Snopes Are Launching a Subscription Service and Making a Strong Case for Why Readers Should Contribute

Snopes are launching a subscription service. 

Since 1994 they’ve been fighting disinformation online, and have become a household name since then!

They really were ahead of their time if you look at their story in the context of today. Disinformation and fact-checking have become hot topics in the last few years. The issues aren’t going anywhere, and will only grow in importance in the next decade.

To continue with its mission, Snopes is asking readers for help.

“Today, despite an abundance of facts at our fingertips, even discerning readers can get lost in the fog of falsehoods. As we enter the next election cycle — and a new decade — we need to supercharge Snopes to light the way for more readers: hire additional fact-checkers and developers, upgrade our website, and bolster our unique expertise to catch and crush rumors at scale”

Although Snopes is an internationally recognised operation, they only have 10 people in their newsroom.

They have plans for expanding and continuing the fight against fake news, and like many other organisations over the last few years they are launching a membership program to help them to do it.

“To effectively fight against those who manufacture misinformation, and to maintain our fierce independence, Snopes needs a broad base of sustaining support. In other words: To help us grow, we need readers like you to become members”

Members will get a number of perks. For a start, they’ll get some nice goodies like tees, stickers and other swag.

Members will also get an exclusive newsletter, an ad-free Snopes, and community spaces!

They are doing a great job here of explaining to readers specifically why they need their support, what they plan to do with revenue raised, and why it is all so important.

In some of our previous interviews with experts from News Revenue Hub and the Membership Puzzle Project, they outlined why this kind of transparent communication is essential to membership success.

Tell your own story:

“News outlets have to do a better job of telling their own story. As journalists we’re really good at telling other people’s stories – but when you really peer behind the veil of a news organization you find that there’s little information that defines who they are. What is their mission, values, agenda, vision?”

– Mary Walter-Brown

Check out how Snopes are doing it for a good example to follow. Also take a look at our interviews with Mary Walter-Brown and Emily Goligoski for some great pointers on building your own membership program.

 

 

Written by
Thomas Goss

I'm MobiLoud's marketing manager.

I write about media trends and business models - and host the Digital Media Growth Podcast, where I interview fascinating people from the world of digital publishing.

When I have time I like reading, skiing, fitness, cooking and learning languages.

View all articles
Leave a reply

+ 29 = 31

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

MobiLoud Blog
https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/snopes-are-launching-a-subscription-service-and-making-a-strong-case-for-why-readers-should-contribute/
www.mobiloud.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-34
118716
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:I5C5IK5NXGFD2S4A475FXQQH7CKWTS7I
<urn:uuid:ab3ec5a6-2797-41cd-81b3-ce944ff91681>
2020-08-03T20:35:58Z
104.26.4.138
text/html
sha1:Y4KU2C6MOKD2RV7LNWKF7EDT5OYCW62Z
<urn:uuid:bfff4469-3cdf-4e0a-9652-7b3a1449e783>
https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/snopes-are-launching-a-subscription-service-and-making-a-strong-case-for-why-readers-should-contribute/
response
<urn:uuid:0ff72a27-429c-41d6-8137-126a495b7194>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-34
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-213.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/