Tear Down The Wall!

CollapseNet's Past, Present and Future on the Eve of Our 2nd Anniversary

Part III - Where We Are Going

By Wesley T. Miller

Mike is no longer our big-name draw. He is still here but took his name off the marquee by choice. No one can take his exact place on this website and no one is trying to. If you came here just for MCR and don’t care to continue the journey with us, we thank you and wish you well. (Please come back and visit.) We are reaching out and bringing in fresh original content, but we don’t have a “star” of this show and it is unlikely we will find an existing one without sufficient revenue to pay them. It’s the same old chicken and egg problem we’ve always had.

So why should you pay for news that you can dig up on your own (assuming you have the free time to do it and forgetting about the original articles we produce)? Why do you need a different social network site when there is Facebook? Why not just use existing search engines to learn new skills or gardening techniques? We’ve heard these questions and more. While Collapse Network’s value should be obvious to our long-term members it may not be to the newcomers. I will explain further.

CollapseNet has a staff of over a dozen regular contributors, including IT staff and writers. We have multiple people with trained eyes from around the world scanning the news daily to bring you the most important stories of the day, stories relevant to your life and future, without the typical corporate, political and celebrity garbage trotted out by mainstream news services.

We are the dot-connectors in an increasingly dangerous and confusing world. Our news and analysis is intended to give you the available intelligence to protect yourself, your family, and your future as best you can, to keep you ahead of the herd, the other campers. At the monthly membership rate of about 33 cents per day (or far less with a yearly subscription and affiliate discount), we provide better, more comprehensive and focused news coverage with further reach than your local newspaper ever could, and for less money.

Collapse Network also brings you original feature articles written by experts and fellow-preppers alike. In addition to long-time feature writers, such as Carolyn Baker and Mike Ruppert, and our wonderful blog writers, we are expanding our staff of quality feature writers to cover a more diverse range of collapse-related issues. We recently welcomed Robert Denner aboard as our new financial analyst and writer, and we have initiated two other new columns, “FYI: Stuff You Need to Know” and “Essential Voices: People You Need to Hear”, which contain videos, written materials and articles with vital information that are not found easily or at all in mainstream news sources. We are also getting more aggressive in how we address the predicaments our species finds itself in, and in how we address some of the more unsavory culprits of this mess (e.g., the new “Hairy Eyeball On…” column). With your support and expanded membership revenue, we plan to add more of an investigative journalism flare. Mike is still with us, he’s just not on the bridge anymore.

In addition to providing a source of revenue to fund CollapseNet’s operations, our pay-wall also serves to keep the riff-raff out. It has been estimated that “Spammers create as many as 40 percent of the accounts on social-media sites.” On CollapseNet’s Hub, we’ve kept the zombies AND the robots out.

Facebook’s idea of exclusivity is to give you up to their advertisers and target your behaviors online. Our goal is to provide a safe, exclusive platform for like-minded people to communicate and help each other prepare for and deal with the many aspects of collapse: economic, environmental, personal safety and coping skills, growing and preserving your own food, etc…whatever issues our members want to discuss. Members can upload virtually any digital materials – videos, articles, pictures – providing each other potentially limitless digital resources. In this one area alone, the pay-wall has demonstrated its value, making the challenges that come with removing it more difficult.

But here we are, trying to provide as much information and resources for free as we can on our Home Page, while keeping our members free from advertising goons and roaming zombies behind the pay-wall. We are trying to draw the maximum traffic possible to our Home Page in the effort to attract enough worthwhile paid advertising to cover our expenses. We are nowhere close to that goal right now, so we have no choice but to continue as a paid membership website.  Our problem is commonplace and getting more so - we are trying to adapt from one economic system to another, under considerable strain and with great uncertainty about our future. Same as it ever was. And the same it shall be for everyone as collapse unfolds.

Knowing everything about this company that I do, I see 3 potentials outcomes:

• Our members do not support CollapseNet without MCR and allow CollapseNet to die. CollapseNet ceases operations in the near term;

•  Our members give us minimal support to carry on a with a skeleton crew, providing WND links, Breaking News and important videos, with no expansion of services, writers or content enhancements (i.e., CollapseNet continues to die slowly until we can no longer fund any operations); or,

• Members and donors rally behind CollapseNet and provide sufficient support for us to jump into the broader, expanded mission discussed above. CollapseNet expands its staff of writers and reporters while building alliances and partnerships with like-minded groups in the concerted effort to actually affect change that matters. Once enough “angel” donation money comes in or sufficient consistent website traffic supports advertising dollars adequate to our needs, we can then look to tear down the pay-wall for most of our features. 

CollapseNet.com is not just about one man and his message – it has grown into much more than that, as intended.

We are here to help facilitate action, to make a real difference and to help YOU to make a difference, too, if for no one other than yourself and your lifeboat crew.

Please stay with us and give us your financial support if you are able. Our team of owners/volunteers and I promise you that we will stretch as far as we can and we will continue to give this endeavor all that we have to give. I will make it my mission as President to expand our circle of allies and voices in our articles and videos, in the effort to expand our voice and our reach.

It takes financial support to make that happen…

Where CollapseNet goes from here is entirely up to you, our members and supporters. These are my suggestions to make CollapseNet quickly get some deeper traction:

• Make www.collapsenet.com your personal Home Page. Start and end your Internet time with us. Click on new columns when they appear and read them.

• Start talking to each other on The Hub. About everything.

• Form groups and get active with each other in and across communities.

• Send us blogs or video reports about what’s happening in your area. We will do more local reporting as long as we have local reporters. I would personally love to see us have citizen reports from all over the globe on a regular basis. We have the tools to make it happen and do it well.

• Join our affiliate program and get paid a little bit to help us grow. Our top affiliate has made over $2700 so far, about $300 a month, just by sharing a few links every day.

Please help us build a vibrant global network for people of action as well as words, and together, we will make a difference.

We have no other sane choice but to change – right now.

Our backs’ to the wall.

Will you stand with us?

Wesley T. Miller   (Lake Oswego, OR)

P.S. This website is a construction zone right now, please be patient. All of the old materials are being reorganized and loaded into new software. We are making other software upgrades, too. It will all be back, better organized and easier to use, just as fast as we can get the work done. Thanks for your patience and your support.