2019 By the Numbers: An A+ Member Exclusive

Hello and welcome to your annual report chock-full of numbers and images that represent those numbers! Since 2016 we’ve been providing this information to our beloved A+ members. We did it in 2017 and then I did it in 2018 and then, believe it or not, I did it again — in 2019. Now, it’s 2020, a year that so far has been not especially great, but you know what, at least we’re all this together.

We’d like to politely request that you do not share any of these graphics outside of A+ and instead enjoy them only here on this page right now with us as a family! Okay? Great perfect!

Most Popular Content of 2019

Who Wrote What

Well, it finally happened: Heather officially beat me, after so many years of us being neck-to-neck!! However, both of us wrote more posts in total than we did last year (Iast year I came in at 165 and Heather at 148). There’s also a bigger difference in number of posts written between the perpetual top 2 and the remainder of the list — last year the #3 spot went to Laneia with 124, followed by Carolyn with 102 and Carmen with 81.

Money Money Money

Income & Expenses

2018 was a really bad year for money but 2019 was better! We finally began earning advertising income — last year it was 8% of our total revenue and this year it doubled. The tricky thing about ad income, though, is that there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see another dollar of ad money, and I like to budget for the worst case scenario — for how much money we’ll have to spend if there’s no more ad money. But during our Fundraiser we decided to commit to a more ambitious budget and to figuring out how to raise that money no matter what, because scraping by just wasn’t working anymore.

Last year and the year before that, our goal was to add another full-time staff member and this year we finally did it! We also raised salaries for full-timers, added 401(k)s, and raised rates for our writers and Subject Editors. All in all, this is a 50% increase in our monthly budget, so you can look forward to a lot more fundraising and A+ member drives this year than ever before, especially as we adjust to a bigger budget AND no A-Camp revenue in 2020.

Merchandise

We had a slower year for merchandise before because we were so busy with all our other initiatives, but we still debuted a lot of new fun things, including the very famous Bette for Mayor 2020 merch, which you can still buy, even though she lost, because that’s the spirit of it, is a triumph over adversity.

You People

Thanks for being a part of all this!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3304 articles for us.

27 Comments

  1. Love the pretty graphs and lists as always Riese. Good to see AS readers are still horny and really loved the Gen Q recaps!

  2. ….I feel bad because I’ve completely forgotten to turn off my adblocker this whole time and this infographic has reminded me. Welp, that stat is now 25% +1!

    • Yeah, this post reminded me to double check my adblocker and somehow my whitelisting got reset so that is fixed now!

  3. That Mel B/Geri article was directly responsible for me falling into a Spice Girls rabbit hole after it showed up on a popular posts of 2019 list in December…from which I have yet to emerge. I have now reread most of the Spice Girls fan fiction on AO3, it’s that deep! Some of the ensuing drama has made me want to give one or both of them a “Dyke Drama” T-shirt from the AS store, though I think my friends and I would appreciate it more.

    On an unrelated note, how do stickers do in the merch store? I like a number of the new designs (like lesberado), but I do not need more clothes.

  4. The price of an A+ membership is worth it just for that list of top outclicks!! Love to see that we are all living our best lives.

    • I also love the Carol pictures. Sometimes I’ve already read everything that the newsletter mentions, sometimes I realize there’s something wonderful I hadn’t noticed, but I always love seeing Carol the dog!

    • I for real laughed out loud at Vanessa’s Instagram making it into the top 10 outclicks.

      It’s well deserved. It’s just funny that you can phrase it as “Vanessa’s Instagram” and we all know why it’s there.

  7. i will never be able to replicate the thrill i felt when i saw MY PERSONAL INSTAGRAM in the top 10 outclicks list…honestly fully thought riese had just put it there as a joke / to be nice to me, still in disbelief that it’s real, THANK U ALL FOR CLICKING ON MY VANITY PROJECT 😂😘

    • Hahah when I saw it I knew you must be overjoyed! And honestly you should be! Your IG is an earnest delight in a cynical world.

  9. Oh i didn’t realize that turning my ad blocker on or off was beneficial to you. that’s a super easy change i can make right now!

  10. Thanks for all these stats! I definitely noticed the growth of advertising last year and I’m so happy advertisers want to partner with queer media now! It’s almost funny but it’s mostly depressing it’s taken this long!!

    Random but I’m wondering if I missed a post about this- I haven’t seen any of the likes on comments in a bit and I’m wondering if they’ve been phased out.

    • probs there are more searches in general for kristen stewart, the people searching it probably just don’t get to this site first?

  12. All this data is super cool, but the gorgeous infographics have no alt-text or image descriptions! Can the data be made available in a text format, so it can be accessible to blind or low-vision readers using screen readers?

  13. Is there a way to know what percentage of monthly readers are A+ members? less than 4k people responsible for ~30% of the site’s income is crazy!

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