{"id":969,"date":"2012-11-08T20:39:18","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T20:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/?p=969"},"modified":"2012-11-08T20:39:18","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T20:39:18","slug":"creation-museum-attendance-drops-for-fourth-straight-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/2012\/11\/08\/creation-museum-attendance-drops-for-fourth-straight-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Creation Museum Attendance Drops for Fourth Straight Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Some good news, courtesy of James McNair at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citybeat.com\/cincinnati\/article-26546-creation_museum_atte.html\">City Beat<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., created quite an uproar in 2007 when it opened with exhibits showing early humans co-existing with dinosaurs. Five years later, the public fascination with that take on paleoanthropology seems to be fading.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">This week, the museum told\u00a0<em>CityBeat<\/em>\u00a0that attendance for the year ended June 30 came to 254,074. That amounts to a 10 percent drop from last year\u2019s 282,000 and is the museum\u2019s fourth straight year of declining attendance and its lowest annual attendance yet. The $27 million museum drew 404,000 in its first year and just over 300,000 each of the next two.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">Michael Zovath, senior vice president for the Creation Museum and its parent organization, Answers in Genesis Inc., offered nothing to blame but the brontosaurus-slow U.S. economy and pterodactyl-high gas prices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">But Zovath says the museum is still up 4,000 visitors over its budgeted 250,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">Still, the museum is having to make adjustments. On its 2011 federal income tax return, Answers in Genesis reported a 5 percent drop in museum revenue to $5.1 million. Worse, AIG slumped to its first-ever financial loss \u2014 $540,218. As of deadline for\u00a0<em>CityBeat<\/em>\u2019s print edition, AIG hadn\u2019t provided financial results for fiscal 2012, which ended June 30. Zovath said the museum itself isn\u2019t losing money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">To ensure its financial health, the Creation Museum raised admission prices on July 1, to $29.95 for adults, up from $24.95. Zovath said the 20 percent jump hasn\u2019t slowed down traffic. About 70 percent of museum visitors, he said, come from out of town. \u201cThe average drive time in our last study was 250 miles and 1.8 days, so it\u2019s been pretty constant compared with previous years,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-size: small\">Veering into red ink, though, can bode ill for a non-profit museum. For a possible precursor, consider the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. In its last three tax years, the Freedom Center relied on $2.9 million in taxpayer subsidies, yet it wasn\u2019t enough to keep it from showing a three-year, combined operating deficit of $21.2 million. In June, the Freedom Center was absorbed into the Cincinnati Museum Center.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some good news, courtesy of James McNair at City Beat. The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., created quite an uproar&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[227,48],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creationism","tag-answers-in-genesis","tag-creation-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}