New IndieGoGo Campaign Aims to Fund Tipster @Evleaks

The man behind innumerable phone scoops, Evan Blass - popularly known as the tipster @evleaks, announced his retirement from tech leaks earlier this week, citing his multiple sclerosis and financial conditions as the reasons.

Now, a tech community has started an IndieGoGo funding campaign to help Blass with his medical expenses. Started by TK Tech News, the campaign's IndieGoGo page notes, "This campaign was started to help one of the most influential tech journalists and one of the top leakers of mobile hardware in our time. This fund is to help Evan with medical costs and get him the necessary funds to be able to get healthy and return to the tech community."

It is noteworthy that in the past, @evleaks (Evan Blass) has come out with fairly accurate information regarding yet-to-be-announced devices. One of the notable leaks that Blass managed to break was of the Nokia X family, which came quite a bit ahead of the company's official announcement.

On Sunday, Blass also posted a link to his first leak, the HTC Inspire 4G, which came back in January 2011. Blass had explained his reasons for retiring from technology leaks in an emailed interview to TNW. He explained that it was time to look for work which would help him prepare financially for the future, envisaging expenses because of his multiple sclerosis. He had highlighted that his phone leak stream, @evleaks, was primarily famous as a Twitter account and it was not easy to monetise a Twitter leak.

Further, Blass had detailed how he tried to take monthly sponsorships, and then weekly ones, and then individual sponsored tweets. His website proved to be easier to monetise; however, since all the leaks were on Twitter, people had little incentive to visit. Also, those who visited, were sufficiently tech-savvy to have ad-blocking software enabled.

Blass had said that he would not be returning to leaks at all, and would be starting a new career now.