game for a long time, and we’ve paid a lot of money out of our own pockets to keep it going. Like, a lot.
Over the years, we’ve brought up the idea of monetizing several times, and we’ve always had a good reason for not going through with it. We hate the idea of ads mucking up the front page of ToughPigs. Asking for donations over and over again on social media felt disrespectful. And most of all, we’d gone this far without asking for anything, so why start now??
The truth is, 20 years of writing thousands of articles, recording podcasts and videos, reporting on Muppet news, and paying for the opportunity to do so became a little too much. Plus, we have dreams of building out ToughPigs even further, and we simply can’t afford to do it on our own.
So, where’s the money going? We’ve got our usual hosting and domain fees, and the equipment and software we’d need to up our game in the podcast and video production worlds. But the big one is ToughPigs.com itself. We last redesigned this site way back in 2009 (once again, out of pocket), and as much as we love it, it’s in desperate need of an update. Not just to give it a fresher look, but to make it easier to read on all your devices. Hiring a designer and a web developer to do it properly is important to us, and any help we get to reach that goal would be simply delicious.
So, where’s the money not going? Exactly $0 will be going into our own pockets. ToughPigs is – and has always been – a volunteer effort. We don’t own the Muppets, and it feels wrong to monetarily benefit off their work. So our pledge to you is that every dollar we raise will be put directly back into this website. If we eventually end up paying for everything we think we need, our plan is to put a pause on the Patreon campaign. We have no intention of taking advantage of your generosity for our own profit, and that’s a ToughPigs guarantee.
So, what do you get in return? Hey, we’re not gonna leave our donors high and dry. For $5/month, you’ll get our ToughPigs Patreon newsletter, featuring insights and previews on what we’re working on, as well as some behind-the-scenes looks our past ToughPigs features. For $10/month, you’ll get the newsletter AND access to a monthly Q&A with the ToughPigs crew. For $20/month, you’ll get the newsletter AND the Q&As AND you’ll be entered into a monthly raffle where you can win merchandise from our own personal collections. That includes recent merch (like the Diamond Select action figures), vintage stuff (like The Muppet Show board game), and rarities (like Japanese Sesame Street toys). Our hope is that you’ll get more value out of the rewards compared to the amount you’re spending on the Patreon.
So, what if you can’t donate? That’s okay! We love you anyway. We would much rather have your eyes reading our articles and your ears listening to our podcasts. But mostly, we do everything we do so we can provide the fan experience we believe every Muppet fan deserves. And that comes with the option to get it all for free. And if you really want to support us without your wallets, you can always share our Patreon link with your friends on social media.
You can find us on Patreon right here: Patreon.com/ToughPigs
Thanks to all of our new donors and to those of you considering donating to our Patreon. And thank you to all of you who’ve chosen to support this silly website of ours. We appreciate your appreciation, however you choose to show it!
Click here to give a little bit of your love to the ToughPigs forum!
by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com
