2024 Transparency Report

This past year was the first full year of publication since The Maple and Passage’s April 2023 merger.

This transparency report includes details about our revenue, costs and output in 2024. All past transparency reports are available online.

As a 100 per cent reader-funded organization, we believe it’s important to share this information with you. The Maple’s continued existence is only possible thanks to the generosity of our members, who provide 100 per cent of our funding. Thank you for supporting us.

If you haven’t become a Maple member yet, we hope you’ll consider supporting us after reading this report so that we can continue to grow, and better fulfil our mission of producing the highest quality left news, opinion, and analysis in Canada.

Thank you,

Davide Mastracci and Alex Cosh

Editors of The Maple

Revenue

The Maple is a non-profit funded exclusively by readers like you, which means all revenue is re-invested to grow the publication.

The Maple’s revenue throughout the year has come from readers signing up as members, and, to a much lesser degree, donations. Readers are able to donate as much as they want, and/or sign up at a monthly ($7, $15, $25) or annual ($70, $150, $250) level. A variety of other membership rates have also been available at various points throughout the existence of The Maple’s predecessors, and some current members maintain these rates.

The amount of revenue each month has varied throughout the year, with new members joining and some cancelling. As of Dec. 31, 2024, the last day included in this report, we had 5,075 active paying readers at a variety of membership levels, and received $64,653 in donations since Jan. 1, 2024.

End-of-year Fundraising Campaign

Our 2024 end-of-year annual fundraising campaign was launched on December 1 and ended on December 31. We had a goal of bringing on at least 450 new members and $45,000 in revenue. The campaign ended up resulting in 464 new members and $76,832 in new revenue.

How We Spend Your Money Each Month

We’ve spent a different amount of money each month, and in a variety of ways, throughout the year, including on newsletters, articles, and other projects. It’s difficult to find a single month that can accurately represent our spending patterns. As such, recency is probably the best approach, so here’s an average of how we spent your money in the last three months of 2024.

Salaries: 73% | Software: 14% | Freelancers: 6% | Online Ads: 4% | Professional Fees: 3%

Audience Numbers

Between January 1 and December 31, we published 100 articles (34 opinion articles and 66 news articles). We also published 50 Class Struggle newsletter editions, and sent other newsletters (Digest News, Digest Opinion, and Friday Roundup) on a combined-daily basis (excluding holidays and weekends). In addition, we published 15 episodes of our Expats & Allies podcast series.

Taken together, our website brought in about 769,599 page views during this period.

The top five articles by page views in 2024 were the following:

The top five Class Struggle issues by page views in 2024, all written by Adam D.K. King, were the following:

Articles We’re Especially Proud Of

One of the reasons we launched The Maple was to provide an outlet for the sort of views and reporting you won’t find in corporate media. Here are some articles and newsletter issues we’re especially proud of:

Diversity

The Maple has three staffers: two white cis men and one racialized cis man.

We can provide you with a rough and broad estimate of the demographics of our freelance writers in 2024. We didn’t ask our writers to provide this info, but we were able to put an estimate together. In order to protect the privacy of our low number of writers, and considering we haven’t actually surveyed any of them, we will keep the demographic stats very general. We recognize that this makes the data less useful, but it’s necessary at this point.

In 2024, 71 per cent of our writers were white compared to 69 per cent of all Canadians, according to the most recent StatCan census. About 53 per cent of our writers were cis men, and 41 per cent were cis women. Trans and/or non-binary writers, meanwhile, made up about 6 per cent of our writers, compared to 0.3 per cent of the population in Canada.

Corrections

We edit and fact check every article and newsletter before publication. Regardless, we made some errors in 2024.

When we realize we’ve made an error, often because readers like you bring them to our attention, we update the relevant article to correct it as quickly as possible. Then we include a correction notice at the bottom of the article explaining what we did, for full transparency. Here’s a list of corrections for all errors of which we’ve been made aware.

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of Liisa Schofield. She is Liisa, not ‘Lisa.’

Correction: This story has been updated to note that the National Post published a JNS article on April 16 in its physical newspaper.

Correction: This newsletter has been updated to correct some dates in the timeline of the formation of the National Day of Mourning.

If you’d like to send us any feedback, please email us at hello@readthemaple.com with “Transparency Report” in the subject line.