Dear readers,

The past year has been great for Jacobin — and we certainly haven’t been shy about boasting about it. It’s more than narcissism. We hope our improbable success is symbolic of a wider intellectual shift and that the Left’s marginality will soon be a thing of a past. With an editorial staff mostly consisting of people in their 20s, we expect to be active participants in that process.

But in the effort to make things that require effort seem effortless, we might have downplayed the challenges that we face. They’re mainly monetary. We’ve grown at a fast rate and our operation needs to catch up. Our online readership is sizeable — increasing five-fold since January — but with so much of our material available for free, we’re not converting these readers into subscribers at a rate that can sustain our continued operation. We average around a 250,000 unique visitors a month, but barely have 2,000 subscribers. Moreover, as a young magazine with no wealthy benefactors or institutional base, we survive financially issue-to-issue.