The Ads Cometh

UPDATE 2: Here is the signup link,

UPDATE: Ads are temporarily running for testing as of 2/19/24. They’ll soon be disabled until we have our membership service running. – Anthony

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.

Here is what is coming:

I am setting up an Internet TV studio. I’ve been working slowly on it for about a year. The challenge for me is to make it work with my hearing issues while making it look professional like I did during my many years of live television weather. The studio will be for weekly live broadcasts and for making instructional videos. With the new studio, there will be a regular weekly live interactive broadcast at WUWT to discuss the issues. That will be a subscriber based event.

A subscriber based weekly newsletter is also in the works.

Along those lines, I am working on a 24/7/365 live “ClimateTV” channel that will run videos, graphics, data, news items, and entertainment. I have done some test runs and it is looking good. There’s still much more work to do before I launch. This will be free and public, though we may run advertising on it.

We will be updating the “Reference Pages” – they’ve been broken, mainly by WordPress cache issues which makes any fix disappear quickly, but our resident writer and programmer Eric Worrall has come up with a plugin that will solve this long-standing problem that prevents us from displaying live information. Our goal is to become the “one-stop-shop” for all climate information, especially the things you can’t find elsewhere.

Eric Worrall is working on a WUWT App, both for Android and Apple phones. This will be made available to everyone for free. The challenge was to make one that neither Google or Apple can “shut down.” We’ve got that figured out. I’ve tested it and it is a great start, we just need a bit more tweaking before release in early 2024.

We will be adding new topics to the Everything Climate section – feel free to make suggestions.

We will do a website overhaul, to go to a more modern theme that is better for speed and SEO. Our current theme is over six years old and it is creaking under the load. It has no update path.

I want to do a monthly “state of the climate” report, much like NOAA does, but from a perspective of sensibility. If funds permit, I’ll send out press releases each month to all media outlets. PRNewswire is not cheap.

Thanks – Anthony