I just launched a Patreon with excitement and trepidation! If you’ve found my blog and books valuable over the years, I hope you consider subscribing, or at least joining Patreon to follow my updates for free.
Starting in the next week or two, subscribers will get exclusive early access to feature articles, available for the first time only here on Patreon. These will be in-depth, deeply reported stories about virtual world culture across Second Life and the broader Metaverse -- from business to art, to amazing new projects and established personalities.
In return, paying subscribers will also get a number of benefits, including copies of one of my books, and several ways of promoting your own virtual world/metaverse-related business or project -- both here on New World Notes (which will continue as usual!), and to my 20,000 followers across social media.
Is there a market for premium news and cultural stories about virtual worlds, and the communities which make them real? Let’s find out together!
Your blog (along with a very few others, such as Inara Pey's), is a very important decades-old historical documentation and archive of Second Life and other VWs' facts, context, and development. If you start a Patreon, does that mean that *from now on*, that documentation/reporting/archive is truncated, available only to subscribers? How will a historian access your invaluable reporting of SL if some of it is hidden behind Patreon?
I understand the desire to make money, but shouldn't journalism be a free and available press? We would appreciate it greatly if you could clarify, please. Thanks!
Posted by: Historian | Friday, May 31, 2024 at 04:49 AM
Thank you! I'll keep running New World Notes as long as I can. Patreon subscribers will get early/full access to select feature articles, but I'll repost select excerpts on NWN.
I'd love to make everything I write free and easily available. The best way to do that is subscribe!
Posted by: Wagner James Au | Friday, May 31, 2024 at 11:26 AM