Our memberships have increased by nearly 1,000% (yes one-thousand percent) since the start of last year. I’m absolutely blown away by our audience stepping up and supporting us at this scale.

The industry has dramatically changed in recent years. Quick AI answers cut our website traffic. Social media platforms claim they no longer need fact-checking. We knew we needed to adapt. Without the support of our members, Snopes wouldn’t exist today.

Memberships have kept us in the game and are allowing us to move into deeper investigations — the types of articles we always wanted to tackle but simply couldn’t afford to do them with being funded only on ad revenue.

In our first attempt, we tacked the accusations that Dr. Fauci had been funding research at a Chinese lab that allegedly created a genetically modified virus and caused the COVID-19 pandemic. We unpacked the research and federal grant behind the claim, competing theories about the pandemic’s origin, and the ongoing debate over "gain-of-function" research.

This investigative article available to members only has been a great success for us. It has brought more sign-ups than our top 3 articles combined in the last year.

Please consider joining us so we can go after more of these deeper investigations. As a member, you can also rate topics to help us decide which investigation we should jump on.

We’ll continue our normal fact-checking for everyone, but I’m excited to take our work to the next level by digging into even more complex topics for our members.

— Chris Richmond, Snopes CEO