You Asked. We Listened. And Now We’re Delivering!

Yesterday, I told you guys about how Facebook’s engagement is way down, because they keep messing with everyone’s timeline, and if you saw that post, and read the whole thing, you may have noticed that at the very end of it, I let y’all know about a new offering we have.

We’ve heard you when you’ve complained about pop-ups and intrusive advertising. We know that those things can be annoying. The problem is, it costs money to run a website, and it costs money to have two amazing writers on our team, and since all of our content is provided to you for free, we need a way to earn money to pay for those things. Hence, the advertising.

For those of you who have used various ad blockers, you know the unique problems they can cause. Sometimes you miss out on embedded tweets that don’t show up. Some of you can’t see the comment section when your ad blocker is turned on. Sometimes, ads continue to sneak through. In other words, they’re not always a good solution.

But now – we are excited and proud to announce that we are offering a subscription service for just $2.99 a month (and the first 7 days are free!), which will provide an ad-free experience for those of you who appreciate what we do, and want to support our work without seeing the annoying ads or using a temperamental ad blocker.

And here’s the best part. We intend, in the near future, to offer extra special super double secret only-for-subscribers perks. We are still ironing out what those perks will be, exactly, but THERE WILL BE PERKS. Beyond just an ad-free experience, we want our subscribers to know that they’re special. Because if you’re a supporter of ours, and you want to be a subscriber, well then by golly, you deserve a perk or two. So stay tuned for more details about that.

In the meantime, we’re just so excited to finally offer an ad-free experience to y’all! At the top of each post page or on our home page, you’ll see where to sign up in the Menu Bar. BEHOLD:

See where it says “Subscribe?”  Click that.  And then you’ll see this welcome page:

Once you hit that Subscribe button, it’ll take you to the page where you’ll enter in all of your details (you will not be charged during the first seven days and you can cancel any ole time you want).  And then, you’ll set up your password, and once you’re logged in, then the top of each page will now look like this:

And that’s it!  Easy peasy.  No more ads.  The commenting section should appear with no interference.

NOW, I should point out that ads within the commenting section (which is on the Disqus platform) will still appear, because that platform is sort of out of our control when it comes to this subscription service.  But other ads that you’re used to seeing will no longer appear.  The other possible exception is that when we have videos that are featured within posts, sometimes ads appear in those videos that we also don’t have control over.

We’ve already had a few folks sign up and they can weigh in on their experience so far!  This is brand new, so we’re working through any hiccups as we’re hearing about them.  Please let us know if you have any trouble!  We understand that Internet Explorer seems to be a better browser to sign up on versus Chrome or Firefox for some folks, but other people have no trouble with Chrome or Firefox.  We’ll be interested to hear how that works for you!

ALSO – make sure that during the registration process, you DISABLE any ad blocker you may have turned on.  This is helping people successfully get through the registration process, and then you can obviously turn it back on as soon as you’re finished up!

It’s fascinating to me that out of the folks who’ve signed up so far, we have representation from literally ALL OVER the country.  We have subscribers from KY, CA, TX, VA, PA, IN, AR, WA, ID, and MI  – and I just love that. 🙂

From the bottom of all of our Chick hearts, we thank you for supporting us in advance.  We love y’all. F’REALZ.