My Site Has Been Totally Free Since 1999.
Why Am I Changing Things Now?
There are two reasons:
Reason #1:
I'm Getting Old
I want this site to live on, even after I'm gone.
If it's not bringing in money, there's not much incentive for my heirs to keep it going.
Here's my website income since 2012.
It barely covers costs (internet, server fees, SSL certificates, domain names, ...)
It's not that I haven't wanted to make money with this site—it just hasn't been my focus.
I'm lucky—I haven't needed income from this site to eat.
Reason #2:
We Need To Change the Web Mentality
In the early days of the web, advertisers largely paid for web content.
Ad income was reasonable, and pages didn't have to be too annoying to get those ads to users.
Those days are long gone.
It costs money to put content on the web.
Want a web filled with high-quality, unbiased, annoyance-free web pages?
We need to pay for it.
No longer can we expect to have it all—for free.
Do you want every web site you visit behind a paywall? That's one direction the web is headed.
Do you want to pay for (and manage) a separate subscription for every site you like?
‘Subscription fatigue’ is real—and getting worse by the day.
The world is trying to figure out how to solve this problem.
I'm experimenting with two promising alternatives.
Both require a single set-up, which can then be used on all supported sites:
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The COIL concept is simple: surf the web, support the web.
A COIL membership unlocks every lesson on my site.
-
PayGo offers a pay-for-just-what-you-want approach.
This is coming soon for my site.
My plan is to offer individual lessons at these rates:
CONCLUSION
I don't want to deny anyone in the world access to my lessons—hence, the ‘random on/off’ stuff.
If a lesson is blocked, you can keep trying. Each day, for each lesson, there's about a fifty/fifty chance that you'll see it (or not).
But—if you're able—please consider either
COIL
or PayGo to open up my lessons.
If you like one of these solutions, start putting (gentle) pressure on the web creators of the sites you love!
Contact them—say: ‘Hey! I want to support you in a way that helps the entire web! Please implement <blah> on your site!’
Once people start doing this—that's when the web will begin to heal.
So, in conclusion:
You can be a part of saving my site.
We can all be a part of saving the web.