Although I admit that I hate to give CNN credit for anything, they came up with a winner this time. Online marketeers are slowly embracing a new era for getting their messages across. People just won’t sit through boring ads anymore. You have to give them something more --through online competitions. CNN’s latest offering is called Political Prediction Market. The rules are pretty minimal. You are presented with the latest odds on basic political questions and your job is to predict which way the odds will change next. I’ll tell you the location of the site in a minute, but first, my own ad. ----------------------- This is our fundraising month. We ran our last one on August 28 – 4 months ago. We are trying to raise enough in monthly subscriptions to allow us to do reporting full time. Right now, I split my time between what I love to do – this report – and what I need to do to stay alive. It hasn’t been easy building an audience. Over the past 5 years, I’ve slowly devoted more and more time to this channel and less time to traditional jobs. I don’t take on popular topics – unless it’s by accident. But now, we are getting so close I can taste it. For example, in the last month, we produced 31 shows, these were seen by 154,000 people and we added a record 412 YouTube subscribers. But in just the last 24 hours, we added another 69 subscribers. The problem is that very few YouTube subscribers became Still Report paying subscribers. A lot of that is just confusion in terminology. Yes, we want YouTube subscribers, but in order to survive, we also need about 20% of those to become paying subscribers or this won’t work forever because with the advent of ad-blocking programs, our ad revenue is dropping steadily. I don’t blame you, online ads are obnoxious. And I think we’ll be all right if we can convince 20% of you to carry the load by becoming a paying subscriber for as little as $1 a month. Now everyone watching this can afford a buck a month, and it really makes a difference. Quite a few people can afford $5 or $10 a month and that really goes a long way. A very few give more per month, and we really appreciate their loyalty. Here’s all you have to do. Go to www.billstill.com. Here is the dropdown option for monthly support. Here’s a dollar – then click on Subscribe. Or, $5. You spend five bucks at Starbucks every day just drinking coffee. This is once a MONTH! So you hit subscribe, then you can put in your PayPal info, or if you don’t like Paypal, click here and you can pay with any credit or debit card. Put your info in here. Oh, by the way, we never see your personal info. That’s all handled by Paypal – the processor. Also, if you don’t like doing it monthly, and want to give 250 or a million bucks one time, here’s what you do. Log into your PayPal account. Then click on Pay-or-Send-Money. Then put in my paypal email address here. Yes, I’m your friend. And put in the amount here, then click Next. That’s all there is to it. But I strongly prefer if you would make your contribution in the subscription model so I can rely on what’s coming in steadily so I will know if I have to go out and get a real job again. Now just a reminder, if you go for the subscription model, you can unsubscribe at any time by just clicking on this button. It’s really that easy. Now back to the news. -------------------------------- So I signed up for the Political Prediction Game an hour ago and already I’ve got 250 points – good enough to move me up to rank 5018 out of 26,000. Here are the basic instructions. Not much to it. Here was my first question. Trump’s odds of becoming the Republican nominee are currently 18%. Did I think they would go up or down in their next move. I predicted they will move up. Nothing has happened so far, so I have no points yet. But here is where I scored big. I predicted that Rand Paul’s odds of dropping out of the race before the end of the year were way below the 81% initially posted. I was right, they subsequently have dropped 3 points to 78% and I got 30 points as a result. Well, that’s all there is to it. Fun and free. See ya on the leaderboard. Oh yeah, the site is at: www.cnn.com/specials/politics/predict I’m Still reporting from Washington.