April $420 Fundraiser & Yatta-Tachi’s Future Plans

The online journalism industry is struggling (dying??). I am not even joking.

Right now many sites big and small have been shutting their doors due to a lack of funding or parent companies not thinking they are lucrative. Don’t even get me started about Google’s SEO/Algorithm/AI bullshit.

I want us to withstand the storm and even come out victorious from it.

We have no parent company, nor do we run third-party ads. Yatta-Tachi is owned just by me, and I know all too well how exploitative third party ads can be (not to mention UX nightmares).

Hell, I don’t even look at traffic numbers anymore. Because, at the end of the day, I don’t particularly care. The only times I even think about them is when we are applying for convention press badges or for a media kit that I had to quickly whip up in a couple of days only for the company asking for it to just pass on us. That was a bit discouraging, and yet another reason why I don’t want to focus on the numbers.

Anyways, other than those, I don’t look at them. I used to obsessively stare at Google Analytics and judge our success based on the traffic. And boy howdy, I wondered why I was burned out, depressed AF, and a breath away from shutting down Yatta-Tachi.

We are not beholden to an investment company pushing us to produce content multiple times a day or to write about stuff we have little to no interest in. We are a handful of folks who just wanna watch the world burn, sorry write about things we give a shit about.

I want to keep it that way and I strongly believe you do as well.

So, how will we accomplish that?

• Raise our financial support
• Increase our rates
• Onboard more writers
• Yatta-Tachi 4.0
• Secret projects?!

Raise our Financial Support

For the month of April, we have been working on raising our monthly support from Patreon & Ko-Fi to be $420 a month.

Right now, we need $144.

Our ideal deadline is April 20th (obviously), but seeing as how I’m just now writing to y’all, it might need to stretch into the first few weeks of May. That’s totally fine, because we will be celebrating Yatta-Tachi’s 9th birthday on May 1st!

The cost of the site has gone up over the last couple of months, including in places like our newsletters at MailChimp, which are now roughly $50 a month because we exceeded the free plan limit. Until I migrate us over to another platform, it will be eating into our already tight budget.

With our financial goal, we would be able to offset those costs, along with a few other things we already have planned.

Why $420?

It’s a financial starting point to where we can begin to accomplish what we are trying to do. It just so happens to be the Weed number by coincidence so I’m just rollin’ with it.

If we manage to surpass our goal by a large amount, that would be beyond amazing and allow us to do more official stuff we haven’t been able to afford. This includes establishing an LLC (costs $$$ upfront) and for Yatta-Tachi to be completely independent and not needing my financial support. Hell, maybe I get paid for the admin work I do? WILD.

But in the meantime, let’s aim for $420 and see where it goes from there.

Increase our rates

I would love to increase our rates across the board. While they are not terrible, I’m fully confident we can do better. We are not a content churning machine, so we can afford to up our rates with our increased monthly support.

Long Form: $55 → $75

Short Form: $25 → $30

Editing Rate: $15 per hour* → $20 per hour

*Minimum payment of 1 hour’s work per article.

Pie in the sky, paying folks $150 per long form/$50 per short form would be stellar, and it’s something we plan on working up to, but we would need to clearly surpass the $420 goal we are aiming for.

Accepting More Writers/Editors

Since Winter 2023, I’ve been reaching out to a few well-known writers in the industry. I wanted to give them the platform to write whatever they wanted without the constraints of “what brings in traffic to the site” or “let me look at numbers before I say yes to your pitch”. I want Yatta-Tachi to be their creative playground.

So, starting in mid-May, these fine folks will be writing for Yatta-Tachi either on a one-time basis or long term! I’ve also included a little sneak peek of what they plan to write about.

• Dawn (Bunnycartoon) – Bylines at ANN, Owner of Anime Nostalgia Podcast  – Toriyama Tribute
• Grant (grantthethief) – Bylines at ANN, Blade-Licking Thieves Podcast – Tokusatsu
• Adam (Andes Chucky) – Bylines at Crunchyroll & Comics Beat – AMV series
• Anne (Apricot Sushi) – Bylines: ANN & Waypoint, Owner of Chic Pixel – Isekai
• Lucas DeRuyter – Bylines at ANN, Anime Feminist, ButWhyTho, and IGN – Chojin X
• Kai – Blogging Accessibility series
• Sara Linsley – Manga Lettering series

I’m honestly kind of beside myself that they not only said yes, but enthusiastically so. A few said that they’ve always wanted to write for Yatta-Tachi, and others gave us a big ol’ “hell yeah!”.

