THANK YOU!!
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My November fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black is now over. As I noted at the start of the campaign, up until October 2025 had been a poor year for donations. This campaign changed that, drastically. November 2025 turned out to be the most successful fund-raising campaign in the fifteen-plus years I have been running this webpage. And it more than doubled the previous best campaign!
Words escape me! I thank everyone who donated or subscribed. Your support convinces me I should go on with this work, even if it sometimes seems to me that no one in power ever reads what I write, or even considers my analysis worth considering. Maybe someday this will change.
Either way, I will continue because I know I have readers who really want to read what I have to say. Thank you again!
This post will remain at the top of the page for the next few days, to make sure everyone who donated will see it.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I prefer the Bachman Turner Overdrive song…
C’mon, everybody!
You know you enjoy this site. Please help to support it!!
Supported. Thank you, Bob. Keep up the good work.
Rene Charles Borbon: Thank YOU. I appreciate the support, more than you know.
Just sent a donation. Very much enjoy your site.
Steve White: Thank you.
keep up the great work!
still not enough places for real science
I put the corrected check in the mail, Bob.
I failed to mention in my note that one of the wonderful benefits of reading the content of your site is the comments from your other readers. The amount of knowledge I have gained over the years, triggered by you and your ability/values, has been multiplied by those you have attracted to reading said content! Over the years of my meager monthly contributions you earned much more! Thank you, again.
Dave
Dave Walden: Thank you again for your generous support and kind words.
As for the high quality of comments on BtB, I credit that largely to the moment I made it clear I would not allow any obscenities or insults. I initially did it because I find such language barbaric. I wanted BtB to have a higher standard.
I found however an added benefit. A curse word allows you to spit emotion without thinking about what you are trying to say. When you are force to express the idea with words of meaning and thought, you automatically begin to write more thoughtfully. I saw this happen with those commenting.
In other words, obscenities focus on emotions. By banning them, I forced people to think instead. The quality of the discussion immediately improved.
Keep writing! You keep us better informed than any other sources out there!
I’m glad that the November FC worked out well. I came to your site several years ago from a Ace of Spades link. After a few months, I saved your slash page link. After a few more years I became a Patreon. It’s well worth the money as your content is amazing and timely.
IDK, maybe if you had a YouTube Channel you could broaden your audience. Too many Gen Z’s don’t like to read.
Barry: First thank you for the kind words and support.
As for doing a youtube channel, that’s an entirely different game. I am a writer and a historian. I express myself in this way by words on a page (or on a screen these days). I don’t have time right now to create a video production.
If someone wants to hear what I have to say in a media format, they can always listen to the podcasts I do with John Batchelor, David Livingston, Robert Pratt, and others. I embed them all here on BtB.
Mr. Z.,
As much as I would *like* to encourage you to explore a YouTube channel, I sincerely doubt you would really want to do all the huge amounts of extra work involved, for the pittance you might receive.
Content Creator Program– aka YouTube monetization:
First, you need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers to your newly minted YT channel. Given your existing web-traffic, fairly quickly doable. The “subscribe” button is always free to viewers at YT.
(You are going to need to invest in a “studio,” of sorts, and buy some more tech, not a huge amount but some.)
-Editing and composting your videos— you are going to plan on a 5-10 to 1 ratio for post-production, 1 hour of video is going to take you 5-10 hours to properly edit, or you pay someone to do it, or get really good at it, fast.
Second–You need to reach 4,000 “Public Watch Hours” in the previous 12 months.
–That is, your viewers are going to have to cumulatively watch 4K hours of your content before you even qualify. What actually qualifies as a “public watch hour,” is heavily qualified. (For example; videos less than 3 minutes are not counted, only the first watch of a video is counted, video served through playlists are not counted, live stream-views are not counted, etc., etc.)
Third– “no community strikes,” or “copyright strikes” on file.
— If they receive even 1 made-up complaint on you, for alleged copyright or “incorrect thinking” you are essentially gone. They don’t have to tell you exactly why, but they continue to place Ads on all your other content and cut you out completely, forever.
If you make it past all these hurdles and build your catalog & audience over 12 months, you could then expect to receive roughly $1-$4 per 1,000 views, depending on how your audience is classified by YouTube.
The *Median* payout for all creators, is about “$2.93 per 1,000.” (If you want the $5+++ per CPM, you need to snag National Advertiser’s, like the Emu or the Ford 150 pickup…)
(YouTube splits the CPM (Cost Per Mille) they charge advertisers with you, on a 55-45% split, they keep 55% and send you the rest. They classify your audience & content, if you are “controversial” the Emu will never advertise on your site.)
