Last week, the relatively popular and useful journalism crowdfunding website Beacon Reader closed its doors for undisclosed reasons. No one really saw this coming, and it's interesting to speculate why this could have happened and what caused it.
By all measures, the site should have been sustainable. Most campaigns on the site were successful - and overwhelmingly so - so it is not as if the concept or execution were particularly off. I have to imagine that the reason for the shut-down was not financially-based whatsoever because, from what I can gather, there is no financial basis with which to shut the website down.
That said, while this website was great for the field of journalism specifically, there are numerous other crowdfunding platforms out there that get more exposure. There is the argument that because the likes of Kickstarter have more campaigns operating at once, it is harder to get noticed, however the contrary argument is that more people visit those sites in general.
Another interesting crowdfunding platform is Patreon which, intstead of backing a single project, is used as a consistent subscription-based crowdfunding platform. In many ways, it takes the burden of setting up a subscription interface on your website, but most creators who use Patreon still make all of their content free and accessible to everyone, instead giving behind-the-scenes looks into the process or other perks. Democracy NOW uses a similar setup, although they do not use Patreon to achieve this.
All things considered, Beacon Reader was a great website, but it was not a necessary one exactly. Incredible journalism projects can still be crowdfunded in numerous ways, and having these options available allows for more unique, unbiased content that people show they want with their wallet
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