Written by by Anthony Watts at wattsupwiththat.com
A few weeks ago I mentioned that some big changes would be coming to WUWT in this post titled Thanks, and the Future for WUWT. Thanks to everyone for their support!
One of the upcoming changes that I didn’t mention in that post is that we are forced to move to a subscription model, and this model requires that we start running advertisements. Now this isn’t anything new, we had been running ads since about 2009 when we were first invited to do so by WordPress, and that worked well up until a few years ago. Then, Google decided that they’d tell our ad provider that “we’re not worthy” and pulled their support due to our content. WUWT and many other climate skeptic platforms all suffered the same banishment. Of course that meant the website generated no revenue….which was the purpose of the climate activists that lobbied for the ban.
There really wasn’t anything we could do, as Google essentially has a monopoly, until recently. A new ad provider has emerged that is not dependent on Google Adwords. So, starting Monday, we’ll be using them.
This is the beginning of a larger plan in which we will offer subscription tiers to premium content. WUWT will always remain free for the majority of content – but it will have advertisements – just like 90% of every other Internet sites out there. Some premium features will require subscription, much like what Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has done on his substack website.
I hate begging like I had to do back in December, so this will put us back into revenue generation.