Hi, my name is James Kelly and for seventeen years I've been writing the pro-independence blog Scot Goes Pop, which according to SimilarWeb's estimates is one of the three most-read political blogs in Scotland. With its distinct focus on opinion polls (although not to the exclusion of other subjects), it has been able to challenge the conventional narratives about polls that are mostly set by the unionist media.

During the 2014 referendum campaign, I was able to demonstrate that the position was nowhere near as hopeless for the Yes side as was often portrayed by the media, and just after the referendum was over, I was faster than anyone in the mainstream media (I think literally) to spot and point out the extraordinary swing that was occurring from Labour to the SNP.

With your help, Scot Goes Pop has also commissioned several opinion polls of its own from reputable polling firms affiliated to the British Polling Council. Some of these were genuinely landmark polls, for example our poll in June 2020 was the first in the famous long unbroken sequence of Yes-majority polls that lasted for around a year, while the 56% for Yes in our November 2020 poll was the highest ever Yes vote in a Panelbase poll, and one of the highest ever in any type of poll.

In 2021, I also started a 'Scot Goes Popcast' to accompany the blog, in which (among other things) I interviewed a number of fascinating guests including the former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond. There have been numerous spin-offs from the blog - I was a monthly columnist for iScot magazine for many years and I've written extensive polling and election analysis for The National newspaper since 2015. I've been interviewed for TV and radio, including for BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Five Live, Al Jazeera, the Bauer radio network and CTV News (Canada).

All of this has only been made possible with your help, because running annual fundraisers has helped the blog stay afloat. Between 2014 and 2020 the fundraisers always hit their target very quickly, but since 2021 it's been more of a struggle for a variety of reasons, and I've often been lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis. In the summer of this year I gave in to the inevitable and decided that I was going to have to seek an alternative funding model. Plan A for the moment is to switch mostly to video content and to seek monetisation on YouTube. The beauty of that idea is that I would be able to keep all the content free and I can embed all the videos on the blog itself.

However, even to become eligible to *apply* for monetisation, I need 1000 YouTube subscribers and 4000 watch-hours. Even after almost six months of trying, I'm still a little bit short of that threshold. I now reckon it'll take me until Christmas to get there. Then the application will apparently take 30 days to be considered. Even if that application is successful (which is far from guaranteed) , it would then take another few weeks before any funds would come through.

So although the whole point of this exercise is to be able to stop crowdfunding, the paradox is that I'll need to crowdfund one more time (and hopefully it will be the last time) to get me through the application period. I've tried to set a realistic target figure based on what I would need to stay afloat for the three or four months it could potentially take.

Many thanks for your continued support, and hopefully with your help I can continue to provide the best in opinion poll analysis and political commentary, albeit more in video form from now on.