New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Frequent visitors and members of our site may have noticed that we have been relatively silent in terms of new updates on the site over the last few months. We're still here though and would like to share some news with you.
Ads, less of them
Our team has been lucky to stay safe during the Covid-19 pandemic, but we can not say the same for the web publishing and advertising industry! This has shifted our plans a bit, but our general strategy remains the same. Ad revenues and fill rates have been dramatically reduced for even sites much bigger than ours and we have been affected as well.
Still, we have been working on reducing our dependence on ad revenues, so this hasn't caught us by surprise. This situation has lead to focus more on our existing decisions. That said, we are at a point where more ad space on our site is more trouble to our visitors than financial benefit to the site. So we are further reducing ads in the desktop versions of the home page, chart pages and lyrics pages.
Support us!
This obviously (perhaps) reduces the point of
supporting us with a membership, since the main feature is the removal of ads. However, we hope that enough of you will appreciate the change to consider supporting us. You can
do so at just $5 / year. Of course, whereas other sites have resorted to locking down part of their content behind subscriptions, we will continue to keep our promise of retaining the entirety of music database accessible for free.
Stay tuned, more coming soon
We haven't been idle during all this though. Our re-design is moving along, and on the image of this post you can get a glimpse of our logo refresh. The process includes a full mobile-first rework and reconsideration of all our pages, so expect some interesting things. Indeed, the teaser mentions "2020" and this is still our target date (well, year!).
2021 Will be our 20th year, we hope you're here with us!
