Our newsletter has grown over the past two years from having around 90,000 subscribers to now over 1,000,000.
For a long time, Snopes relied on Facebook and Google Search to distribute our stories. Now, with your support, I feel like we’re finally controlling our own destiny and delivering the facts on our terms.
Monthly chart of Snopes newsletter growth
Our newsletter has also helped us build up our membership program, which is now more than 29,000 paying members strong. Most of our members signed up after reading stories from our newsletter.
If we didn’t have our members, I don’t know if Snopes would exist right now. Social media platforms have shunned fact-checkers and search traffic has been hit hard by AI answers. Memberships account for over 65% of our revenue now.
The great thing about switching our focus to memberships is that it lets us tackle deeper investigations. This has been my dream for so many years, but it always felt impossible when we relied on Facebook and Google traffic. Anytime we spent more time on deeper stories, our revenue would fall and we’d be right back to worrying about finances. It felt like something only major publications had the ability to do.
For the first time in a year, we’re talking about hiring again and expanding the types of investigations we can offer. That’s all thanks to our members.
— Chris Richmond, Snopes CEO
P.S. We want to hear from you. If you have any ideas about how can we improve our newsletter or membership offerings, or what type of deeper investigations we should pursue, please respond to this email. We’ll be on the lookout for any feedback.
