After what feels like quite a long time, we’ve given the Daily Sceptic a facelift. We’re flagging up our latest articles on the home page in thumbnail form and instead of archiving the most important articles on the right-hand side of the home page under various headings we’ve created a separate ‘Archive’ page that will be easier to navigate. In place of that old right-hand menu we’ve created an easy way for readers to select our ‘Most Read’ articles, ‘Most Commented’ on, and ‘Editors Picks’.
We continue to be grateful for all of your donations, particularly those of you who donate regularly, and we encourage those who haven’t donated before, or who haven’t done so recently, to please do so via our secure donation page.
But, alas, the Daily Sceptic cannot survive on donations alone. The company now has four employees, as well as legal bills, accountancy bills and other costs, so if we’re going to make it sustainable over the long term we need to find additional sources of revenue.
One change you’ll soon notice, therefore, is that the Daily Sceptic has advertising. We’ve worked with our designer and sales agent to make sure the ads are as unobtrusive as possible and we hope they won’t affect your reading experience. But given the amount of monthly page views the site gets – more than 1.3 million last month – we should be able to generate enough money to cover the cost of at least one employee via programmatic advertising.
In addition, we’ve decided to ask for a small donation from people who want to comment on articles below the line or post in our Forums. Henceforth, if you’d like to contribute to the Daily Sceptic in this way you’ll need to donate at least £5 via our secure donation page, at which point you’ll be able to comment or post as often as you like for the next 31 days. If you’ve already donated at least £5 in the last 31 days there’ll be no need to give any more – the system will recognise you as an authorised contributor when you log in provided you use the same email address when donating as you did when you created a log in – and if you haven’t created a log in yet, but have donated more than £5 in the last 31 days, you’ll automatically become an authorised contributor as soon as you do create one. Incidentally, if you’re someone who wants to comment or post regularly, the best way to avoid being prompted to donate again after 31 days is to set up a recurring donation for at least £5 a month.
Alternatively, if you donate at least £50 you’ll be able to comment or post for 12 months. If you’ve already donated something in the last 12 months, but less than £50, just top-up your donation to at least £50 and you’ll be able to comment until the amount you’ve donated in the past year drops below £50, at which point you’ll have to top it up again. If you’re unsure how much you’ve donated in the past year, just search for “Donorbox” in your email inbox.
If you’ve made a donation and are still unable to comment, check that the email address you used when setting up a log in is the same one you used when donating. If it isn’t, you can change the one you used to log in with and that should solve the problem. If that doesn’t work, try logging out and logging back in again – and if that doesn’t work, try clearing your cache.
We hope these two minor changes won’t annoy you. The alternative way of raising additional revenue would be to put our articles behind a paywall, but that would be self-defeating. Sceptical points of view on issues like lockdowns, vaccines and climate change are so rare we don’t want to limit people’s exposure to them by charging for our content. The entire reason for creating the site in the first place was to provide a platform for scientifically-literate, evidence-based views that are usually suppressed in the mainstream media so it’s important that all our content remains free to access.
We’re still doing the daily update every day, including the News Round-Up, which you can get straight to your inbox every morning at 4am – just enter your name and email address here. That service is still free. The daily update can also be viewed online by clicking here.
If you find anything isn’t working properly, or can think of ways to improve the new site, please email us on thedailysceptic@gmail.com. That’s also the address to use if you spot anything you think we should dig into further or include in the daily round-up – or if you’d like to submit articles, reply to those we’ve published or correct any mistakes. We’re grateful to our readers for their continuing support, whether it’s a monthly donation, a link to an interesting article or simple words of appreciation, and we hope the redesign will make the site easier to read and navigate.
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