Hey, Mary Suevians!
First, we want to thank those of you who have subscribed. You’ve already helped us improve our content, so I want to take some time to tell you about what subscriber revenue has enabled us to do for you, our readers, and why we hope more of you will chip in to keep the momentum going.
Sure, subscribing gets you an ad-free site, a subscriber-only newsletter, and monthly live chats with our editors, but the biggest benefit to subscriptions from our perspective is that they allow us to take more time writing original content. Since we launched the subscription service just 2.5 weeks ago—just about 12 work days for us—our editors have written 11 original feature stories that we might not otherwise have been able to do:
- The “Uncensored” World of Street Fighter Mods: The Good, The Bad, The Naked
- The Marvel Cinematic Universe Can’t Avoid Magic Forever
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt S2: Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s Hate Letter to the Internet
- Queer Subtext in The Little Mermaid, From Hans Christian Andersen’s Original to Disney’s Adaptation
- What Does “Latinx Representation” Even Mean?
- On Robots as a Metaphor for Marginalization: The Stories We’re Not Telling
- There’s Still a Need for Supergirl AND Agent Carter
- Deadpool and the Hero’s Journey: How a Postmodern Asshole Deals With Rebirth
- Clara and Ashildr in the Diner: Best Doctor Who Companions Ever
- On Fox’s TV Adaptation of Lucifer, Free Will and Radical Consent
- On Doctor Who and My Struggle With My Trans Identity
We’ve also been able to keep our Let’s Play series, The Deadly Sue, alive (or at least undead), brought you interviews and exclusives (including these), and put more time into our own original takes on the current events we do cover. Our contributors have also produced great original content with feature stories, reviews, recaps, and interviews, which subscription dollars will allow us to pay for. On top of all that, we’ve also let our full-time editors narrow down the topics they cover based on their personal interests, ensuring that even our regular news posts are often more original and insightful.
Overall, The Mary Sue is already so much better because of subscriber support. As Carolyn already mentioned, we still need more support to allow us to continue down this path. All of these original stories have seen plenty of readers, but they take a lot more time to produce than your typical Internet clickbait, which has caused a big reduction in our total post output—quality over quantity. That means we have to depend on subscriptions for funding more than we do on clicks and ad revenue, and for that to work for us financially, we need more readers to subscribe.
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