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.

Many of my readers are low-income and so at the time this was the best model to get resources to the people who needed it most for free while still covering the hosting and administrative costs.

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 - you’re still paying off your husband‘s loans from 20 years ago) 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 to be told to visit your very own website that you created for journaling prompts.

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

Imagine pouring your heart into art or writing only for someone to ask you if it is AI generated.

All of these things have actually happened to me.

I’m not mad. Not anymore, at least. I forgive them even, because this is now a HUGE new opportunity for you - and I can focus more on what I love to do - to create, spend time outside, take care of my family and take cat photos.

Speaking of cat photos, here’s one just for fun so you don’t get bored reading this:

Making the transition here was not an easy decision, but doing so will help Zera, a single mother of 4 children, finally be able to pursue her dreams of a professional acting and modeling career.

—-

How Things Will Work Now + Moving Forward

Thursday, June 25th will be the last day you will be able to access any of my old ad supported sites. Between now and then I will be transitioning all of my old content over here.

Everything on this site will be 100% ad-free. You will not even see so much as an affiliate link from me.

As a subscriber, you can also comment on and interact on posts. Ask me questions, share your own ideas, meet other people - whatever floats your boat! Today so many websites got rid of comments completely, I will NEVER do this.

You will also get one email a week 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. It will usually come on Fridays.

As a premium subscriber, you get access to whatever is published here weekly (including a LOT more cat photos!), as well as access to the archives of all of my tutorials, essays, resource links and more.

Based on my calculations, this will get us a healthy revenue of $600 a month, which I hope will be enough to cover hosting and the feeding and care of a family of 5 with 9 cats. I’ve survived on much, much less so we should be okay.

If I do need to increase prices later down the line, you’ll always be locked into the $5/month or $48/year pricing as long as your subscription remains active.

We eventually may launch a shop where you can buy hand dyed t-shirts, art supplies, books and beaded items - but that is very far away and I’m not 100% certain yet.

I think we need another cat photo.

I am sure you have questions.

Obviously, there is a lot more we could talk about, but it would get confusing and complicated fast. 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! You can ask me anything.

——