Sign Up Here For An Ad-Free TeachThought
by Terry Heick
TeachThought started off as a small teacher blog that I ran to share English-Language Arts teaching resources, and in less than 4 years has grown into something pretty cool.
But it takes a lot of work–running TeachThought as an organization is my full-time job. We have content, curricula, publishing, professional development, consulting–a lot goes into what we do, and so far I’ve financed it all with ads. Only I dislike ads.
Part of it is personal philosophy. While we all have material needs and no one is forced to click on an ad, making a living by enticing other people to buy things they may or may not need–that may or may not have anything to do with their classroom–isn’t my favorite thing, and I’ve been working to diversify the way revenue so that:
1. TeachThought can continue to grow new ways to ’cause’ innovation in education and
2. We can do so without selling anything that you can’t use in your classroom tomorrow to improve student outcomes–in other words, get rid of ads.
The other part is that beyond my personal philosophy, ads are a pain. I run TeachThought almost entirely by myself. Every hour I spend with advertising is an hour I could’ve spent writing, designing, speaking, developing, or otherwise helping you do great things in your classroom.
I could take down the ads altogether, but there’d be no TeachThought. While I work to pull the site from the teet of rampant consumerism, I asked readers a couple of months ago if there was an interest in actually paying for an ads-free experience. (We get many millions of pageviews per month, and make pennies on the ads compared to what ad companies earn, which also bothers me.)
To my surprise, many of you said yes, you might be interested. ‘Pay walls’ are an old idea on the web that didn’t work, and while this isn’t exactly a pay wall, paying for content in 2016 doesn’t exactly feel progressive. But if it allows me to get rid of the ads, so be it.
This isn’t an actual sign-up page–by filling this out you’re basically saying you’ll pay for it if/when it becomes an actual thing.
Thanks for any feedback. I’ll read every word you write.
–Terry Heick
Director, TeachThought