Financial Report 2022
2022 was a very challenging year financially for The Philosopher. By the middle of the year, it became clear that we were not running our finances in an organised and sustainable manner. A combination of paying too much to contributors combined with a large bill for resolving a coding problem on our website left us with almost nothing in our bank account. Furthermore, we lost a considerable proportion of our revenue over this period due to a spike in cancellations by print subscribers in the latter half of 2021 and the first half of 2022 (perhaps due to the economic downturn in the UK where the majority of our subscribers are based).
The second half of 2022 involved a lot of hard work thinking through which areas were losing us money, as well as how to generate sufficient income to ensure no significant future financial losses:
A decision was made to cap payments for contributions to £100 and to limit payment to only those who are freelancers or insecurely/precariously employed within academia. We will be producing a document outlining our payment policies and the thinking behind them shortly.
We also arranged an ongoing partnership with Boston Review that generated some much-needed income in exchange for co-hosting a number of annual digital events. It will continue in 2023 (and hopefully beyond).
We shifted our weekly newsletter from a paid platform to Substack, which is free.
We have now set up a Patreon page to encourage monthly “memberships” and are using a new platform on our website to make donations easier to offer and to process. Finally, we are introducing an optional donation on the sign-up for the digital events. Overall, the plan is to try to encourage as many people as possible to support our free content through donations.
The final but most important thing we did in the latter half of 2022 was to set up an appeal for donations. The total for donations in 2022 was £4,211.60. It is no exaggeration to say that without this income we would likely have been unable to carry on.
Overall, we made a profit of £151.93 in the second half of 2022.
In 2023, one notable change is that we hope to pay our editor, Anthony Morgan. While we don’t anticipate that it will be possible for this payment to even meet the level of minimum wage, we feel that paying him a monthly fee is important for the sustainability of The Philosopher.