We are pleased to announce the launch of ValueWalkPremium.com – what began as an extremely hesitant tiny experiment about two years ago has grown into something beyond my wildest dreams with thousands of subscribers. While I never wanted nor expected to make a significant percentage of our content paywalled, circumstances change. Ad revenue is down for everyone and to be able to run our site we need to focus on the quality premium audience we have built instead of playing the game of chasing views.
Additionally, while I am far from perfect, I try extremely hard to maintain ethics in advertising, and it is increasingly hard in an age where I get multiple high paying offers to promote products like ICOs and binary options every few hours. NOTE: We are not and will not change our blanket ban on ads for those products (although that does not stop the endless pitches)- this is just an example of why we are focusing more on premium. We have received at least two buyout offers over the past few years on very lucrative terms which would force us to compromise our ethics severely, and we turned both down immediately. I will not provide further details since they may be reading this but my friends and family can vouch for both stories. The point is that ads pay nothing unless you want to deal with companies that make James Altuscher Bitcoin stuff look legit, which on a side note even though ads paying nothing I know to bid on terms like Bitcoin is super expensive – i have no idea where Altuscher got the money to show up first on those terms on every platform known to mankind (not much info in Bitzumi REG A+ offering on that from quick look), but it has to be millions at least – perhaps a story for an aspiring young journalist.
If you still hate paywalls you can donate thousands to ValueWalk and we will be happy to give you a free pass.
We have launched ValueWalkpremium to give better attention to our core readers. We did not start a subdomain because we wanted 100% freedom to run ValueWalkPremium as best as possible for our readers and not have to worry about specific features (plugins, CSS, etc.) slowing down ValueWalk which is a relatively high traffic site. That said, we hope to continue to post the same amount of quality value-added content on ValueWalk (where everything will be free), while ValueWalkPremium will be majority paywalled and a bit of free and some email locked content.
We still are finishing the design and adding more features so stay tuned for that and open to suggestions as always!
Our IT transferred all the data, but there could be mistakes or glitches – please let us know at [email protected] if you notice any account issues. Also, we did fix some bugs with the plugin but contacted you all individually – that said if still, an issue let us know.
On that note, we are raising our prices to $99.99 a year and monthly to $14.99 effective March 15th at midnight EST (no exceptions). NOTE: ALL EXISTING subscribers whether from PayPal or mediapass ( or direct etc) will be grandfathered in at the lower rate, but new members will soon have to pay more. We do not try to sell VWP but we love signing up offices so if you are interested for your firm shoot us an email and we can discount you whether before or after March 15th.
From the feedback we receive we think higher prices will allow us to sift out some trolls, pay our staff well and focus on more attention to our subscribers and also our subs on our small/micro-cap focused HiddenValueStocks (if you have not done so already check it out!), and possibly one or two other ideas I am excited about (stay tuned).
Side note, if you are an allocator looking for a long list of spectacular smaller hedge funds run by honest fund managers, hit me [email protected]
Since most of you are interested in hedge funds I want to re-iterate something significant – there are various levels of understanding, and we never provide names of sources or information which we promised to keep confidential – that said, we do not post full PDFs unless there is some permission as that would fall outside of fair use – anyone saying anything to the contrary is a liar furthermore there is no way for them to know all the facts, so it is extra wreckless – we do not sue, instead we respond with the truth. Some people do not like us because they are jealous, or because we try to fight fraud – if we make any enemies because of our commitment to shutting down con artists, then we welcome it. We save our manners for those who operate honestly regardless of whether they are competitors or not.
Thanks again for making this moment possible
Best,
Jacob Wolinsky
