In light of today's story in the Independent, we're bumping this story to the frontpage, as we still need your support.

Between people's ad-blockers, seasonal advertising fluctuations, Facebook and Google lowering the value of advertising, and the increasing costs of keeping the site online, for the first time in 14 years we are asking for your financial support to help DiS provide the free service to which you've become accustomed.

Wikipedia do it. American radio stations have reader drives to do it all the time. Websites we love such as Brain Pickings encourage donations too, but until recently we haven't needed to ask for your help. Sadly, times have changed.

Last month, a few regulars on our messageboard suggested that we set-up a PayPal account for donations, partly because some errors with the site were really frustrating them, but also because they felt guilty for using ad-blockers whilst racking up hundreds of pageviews a month.

We posted a thread on the boards and were blown away by the response. Your generosity raised just over £1000, which has allowed up to fix various bugs with the mobile site (such as names of thread authors and scores at the foot of reviews not appearing) as well as cover some of our server bill. Thank you.

Your generosity was a big help. However, as you may be aware, this Internet lark isn't quite the goldmine that the headlines about start-ups make out. Last year, despite racking up 28.5 million total page views from 3.5 million music fans ("unique users"), we had one of the worst years for advertising income in our history. Combine that with the costs involved with renovating the site (most of which was done to allow new-fangled ad formats) and you'll not be surprised to learn that we can't afford to finish fixing the website, and can only just keep up with the £1100 a month server costs to ensure the site stays online.

We have considered various other 'revenue streams' (although ironically most of them are costly to implement) and we will continue to investigate alternatives to lower our reliance on advertising, but for now we would be very grateful for whatever donation you can afford to give.

A one-off payment of whatever you can afford would be great. A few of our regulars have kindly set-up a small regular donation to help support the site - our suggested subscription donation would be £3 a month.

TL;DR? If we've ever turned you on to a record you now love or you've ever enjoyed the 'discourse' on our forums, please buy the server a pint of craft beer:

Please use the donate button above or click here. Thank you in advance for your support.