Some of you may have heard me moan occasionally on social networking sites such as Facebook about how hard it is to keep the Welsh Icons sites available as a free service and thought that it was just a ploy to get funding.
This is not the case. For the past 5 years I’ve been trying to pretend to potential advertisers how successful Welsh Icons is.
One thing I have not lied about though is our readership. Here are some facts:
- The main Welsh Icons site has over 5,500 pages and averages over 6 million hits a month
- The Welsh Icons News Site (this site) which was started just over a year ago now contains some 12,000 pages and is viewed by most of the ‘players’ and ‘decision makers’ in Wales.
Yes we have the readership but we have no funding.
We are all too busy adding content to spend hours a day chasing advertising. Most of our team are ‘creatives’ or ‘techies’ who do not have the skills or the ability to sell.
Our hand-to mouth existence is becoming increasingly untenable and there are a number of days every month when I (as editor) have to operate out of a public library as the broadband connection has been cut off.
I thank everyone who has written in saying that they only pay £x for their hosting etc but there are many hidden caveats running a site of this size.
We list many tens of thousands of Welsh businesses on the sites for free and have never refused to carry a charity press release – even if it is just for a coffee morning in the local village hall.
What you can do to help:
- Click on the Donate button on the right hand side of each page on this site – $5/£5 is a great help
- Advertise with us – Prices start from just £2 a month. See http://welshicons.org/support-us/advertise/ for details
- Tell your friends about us and join our Facebook group
- Keep sending us your news and for as long as we can keep going, we will publish it. Send to [email protected]
In all honesty I get just over £51 a week to live on and over half of that goes on keeping Welsh Icons on-line. I’d like to thank all our contributors and the Welsh Icons team but in all honesty I do not know if we can keep going without you help.
Sorry to even mention it,
Dom Stocqueler
Editor – Welsh Icons