YouTube Premium Subscriber revenue:
–If your viewers pay YouTube for a premium monthly subscription to the entire platform, they do not receive adverts while watching your content and those paid-subscribers are not counted toward your “total views.”
-Instead, they use a formula based on Entire Premium Subscriber revenue divided by Total Watch Time for your content. This at least gives you a miniscule cut of subscription revenue from the 125 million premium subscribers, but only if they watch your content.
“Superchats:”
YouTube takes 30%, sends you 70%. A $10 superchat would net you less than $7. If you get superchapts through Apple, they will take 30%, on top of the Youtube charge, which drops that $10 chat to less than $2 paid to you.
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Going tangential— “Book Publishing:”
Had the absolutely wonderful experience this year of helping an older friend publish 3 books through Amazon Kindle Print on Demand. (Niche local History, he has a following on the local Facebook Group Thing’ where he posts weekly local history tidbits with pictures taken from the Historical Society & Library.)
–You prepare a Manuscript and Cover (If you can run WORD you’re in business, and Kindle has free Cover templates and free Kindle Create Software for the e-book), upload to Kindle Print on Demand, create an E-Book or physical-book(s) (hard & soft-cover versions), Amazon then calculates a Print-Cost which is charged against your Retail price, and the remaining amount is the Royalty, which Amazon splits on a 60-40 payout.
His book(s) are picture-heavy but look really good using “premium-color.” Print cost for a single 200-page book, premium color, soft-cover, was about $13, the hard cover was about $17.
–They cover all “back-office” stuff; fulfillment & shipping, returns, etc. You get paid after they get paid, and you never pay them upfront. (You get paid roughly 45 days after the end of the month in which the sale is booked. That covers returns, etc.)
–You can however purchase Author Copies at print cost + tax + shipping and re-sell them yourself, but you do not receive a royalty per se on those books. Amazon is your partner.
-The Royalty for E-Books is a 65-35% split with Amazon on the Retail price.
-For people who have a Kindle Unlimited Subscription, they can read your e-book book for free and do not have to actually buy it. For those e-books, you receive a royalty payment based on the “Standardized Kindle Pages Read,” metric. If someone reads your book via Kindle Unlimited, you get paid a fraction of a cent per page actually viewed.
My friend has a lot of older readers, and he wanted them to be able to buy his books at the local Indie Bookstore– and they even hosted an Author Event for him in the Summer.
–Bookstores can’t buy wholesale copies from Amazon, but you can supply them with your Author copies, which he did. (He wanted this available to his readers at the lowest cost possible and gave up a substantial amount to supply the bookstore. His royalty is low by design anyway, and the retail price is as low as he could make it. (In retrospect, he could have charged a lot more.)
Wayne: Thank you for the detailed info. You forget perhaps that I spent 20 years in the movie business. I know very well the work involved to set up a professional podcast, and don’t have the urge or the time to do it.
However, the details about youtube are most interesting, and further helps me decide not to do it. The deal appears as corrupt as I would expect a Google company to be, feeding off the work of others and paying them little or nothing for it. This was my experience when I tried Google as a money source early in the BtB’s history. It paid very little, and set up its rules that allowed it to cancel any big payments from traffic if it decided it wanted to.
As for self-publishing, you know I have been doing it now for about a decade.
Reading through these comments confirms what Neil Postman documented in his excellent 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, an analysis of how the transition from the era of written communications (through the 19th century) to our modern era of media driven communications (first with radio, then to newsreels, then television, and then the internet) has degraded the quality of our communications along the way.
The reason, exactly what Bob argues, that media comms abandon the reliance on data, logic, and critical thinking that written communications demand and instead appeal to emotion and the illusion of “presenter integrity” to foist off opinion and innuendo as believable fact.
As I noted this work was in 1985 so predated most of the digital media era, and Bob rightly identifies Google and Social Media as a primary culprit in the accelerated deterioration we have seen these last 40 years. The reason imho is because while through 1985 we had seen the warning signs, the professional media industry was still manned by a generation schooled in the art of written communications and their corporate owners were still closely affiliated with professional journalism so maintained the edicts of written communications even on their media platforms.
But then along came Google and Facebook and other platforms who Hoovered up the vast majority of ad revenue in these industries with their ability to profile and target ads much more effectively and cast these legacy corporations as mere content providers little different than they treat today’s YouTube creators.
And with that transition the corporate providers suddenly could no longer afford to subsidize professional journalism and instead forced their newsrooms to find a way to monetize their content. And thus the rise of ClickBait journalism and narratives tailored to draw support from an ardent but biased viewership who crave the emotional confirmation of their biases more than they do the truth.
It’s a great book and worth the read for anyone interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death