Penny Arcade Launches Kickstarter Campaign to Make Website Advertisement Free

The popular comics website is hoping to raise at least $250,000 by Aug. 15 in order to give its users an advertisement free experience. The ultimate goal is to raise at least $525,000 to rid the front page of all advertisements, while it takes $999,999 to clear out all of the advertisements on the website.

The decision comes after the website's founders admitted that they thought advertising was simply the way it is, and that it wasn't possible to run a site purely off donations, but later realized we'd never actually asked.

Penny Arcade decided that it could sell out to its users by offering incentives for donations in addition to a better overall experience on its website. For instance, donors can get a retweet from Tycho Brahe for $500, intern for a day at Penn Arcade for $7,500, and even appear in a non-commercial Penny Arcade strip for a whopping $100,000.

It's an ambitious project, but it is already off to a fast start, raising more than $80,000 in the first day of launching on Kickstarter. Penny Arcade is the type of company that has a strong, devoted Internet fanbase that tends to come out in droves to support a worthy cause, similar to fans raising more than $200,000 for The Oatmeal's legal defense against an over-ambitious lawyer.