Actually cryonics resembles progressive talk radio in most American markets. Those stations can't compete with profitable conservative talk radio stations, so they need private donations to stay on the air.
Cryonics also resembles Austrian economics, which requires subsidies from American businessmen like the Koch brothers to stay in existence because otherwise its professors can't find regular academic jobs and get their books published. (I call these professors "kept Austrians," analogous to "kept women.") Even then Austrian economists often have to give their books away, like Jehovah's Wtinesses or something, because nobody wants to buy them. By contrast, the non-Austrian economists who publish those Freakonomics books seem to meet a genuine market demand.
I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here.
On her blog, Melody Maxim, former employee of Suspended Animation, provider of "standby services" for Cryonics Institute customers, describes several examples of gross incompetence in providing those services. Specifically, spending large amounts of money on designing and manufacturing novel perfusion equipment when cheaper, more effective devices that could be adapted to serve their purposes already existed, hiring laymen to perform difficult medical procedures who then botched them, and even finding themselves unable to get their equipment loaded onto a plane because it exceeded the weight limit.
An excerpt from one of her posts, "Why I Believe Cryonics Should Be Regulated":