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:
- A minute-long short and funny video that explains why John F. Kennedy directed his underlings to buy up a thousand Cuban cigars right before he banned trade with Cuba.
- A two-hour-long debate between lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald about Iran policy.
- Remy's great song spoof about Boeing's incompetence ("It's Raining Men," literally!).
- An explanation of how Javier Milei is beating inflation in Argentina.
- My in-depth interview with Steven Pinker about how to fix the intellectual and moral rot at Harvard and other universities.
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'll be producing more videos, including comedy shorts and satires with Remy, Andrew Heaton, and the Bragg brothers; deep dives into innumeracy and academic fraud; feature-length documentaries about Venezuelan socialism, the rise of psychedelic therapies for PTSD, and more; and special events (like this Webathon livestream with Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and me embedded below).
With your tax-deductible help, we can go from 9.2 million views a month to double or triple that! But we can't do it without you! So please give generously—especially while all gifts are being matched! It's not simply a gift to help us keep spreading libertarian ideas and insights—it's a down payment on the freer future we all want to see.
Here's the swag list:
- $50: A Reason Plus subscription—ad-free browsing, early access to the magazine, commenting privileges, and exclusive events.
- $100: All of the above PLUS a Reason-branded phone wallet.
- $250: Everything at the $100 level PLUS an Abolish Everything t-shirt to spark conversation (or arguments) wherever you go.
- $500: All of the above PLUS a cozy 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 your moment of fame 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).
Thanks again for your support! Go here now to make your matched tax-deductible donation!
*Update: The $50,000 match has been met. Thank you!
The post If You Like <i>Reason</i>'s Videos and Podcasts, Donate Today! appeared first on Reason.com.