When we hit our April financial goal, we would be able to pay these folks with the new rates. It would be amazing when we do because all the folks who contribute their time and energy working on Yatta-Tachi deserve it.

Yatta-Tachi 4.0

I have officially started working on the 4.0 version of Yatta-Tachi. My plan is to work on it between Hand Design Co’s projects (did you know Chris and I launched our own design agency?!) and day-to-day Yatta-Tachi admin stuff.

Ever since we launched 3.0 in 2020, I have been making a wishlist of stuff I wanna have in the new version. Things I think we’ve been seriously needing from a backend standpoint, desperate revamping of both the films and releases list templates, and fun, dumb stuff that we think we will all enjoy.

Yatta-Tachi is super fortunate that I’m a visual designer and Chris is a web developer, so the sky’s the limit on what we can do.

We recently redesigned Anime Herald’s site and there’s a lot of fun stuff we did there that can give you an idea of what we have in store for our redesign.

Anyways, I do not have a tentative date. When I do, our supporters on Ko-Fi and Patreon will be the first to know, followed by our Discord server peeps, and then everyone else.

Secret Projects??

I’m holding these really close to my chest at the moment, but there are a few things that I personally have been working on that we hope to roll out by the end of the year. Some stuff will involve things we already have existing on the site and some new fun stuff that we believe would be a great asset for the anime/manga community.

What happens if we don’t meet our goal?

Well, Yatta-Tachi won’t shut down, but it will make things a bit difficult for us.

Right now, we are barely scraping by and with the new bills we are dealing with, we are not making enough. We have some money from folks making one-off donations and yearly Patreon contributions, but that can only offset the cost for so long.

If we don’t meet our goal, the publishing rate of articles written by our new writers would have to be revisited and unfortunately, we would not be able to increase our pay rates just yet.

To be honest I, personally, wouldn’t be very happy if we didn’t get to do the things we have planned. If it comes down to it, Chris and I can increase our financial support of Yatta-Tachi if we absolutely have to in order to make it happen. It’s really not something we want to do, but we won’t have much of a choice otherwise.

Since the end of 2019, things haven’t been great for Yatta-Tachi. There always seems to be something in the way, stopping its success, and I’m really tired of that being the case.

If we hit our financial goal, I would mark that as a huge WIN for Yatta-Tachi.

So please, I ask you, our community, to help us get there.

How can you help?

There are many ways you can help us reach our goal.

Become a monthly supporter on either Ko-Fi or Patreon:

This is pretty much a given. For us to meet our goal, we need your financial support. Both Ko-Fi and Patreon have perks depending on what tier you choose. All our Patreon supporters get the bonus perk of being listed on our special Thank You Supporters page.

We know money is tight for a lot of folks, but if you are able to, as little as a $1 can help get us closer to our goal.

Patreon: https://patreon.com/yattatachi

Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/yattatachi/tiers

If you’re already making a monthly pledge on Patreon or Ko-Fi:

If you are in a good financial standing, please consider upping your pledge. If you’re a Patron, you can even up your pledge and save a few bucks by making it a yearly contribution.

Make a direct donation:

While we are saying we need to make a goal of $420 a month, we are still accepting one-off donations via Paypal or Ko-Fi. If you make a donation, we will divide that by 12 and add it towards our goal.

Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/yattatachi

Paypal: http://paypal.me/yattatachi

Promote the hell out of us:

The easiest things you can do are to let folks know about us, read & share our articles, sign up for our newsletters, and follow our social media. And they’re free!

Stop, collaborate and listen:

If you work for a company that you think aligns with us and wanna collaborate, let us know (send me an email: yattatachi at gmail )! I also have a media kit that I worked my ass off on that’s collecting dust and I would love to send it to folks. And with the site redesign on its way, we will have even more cool shit we can offer.

As always, I wanna thank y’all so much for continuing to help us keep going!

Whether that means financially helping us, sharing our content, joining our Discord community, or telling folks about us. We are making great strides and with your help, we are getting there. Thank you, everyone.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment!