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Debt­watch began in March 2007 as a way of dis­trib­ut­ing my month­ly newslet­ter on the eco­nom­ic cri­sis I expect­ed to soon erupt, and about which I had been warn­ing in media inter­views since Decem­ber 2005.

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Fig­ure 1: Excerpt from the 1st Debt­watch Report in Novem­ber 2006

From hum­ble begin­nings, the blog has grown like Top­sy to have over 12,500 sub­scribers, about 60,000 unique vis­i­tors, amost one mil­lion page views and six mil­lion hits per month.

Fig­ure 2: Debt­watch read­er­ship stats for 2011

The read­er­ship is inter­na­tion­al. The major­i­ty of read­ers are Amer­i­can, with my home coun­try of Aus­tralia sec­ond, and the UK third.

Fig­ure 3: Top ten coun­tries by page views in Decem­ber 2011 (till Decem­ber 18^th)

The audi­ence is also high­ly edu­cat­ed, both in gen­er­al and in com­par­i­son to sites of promi­nent media out­lets.

Fig­ure 4: Alexa demo­graph­ic data on Debt­watch

Iron­i­cal­ly, giv­en that my sym­pa­thies are firm­ly with “the 99%”, and that my objec­tives include dras­ti­cal­ly reduc­ing the pow­er and size of the finan­cial sec­tor, this blog is pop­u­lar with both the well-paid and the finan­cial sec­tor.

Fig­ure 5: Alexa income lev­el data

In fact, my blog is now so pop­u­lar with the finance sec­tor that I am being approached by funds that are inter­est­ed in spon­sor­ing both Debt­watch and the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty.

So I am now pre­sent­ed with a para­dox: my objec­tives are to dras­ti­cal­ly reduce the size and pow­er of the finan­cial sector—hedge funds included—and yet organ­i­sa­tions with­in that sec­tor now want to spon­sor my work.

The moti­va­tions behind such offers of finan­cial sup­port undoubt­ed­ly range from sim­ply want­i­ng to have a cor­po­rate logo appear in front of blog read­ers’ eye­balls at one extreme, to shar­ing some of the same objec­tives I have at the other—as George Soros clear­ly does in his fund­ing of the Insti­tute for New Eco­nom­ic Think­ing.

I cer­tain­ly need fund­ing to be able to achieve my own aims. I can’t do the work need­ed to over­throw neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics and devel­op a real­is­tic alter­na­tive on my own, and the work involved in main­tain­ing this blog and han­dling cor­re­spon­dence from the pub­lic means I now spend far more time work­ing out the intri­ca­cies of the inter­net and answer­ing emails than I spend doing orig­i­nal research. So fund­ing is nec­es­sary, which is the main rea­son I insti­tut­ed a mem­ber­ship scheme on Debt­watch: to raise suf­fi­cient funds to employ assis­tants who can take those tasks off my hands, so that I can focus on that research.

That fund rais­ing has been mild­ly successful—about $18,500 has been raised since mem­ber­ship schemes for Debt­watch and CfE­SI com­menced in Sep­tem­ber 2011, of which about $10,000 is recur­ring fund­ing.

Fig­ure 6: Recur­ring Fund­ing for Debt­watch as of mid-Decem­ber 2011

Fig­ure 7: One-off Fund­ing for Debt­watch as of mid-Decem­ber 2011

Fig­ure 8: Recur­ring fund­ing for CfE­SI as of mid-Dec­cem­ber 2011

This fund­ing has been useful—amongst oth­er activ­i­ties, it fund­ed my trips to Lon­don to launch Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II and to be inter­viewed by the BBC—but at this rate it will be decades before I can afford to hire staff as well. I haven’t got that long.

So I will accept cor­po­rate sponsorship—including, but cer­tain­ly not lim­it­ed to, spon­sor­ship from the FIRE sector—but only on my terms. These are spelt out in The Debt­watch Man­i­festo, which is now a per­ma­nent page of this blog. Any cor­po­rate spon­sor has to accept that those are the aims to which spon­sor­ship will be put.

There are at least two rea­sons for stat­ing my objec­tives in this man­ner.

First­ly, I am aware of the dan­ger of let­ting com­mer­cial spon­sor­ship alter one’s mes­sage, and I want to make it clear that I will not let that hap­pen to me. As some­one who has spent 40 years oppos­ing the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom in eco­nom­ics, I’m not about to let spon­sor­ship per­suade me to do oth­er­wise, or to resile from pol­i­cy posi­tions that I believe are jus­ti­fied by good analy­sis and empir­i­cal data. For that rea­son I’m putting my objec­tives on pub­lic view before spon­sor­ship becomes an impor­tant source of rev­enue for my work.

Sec­ond­ly, I know that this is in the inter­ests of those who might spon­sor me—even if some of what I hope to achieve works against those inter­ests. I have devel­oped the fol­low­ing I now have because of my empir­i­cal­ly-ori­ent­ed ana­lyt­ic real­ism. I would be doing a dis­ser­vice not only to myself, but to spon­sors them­selves if I let spon­sor­ship affect my analy­sis or my views.

Levels of sponsorship

There are 3 lev­els of spon­sor­ship:

Fig­ure 9: Spon­sor­ship Lev­els

Spon­sor­ship fund­ing is allo­cat­ed between my blog Debt­watch and CfE­SI. If you are inter­est­ed in spon­sor­ship, please con­tact me at Prof­Steve­Keen AT gmail DOT com.

First Sponsor

The first Foun­da­tion Spon­sor for Debt­watch and CfE­SI is Sabre­tooth Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, whose logo now appears on both sites.

Benefits of sponsorship

The pri­ma­ry ben­e­fit is an altru­is­tic one: by spon­sor­ship, you con­tribute to my efforts to build a new real­is­tic the­o­ry of eco­nom­ics to replace the myths of neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics that have played such a major role in caus­ing the cri­sis we are now in.

The fund­ing will make it eas­i­er for me to devote my time and ener­gies to devel­op­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal and empir­i­cal analy­sis that made this blog influ­en­tial in the first place, but which today receives so lit­tle of my per­son­al time because of the sheer work­load that my suc­cess has gen­er­at­ed.

Oth­er ben­e­fits include:

• Acknowl­edge­ment of your sup­port on Debt­watch & CfE­SI (if required; I have been con­tact­ed about spon­sor­ship by some insti­tu­tions that do not want their sup­port pub­licly acknowl­edged);
• An annu­al sem­i­nar by me on eco­nom­ics for your staff or cus­tomers, as request­ed;
• Ear­ly access to my analy­sis (but not exclu­sive access—I am com­mit­ted to inform­ing the pub­lic about real­is­tic eco­nom­ics, and this is not going to change);
• Infor­mal access for analy­sis and data (but not con­sult­ing unless sep­a­rate­ly arranged; I am loathe to under­take con­sult­ing, giv­en that this takes time away from fun­da­men­tal analy­sis);
  • By doing this I am not offer­ing finan­cial advice. Apart from the legal restric­tions on offer­ing finan­cial advice in Australia—for which I am not licenced—giving finan­cial advice involves hav­ing knowl­edge of a cus­tomer’s finan­cial sit­u­a­tion and needs, which I do not have and will not seek; and
• Signed copies of my lat­est book (cur­rent­ly Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics: the naked emper­or dethroned)—2 dozen, 4 dozen and 10 dozen copies respec­tive­ly for each lev­el of mem­ber­ship.

How Sponsorship will be used

Part will go to my income. I did­n’t start the blog to make mon­ey, but to warn about its destruc­tion on a glob­al scale. How­ev­er, now that I have suc­ceed­ed in that aim, I want to be able to con­tin­ue work­ing on devel­op­ing an alter­na­tive eco­nom­ics full-time, with­out hav­ing to con­sid­er my finan­cial secu­ri­ty while I do it.

Well before I reach that lev­el of fund­ing, spon­sor­ship will enable me to reduce my teach­ing com­mit­ments and focus on writ­ing Finance and Eco­nom­ic Break­down, with the hope that it can be pub­lished in 2014.

I need to hire staff for a range of pur­pos­es. Major pri­or­i­ties are a per­son­al assis­tant, a web­mas­ter to take over main­te­nance of Debt­watch (three cheers for WordPress—as a com­put­er ama­teur, I could­n’t have reached the audi­ence I have with­out this bril­liant Open Source program—but the blog itself des­per­ate­ly needs a pro­fes­sion­al makeover), a research assis­tant to pop­u­late Econ­o­da­ta, and a sta­tis­ti­cian to help with the design of lead­ing indi­ca­tors and the empir­i­cal ver­i­fi­ca­tion of my dynam­ic mod­els. The devel­op­ment of the Min­sky soft­ware pro­gram will be on-going, and with suf­fi­cient fund­ing full-time programmer(s) will be hired for this pur­pose.

The fund­ing to date has most­ly been expend­ed on trav­el, com­put­er hard­ware and soft­ware. Once suf­fi­cient funds, stan­dard ancil­lary expens­es like office rental will also arise.

Changes to the blog

There will be some changes to the blog in com­ing months. Some of these are long over­due cos­met­ic changes, which I can now final­ly afford to hire a pro­fes­sion­al design­er to under­take. Oth­ers will be designed to increase the rev­enue gen­er­at­ed by the blog.

This may include requir­ing browsers to reg­is­ter to read, but it will not include restrict­ing read­er­ship to pay­ing sub­scribers (as, for exam­ple, Nouriel Roubi­ni has done). My pri­ma­ry objec­tive will always be devel­op­ing a real­is­tic the­o­ry of eco­nom­ics, and pub­lic knowl­edge of both the flaws in neo­clas­si­cal analy­sis and the exis­tence of alter­na­tives is vital to that objec­tive. That’s why my cur­rent mem­ber­ship scheme is a “Clay­ton’s” one, where the only restric­tion is on down­load­ing doc­u­ments.