Why is all of your old content paid now? It was free before!

26 years ago I published my first website. It was designed in dreamweaver, clunky to navigate, and a labor of love. This slowly developed into well-loved sites such as Artjournalist.com, ThinkWritten.com and many others, viewed by over 2.3 million+ visitors a year.

From then until now, all of my content was available to everyone to access for free and supported by advertisements on my websites.

Unfortunately, as tends to happen to those of us who freely give with the pure intention to help people, this system was abused. Not by my readers, not by you! – but by gigantic corporations and major organizations.

• Imagine sitting at the dining room table with your kid trying to figure out how to pay for college (which you can’t afford) and then later receiving an email to find out your work is being used by a university charging $1200 for the class.

• Imagine you are sitting in a therapist‘s office and paying $200/hour out of pocket with no insurance to be told to visit your very own website that you wrote and created as a solution for all your problems.

• Imagine your website used to get 500,000 visitors a month, but now it is only getting 500 because Google scraped all your content, stole your photos and is showing a sloppy AI version of what you wrote on its homepage, all while citing someone else as a source.

• Imagine a successful YouTuber with 12.7 million subscribers uses a song you wrote in one of his latest videos, except it’s just been altered enough by AI that it’s not caught by Content ID so you don’t earn a dime.

All of these things have actually happened to me. The last one just happened last week.

I should be mad as hell. But I'm not. I'm just changing things. Setting healthy boundaries. Maintaining my mental peace. Making more time to be creative than dealing with the chaos of whatever the internet has become these days. Hopefully I can inspire you to do the same thing!

Now, I could just nuke everything, delete it all and run to the woods to tend goats.

But, I think all the things I have published the last 26 years and planned to create in the future might help people.

You see, I don't measure success by money or traffic stats, I measure success by my impact on those around me. Let's quote Vince Lombardi:

This is where we go back to the whole reason I started publishing things on the internet two decades ago in the first place: to help people. To inspire them, to motivate them, to uplift them, to give them a unique perspective.

It'd be awful to just delete it all, who would I help if I did that?

Unfortunately, in the old way of doing things, I'm not able to help anyone.

My sites currently with ad revenue don't even make enough to make the hosting costs.

They certainly don't help my kids get an education and start their grown-up paths in life.

If I continue on my current path, Ray and I will be forced to live like homeless vagabonds in a van down by the river. (Which at times doesn't sound so bad, but I've got it pretty nice now with AC and running water, I'd like to keep it that way!)

Making the transition to publish only here at chellestein.com was not an easy decision, but doing so will also help our dear Mama Muffin Zera, a single mother of 4 children, finally be able to pursue her dreams of a professional acting and modeling career. Here she is, isn't she beautiful?

We can also get treats for Cocoa, if you're more of a dog person than a cat person.

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How Things Will Work Now + Moving Forward

On Thursday, June 25th I will be officially archiving my websites Artjournalist.com and ThinkWritten.com.

Moving forward, all revenue for my online business will come directly through paid newsletter subscriptions and donations. There will no longer be any ads on these sites.

You have the option to sign up as a free subscriber or a premium subscriber. Both are great, so if you're on the fence, just go the free route for now! Here is how it breaks down:

If You Want to Go the Free Route

Each week I will send one email (usually Fridays!) that goes to everyone - paid or free. The free email gets you 1 cat photo and an update of whatever else we’ve published or have going on at the time. This way you can stay updated on what we're doing, but there's no cost or commitment.

You can also opt to follow my husband Ray Stein's YouTube channel - here you will certainly see lots of videos and cats and what else we are currently working on and doing. His YouTube channel is still ad supported, so you can watch it all as much as you like, for free without buying things.

But if you have $5 to spare...

For $5 a month, here's what you will get:

• Weekly update email from me with access to all premium posts published on chellestein.com.
• Behind-the-Scenes Access: Get a look at pages from my private journals and how we manage a family of 5 as full-time content creators.
• Maximum Cat Content: Instead of just one photo, premium subscribers get a photo of every single one of our cats (that's 9 photos every week!).
• The ability to ask me anything and get answers to your questions.

Here's a few examples of some interesting views from my private journals:

And did I mention cat photos?

You can meet all of our cats here.

My hope is that once we are successful in generating enough revenue through subscriptions here, I will be able to keep ThinkWritten and Artjournalist available as an archive for future generations to come.

I am sure you have questions.

Obviously, there is a lot more we could talk about, but it would take a very long time. I respect that you probably don't want to read a giant wall of text.

Instead, I invite you to subscribe, ask your questions in the comments below and I will be happy to answer whatever you’d like to know! As a premium subscriber you can ask me anything.

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