<div>Hey there Fuzzies!
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<div>Recently, there has been a lot of conversation about censorship of the internet and third parties forcing sites to make changes to their content allowances or face financial penalties. We are sad to say that Fur Affinity has not been immune to this pressure. While we used to be able to use third-party advertisers to help fund the site, they are now bringing in less than $150 USD a month. For reference, the cost to keep Fur Affinity running is over $25,000 USD per month (there’s a breakdown further into the post, for those curious)!
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<div>Over the past couple of years we have been working with our third-party advertisers to meet their demands on content moderation. <strong>This has not resulted in any changes to our policies</strong>, but we <strong>have</strong> had to shift more staff focus to rating change tickets (which unfortunately slows down our response times in other categories). Some users may have noticed they received multiple ratings change notifications in a short span of time. This is a result of more submissions in violation of General rating guidelines being reported to us combined with more staff focusing on that specific area. And just to be clear: Content that does not break our rules has no action taken against it, even if it is reported.
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<div>This effort has cost us in resources and time in the hopes of having this source of funding restored completely. Despite jumping through every hoop presented to us, we have had our income severely restricted with one demand to remove the restriction: remove all of what <strong>they</strong> consider to be “adult content”, <strong>which we refuse to do</strong>.
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<div>To reiterate: <strong>We will not be removing adult content from Fur Affinity.</strong>
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<div>What the third-party advertisers consider adult isn’t even always <strong>actual</strong> adult content. For further context here’s a snippet from our Fur Affinity Advertising Manager, Jamesalesto:
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<div>"Howdy!
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<div>What makes this situation frustrating is that the bar for what advertisers consider “adult content” is very very low. For example they consider plus size characters, two characters hugging, and “barbie doll nudity” to be adult content, despite these being normal everyday things that are not adult at all. This is why you may see other sites with restrictions on how characters can’t be posed or dressed “too provocatively.”
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<div>We receive a daily list of items that they have flagged as violations and have to sort through them. If they’re legitimate violations, we re-rate them. If they aren’t, we don’t touch them. Submissions that are not violations of our policies are still held against us.
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<div>We have had many email conversations, Zoom calls, and even an in-person meeting with representatives to help resolve this to no avail.
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<div>Given this uphill (and frankly annoying) struggle, if properly funded we would like to aim towards removing third-party advertising entirely, and instead focus on our in-house community advertisers. They are the heart and soul of the fandom, and they deserve to have the eyes of our active users."
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<div>And here with a follow up is Fur Affinity’s Site Owner Sciggles
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<div>"With more and more sites restricting the content they allow, we believe it’s important to maintain our current site standings to protect the artistic freedom of our talented community. However, this comes with a hefty burden of now needing other ways to fund the site. Third-party advertisers aren’t entirely off the table at the moment, but as the funding from them has been significantly lowered, they cannot be relied upon as heavily as they were before. They want us to play by their rules; we have high traffic that they would love to get ads in front of. But we know that censoring Fur Affinity to meet their standards for unrestricted funding isn’t healthy for the site or the community.
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<div>For the sake of transparency, these are the monthly costs (in USD) for the site (note—the funds are specific but we will not be saying who we contract and host with for their privacy and protection, they are good beans):
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<div>Contracted staff/coders: <strong>*</strong>$15k
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<div>Loans: <strong>**</strong>$6,258
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<div>Hosting: $6,000
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<div>Cloudflare $260
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<div>Accounting: $235
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<div>Email services: $124
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<div>Extra: <strong>***</strong>??? Varies
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<div><strong>*</strong> The majority of our staff are volunteers. This number is split in different ways between 7 individuals that dedicate their days to the harder parts of managing Fur Affinity, such as: managing code, handling advertising, urgent emails and meetings, legal obligations and reports, and so many more high-level management tasks. More than Trouble Tickets and not being paid nearly their worth for the work they do and still very much volunteer for the rest of their time. These roles are vital to keeping FA online and are more than what one person would be able to handle on their own.
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<div><strong>**</strong> This is based off of a percentage of sales on Paypal. We were forced to take out a loan when a third-party initially pulled out in June 2025 and hoped we would be able to resolve and bounce back from the issue to not need to ask for community help at the time. Trust me that I wish we had not gone that route...
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<div><strong>***</strong> This does not include any emergency funds needed or refilling retainers with our lawyers. Those are difficult to calculate in a monthly breakdown as they are more of an “as-needed” expense. It is usually $5k at a time when we are due to refill the retainer. Unfortunately we’ve needed to refill it often as we’ve needed help bringing FA into compliance with the ever-changing modern day regulations and legal standards. As for “emergency” funds, we would ideally like $20-30k set aside. “Emergency” in this case would basically be anything related to physical hardware issues.
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<div>We are <strong>3 months behind</strong> on some of these items and are grateful to our hosts for being understanding and willing to give us such grace. We had hoped to resolve these issues with third-party advertising to catch up but we now know that isn’t going to be a proper resolution for this. We must instead reach out to the community for assistance if we are to keep things going. This has been difficult to come to terms with and try to approach. We were hoping to make things work out without needing to request more from the community, and it is difficult to announce defeat when we want to be bringing you our best.
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<div>I can’t begin to tell you the countless hours, days, and months spent trying to work with third-party advertisers to ultimately be met with the door slammed in our faces for not caving to their standards or for pushing back against AI and cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin). We hope by approaching things from a new angle with the support of the community, it will make things better overall for the site and all of you.
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<div>We have the crowdfunding set to increase overtime to hopefully cover up to 6 months of costs for FA but we are grateful for any amount we are able to bring in while we work to improve our systems for future funding."
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<div>If you'd like to read more info about this we have an announcement live on the site here:
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Anonymous

Marvin Kmelisch

Jordan Eckard

Tyus McElwee

Isaac Whiteman

Daniel Marsee

Huai-Jen Tai

Jay Statham

Joe Brown

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