We’re halfway through Reason‘s annual Webathon, the one week a year when we ask our online readers to support our award-winning journalism with tax-deductible donations. Right now, the next $50,000 in donations are being matched by a generous supporter, so your dollars go twice as far! Scroll down to explore our (great!) swag levels and find out how to give. (And yes, of course we take bitcoin and other forms of crypto!)
Why should you give to Reason? Because each month over the past year, Reason videos were viewed a whopping 9.2 million times across platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube (where we passed a million subscribers in August). As someone who was there at the launch of our groundbreaking video platform back in 2007—when we literally had zero viewers!—these numbers are both astonishing and encouraging.
Above: At Reason‘s Very Special, Very Secular Christmas Party in Washington, D.C., December 2007, Christopher Hitchens headlined with a dramatic reading of Tom Lehrer’s “Christmas Song.”
Equally impressive is the fact that about two-thirds of our video audience is under 35, a time in life when people’s worldviews are still taking shape. In a world of growing left-wing and right-wing populism and pessimism, we need to reach tomorrow’s business, cultural, and political leaders with an unabashedly optimistic, libertarian perspective on how to improve the world. Instead of giving in to fearmongering and finger-pointing, Reason‘s message is unique and upbeat: Set us free and watch all the wonders you can think of become reality!
Supporting Reason‘s video efforts is a great way to fund the future we all dream of—a world where a thousand flowers bloom (like this charter city in Honduras!). Every month, millions of people watch millions of hours of our principled libertarian video journalism extolling and illustrating the virtues of “Free Minds and Free Markets.” We crank out more than two videos a day, each pushing back against people who would limit our freedom, advocating for greater choice in our lives, showing how to identify the enemies of progress and peace, and demonstrating how to make our world a richer, more innovative, and fun (yes, fun!) place.
Above: Former Reason video producer Ted Balaker and his wife Courtney Balaker discuss their documentary The Coddling of the American Mind and the campus revolt against wokeness.
One of the reasons our videos are so popular is their variety, both in format and subject matter. The most-viewed content from the past year includes:
No wonder nobody watches broadcast or cable news anymore!
Above: A figuratively glowing example from the short-form series Yes, This Really Happened.
The biggest growth over the past year has come from “verticals,” or short-form, info-rich videos that are designed to be watched and shared via smartphones (like the one embedded above). Though just 60 seconds long, Bess Byers’ “How To Stop Your Car From Spying on You” has racked up more than 13 million views across all platforms, and it shows no signs of stopping. Her similarly brief commentary on why a small town in Idaho was forced to make its library adults-only due to a stupid new law will make you laugh—and pound your fists. Eric Boehm’s deconstruction of hyper-nostalgic takes on grocery costs in the 1950s has made him a YouTube star. And Emma Camp’s vertical on whether eating poppy seeds can really make you fail a drug test has done the same for her.
New weekly programs like Robby Soave’s Free Media, which offers scathing critiques of the media, are reaching bigger and bigger audiences and changing hearts and minds. We’re spinning off all of our weekly podcasts—The Reason Roundtable, Just Asking Questions, The Soho Forum Debates, and my own Reason Interview—into their own channels, all while delivering great documentaries like How the Feds Destroyed Backpage.com and Its Founders, which showed the injustice of an attack on commercial speech by the federal government, and Why These Workers Want a Lower Minimum Wage, which exposed the unintended (but totally predictable) negative effect of laws designed to protect restaurant service workers in Washington, D.C.
We don’t expect to rest on our laurels in 2025. We are excited to announce that we will be creating more videos, including comedy shorts and satires with Remy, Andrew Heaton, and the Bragg brothers. We will also be diving into topics such as innumeracy and academic fraud, as well as producing feature-length documentaries on Venezuelan socialism, the rise of psychedelic therapies for PTSD, and more. Additionally, we will be hosting special events like the upcoming Webathon livestream with Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and myself.
With your generous, tax-deductible support, we aim to increase our monthly views from 9.2 million to double or triple that number. Your donations will help us continue to spread libertarian ideas and insights and work towards a freer future.
To show our appreciation, we are offering the following rewards for different donation amounts:
– $50: A Reason Plus subscription
– $100: Reason Plus subscription and a Reason-branded phone wallet
– $250: Everything at the $100 level plus an Abolish Everything t-shirt
– $500: All of the above plus a Reason-branded blanket
– $1,000: All the perks of the $500 level plus an invitation to Reason Weekend, a Torchbearer pin, and a podcast shoutout
– $5,000: All previous rewards plus lunch with a Reason editor in Washington, D.C., or recognition as Donor of the Week on the podcast
– $10,000: Everything up to $5,000 plus a ticket to Reason Weekend for first-time attendees
Thank you for your support! Please consider making a matched tax-deductible donation to help us continue our work. Click here to donate now.
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