At the start of July, Boards.ie announced they were reintroducing ads to the site and offering an ad-free experience for paying members.
This follows a raft of changes in the internet landscape, for example Google Search introducing AI Overviews, Boards.ie has lost significant volumes of traffic. As a result, the platform shifted towards showing ads, which can be removed by paying a fee.
Over a month into their efforts, progress towards their self-imposed revenue goals have slowed.
The team behind Boards.ie has created a page showing all the funding received to date. In little over a month, the platform’s efforts has garnered just 683 subscribers or 34% of the 2000 subscriber goal. This has raised just under €24,000, or 24% of the €100,000 goal.
Interestingly, the website also includes the number of days remaining, suggesting there is a deadline of Friday, 7 November 2025. It’s not clear whether this is just a random date in the future because it adds suspense and increases donation count, or that Boards.ie has a genuine line in the sand with serious consequences.
Should that deadline be quite real, Boards.ie needs a significant uptick in paying subscribers to keep the site alive. It is possible that incremental revenue generated from ads being added to the site has not been factored into forecasts, and that the goals will be supplemented by this revenue too.
Still, without a renewed effort to attract subscribers, it seems that the fundraising efforts are some way behind where they need to be.
I’ve reached out to the team behind Boards.ie for comment.
