We Need Your Help – A Statement on Our Future

Dearest Readers,

On Sunday 28th January 2024, The Film Magazine will cease to exist.

Our zero-budget independent publication that hosts more than 2.5million freely accessible words on cinema will be removed from the internet if we cannot meet our renewal costs. As of Sunday 21st January 2024, we do not have the funds to meet our renewal costs.

Without immediate financial aid, The Film Magazine will die. We need your help.

In the interest of transparency, the renewal costs are as follows:

3 Years = £175
6 Years = £745

Due to a deal struck with our hosts, we can renew for 3 years at the price of 2. It is not currently possible to renew for 1 year.

Thanks to the generous donations of readers throughout 2022 and 2023, we were able to renew our ownership of our URL on 5th January 2024. The above costs are what remain of the price of servers, website security, and security certification. Without servers, we cannot operate.

If you would like to help, please follow this donate link to help us via PayPal (a secure payment method guaranteed by PayPal).

More information…

Our on-site ads, RedBubble store profits, and affiliate link profits, go towards our monthly costs: one website-specific email account, one Adobe subscription. Any surplus is added to our renewal fund. The term “profits” is somewhat misleading, as total “profit” earned via these methods each month often equates to zero.

The renewal costs have rocketed more than 300% in 5 years, making it more difficult than ever for a website like ours to exist.

This issue has been compounded by on-site ads offering fewer pennies per click/view since the pandemic, and search engines altering their algorithms to suit their future “one-click-suits-all” business approach in which any search you do is offered “solutions” or “answers” on the search engine itself, forgoing the need to click through to the provider of that information (websites like ours). These specific challenges have already closed a number of high profile film publications over the course of the past 2 years, silencing critique, analysis, evaluation and discussion around art.

Our partners at RedBubble have introduced new user fees that have decreased the profits made per item through selling with them. This has coincided with a reduction in traffic to RedBubble due to increased competition and some anti-user business choices, as well as Brexit and pandemic-affected increases to delivery costs. Our affiliate partnerships do not earn us enough to offer pay-out more than once every 18 months to 2 years.

This situation is one that every independent publication and online journalistic business is suffering through at no fault of their own.

The Film Magazine has existed in one form or another for almost 10 years. As a blog, then a store, and then a website, our publication has published more than 2,000 articles by more than 100 writers from at least 10 countries.

We believe wholeheartedly that this writing is important.

We believe that our years of on-site work, social media posts, fun videos, quizzes, and fun, have worked to highlight the importance of cinema, and have encouraged people to visit cinemas.

We believe in our impact. We believe that we deserve to exist.

If you believe in that too, please donate to us via PayPal.

Thank you,

Joseph Wade
Founder | Editor