CleanTechnica Needs You — No Paywalls, No AI BS, No Billionaire Owners – CleanTechnica

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CleanTechnica has worked hard for more than 17 years to bring accurate, useful information on clean technology matters to the world. That started primarily with solar energy and wind energy, but then grew into thorough coverage of electric vehicles, batteries, and much more. We have built out an enormous collection of regular, original reports, and we also consistently publish deep dives into new topics, conduct thorough product reviews, and go on in-person visits to cleantech projects and events.

None of this is free. We have to put a lot of money and time into our daily work, not to mention our bigger monthly, quarterly, and annual projects. Plus, we have to pay for that world-famous sun-soaked lounge of ours, the rooftop pool, and an endless supply of kiwi-strawberry cocktails and minty mocha frappucinos. Or so we dream. 😀

The world is evolving, as it always has. Some basic things always stay the same — we all need food to live, interesting news catches people’s attention and gets chattered about, sports excite people and lead to tribal “battles,” and so on — but technologies and norms around these things change.

There are multiple factors putting a crunch on the media industry, and that certainly includes us. So, if you appreciate what we do, I encourage you to become monthly contributors, provide a one-time contribution if you prefer that approach, or even double your existing contributions if you already a subscriber and can offer a little bit more! We need all the help we can get.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that more and more websites now hold their content behind a paywall. We’re not eager to go that route, because 1) we think our content is important for society and want as many people as possible to see it, and 2) we don’t want to limit access to people who can’t afford any extras. So, we forego the revenue we can get from paywalls.

Others have turned to using AI to write their content. Who needs to pay a writer when you can just put a prompt in a LLM program and have it spit out an article? Well, there are plenty of reasons we are not keen on that approach and don’t use it. And I think you all appreciate that we don’t publish AI BS here.

At the same time, AI and social media companies are squeezing websites like ours more and more. We’ve always had a lot of traffic come from Google searches, as all sites do, but Google increasingly wants to give you its AI answer to a query rather than direct you to a site like CleanTechnica. Others have turned to ChatGPT for all their questions. ChatGPT is indeed our 10th biggest referrer now, but as you probably know, only a tiny fraction of people who go to ChatGPT for an answer are clicking through to source materials.

So, ChatGPT, Google, and others are using our work to provide answers but sending only a minuscule amount of that traffic on to us.

Social media companies, meanwhile … well, they want people to stay on their platforms, not click away, so they have deemphasized posts with external links increasingly over the years.

If you pay a bit of attention to the media industry overall, you have surely seen layoffs at all kinds of media companies year after year, even at the biggest and best news outlets. There are also plenty of signs of those of us in the media industry getting squeezed to do more, or work faster, for less.

At the same time, many media companies are now owned by billionaires or corporate behemoths without a core aim of helping society. That even goes for what were once completely independent, original media outlets that sprouted at the beginning of the Internet Age. We are not in that boat. No billionaire owners here.

I’m not here to complain about it, though. That’s the nature of the industry right now.

Again, our ask is simple. If you can contribute (or can contribute a bit more) to help us do what we do, we can’t tell you enough how much we appreciate it and how much it helps us to do our work. In actuality, we do work for you. Ideally, we would be fully funded by reader support and no longer have to run ads or seek sponsorships. That’s really the dream. If you can help us to move toward that dream today, we give you a huge thank you.

You can contribute on Stripe or on Substack.