We're in the thick of Reason's annual Webathon, the one week out of the year when we ask our readers to support our journalism with tax-deductible donations. Right now, there's a match offer going on, so every dollar you give magically turns into twice as much, thanks to generous benefactors who want to supercharge our efforts fighting for "Free Minds and Free Markets." Go here to see the swag associated with different levels of giving (among the goodies: $1,000 gets you a lunch with an editor in Washington, D.C.).
One of the main things your donations support is our award-winning, unparalleled video platform. Launched in 2007, Reason TV is the brainchild of TV legend and The Price Is Right host Drew Carey, who sits on the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. Drew had taken an interest in documentary filmmaking and, in a world of ever-cheaper cameras and editing software and burgeoning online distribution, urged us to get into video years before most other publications ever considered "pivoting" in that direction. Our magazine and website, he said, did great jobs in making the principled libertarian case for maximizing freedom, but video would attract a whole new audience and give us a whole new medium through which to make our case. We've released over a dozen documentaries with Drew, including the award-winning, hourlong Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey: How To Fix the Mistake on the Lake and Other Once-Great American Cities.
Here we are, 14 years later, and Reason TV is going stronger than ever. Over the past year, we released almost 150 videos that pulled in an amazing 39.5 million views on our YouTube channel alone (plus millions more on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reason's website). Over the course of Reason TV's existence, we've generated 233,891,458 YouTube views as of this writing and we have over 727,000 subscribers to our channel. That's more people than live in Washington, D.C. (if only our viewers were in charge of the government)!
Our most-viewed video of all time, "This LA Musician Built $1,200 Tiny Houses for the Homeless. Then the City Seized Them," exemplifies the power of video to tell powerful, gut-wrenching stories of abuse of power. Justin Monticello tells the story of Elvis Summers, a mohawk-sporting good guy whose smart solution to an ongoing urban problem was stymied by the bureaucrats in the country's second-largest city.
We also produce fall-down funny parodies, such as "Libertarian PBS," which came out earlier this year and features fan favorites Remy, Andrew Heaton, and our in-house dynamic comedy duo, Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.
Then there are the in-depth interviews we roll out, with leading thinkers, authors, political activists, and mavericks such as Columbia University's Carl Hart, whose recent book Drug Use for Grown-Ups radically altered the conversation on prohibition.
That's just the smallest taste of what we're doing at Reason TV, year in and year out. Our video archive is packed with over 3,000 videos that go deep on every topic from bitcoin and crypto to Second Amendment rights to the military-industrial complex to civil liberties and speech rights to ardent defenses of capitalism and individualism.
We love making videos and it turns out we're pretty good at them, too. Your past contributions have allowed us to reach millions of viewers we might never have influenced otherwise. Your next tax-deductible donation—which will be doubled because of generous matching grants—will allow us to reach even more people in the fight for "Free Minds and Free Markets." Video is also one of the best ways to reach younger people—54 percent of our YouTube audience is under 35!—with libertarian ideas about politics and culture.
So go here now to help take the fight for a libertarian world to the next level.
The post 234 Million Reason TV Fans Can't Be Wrong! Support Our Video Journalism! appeared first on Reason.com.
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