Short-Short Version: With the introduction of the new Affiliate Program, the Lifetime Subscription option for The Lunduke Journal is being phased out. All current Lifetime Subscriptions will be honored (for life), but no new Lifetime Subscriptions will be available. The last date which new Lifetime Subscriptions will be available is Friday, October 11th, 2024.
Over the last few years, the "Lifetime Subscription" has been a wonderful thing for The Lunduke Journal. It has provided significant bursts of revenue during those early "growing the business" years -- which made it possible for The Lunduke Journal to stay afloat, entirely thanks to subscriptions, at a time when other Tech publications (even well established ones) who relied heavily on advertising... were going out of business or downsizing (and turning to AI for content creation).
As The Lunduke Journal subscriber base grew, and matured as a publication, it became obvious that the Lifetime Subscription option needed to be phased out (in fact, many of you long-time subscribers have seen multiple attempts at doing exactly that). But the time was never quite right. Pieces of the puzzle (for running a successful publication business) were missing.
With the introduction of The Lunduke Journal Affiliate Program, the final piece is now in place. As such, the Lifetime Subscription option is being retired.
- New Lifetime Subscriptions will be available until Friday, October 11th, 2024. After which, no new Lifetime Subscriptions can be purchased.
- All Lifetime Subscriptions obtained will be honored. For life. Naturally.
- As one last hurrah of the Lifetime Subscriptions, I've discounted them to $200 for their final days.
If you want one, grab one.
The Need for the Affiliate Program
I have been searching for an effective -- and easy to administer -- way to run an affiliate system for The Lunduke Journal for quite some time. A system where other publishers (of any kind of content), or even simply avid fans, could promote The Lunduke Journal... and get a cut of the revenue.
There are two key reasons why this has been such an important thing to get in place:
- With other people promoting The Lunduke Journal -- and getting paid for their efforts -- that allows the publication to reach a wider audience and increase subscriptions (without me needing to focus on promotional activities quite as much). Thus: more time and energy to focus on articles and shows. Which is a good thing.
- And to provide a revenue stream for other publishers (podcasters, bloggers, etc.) to promote something that is not tied (in any way) to Big Tech.
Both are critical points, but I want to talk about that second one for a moment.
The Tech Publishing World (tm) is, currently, highly dependent upon advertising for one Tech Company or another. And, with advertising revenue drying up -- rather rapidly -- this has left Tech Publications (of all kinds) in a position where they need to bend over backwards to make their few advertisers happy.
Which mean no publishing content critical of those Tech Companies. Or any company those companies do business with. And, most definitely, no publishing of content which might offend people with certain political leanings.
One misstep, and the last crumbs of Big Tech advertising revenue get swept into the dustbin. Poof. Another Tech publication either goes out of business or turns into (yet another) "Press releases turned into articles generated entirely by AI chatbots" outlet.
An solution was needed. One which allowed publishers to continue putting out content, without changing their advertising focused business model, and without being reliant on making "Big Tech" happy.
With The Lunduke Journal Affiliate Program, any publisher can replace their Big Tech-centric advertising with ads for a Tech publication which regularly spits in the face of Big Tech. And, importantly, continue earning revenue.
Because this effort is so important -- across the Tech Publishing world -- I have chosen to do an even split of all revenue with affiliates. For every new subscription referred from an Affiliate, that Affiliate gets 50% of the revenue.
The goal is to make this as profitable as possible, in order to make it a viable replacement for current Big Tech advertising. And making it a 50/50 split goes a long way toward making that happen.
Obviously, not every publication will be a good fit for promoting The Lunduke Journal. But, for those which are, they now have that as an option.
As of a few days ago, Locals (which, owned by parent company Rumble, hosts The Lunduke Journal) has begun rolling out functionality (to select publishers) which makes an automated affiliate program possible. And The Lunduke Journal jumped at the chance to implement it.
Meaning Locals handles all of the processing, revenue splits, and payouts automatically. Very, very little overhead is required from me (and almost zero day-to-day administrative work).
Perfect. This was the solution we'd been waiting for.
Lifetime & Affiliate Don't Mix
And, with the creation of The Lunduke Journal Affiliate Program, the time was finally right to fully sunset the Lifetime Subscription option.
The "Lifetime Sub" option had a good run -- and was huge help in bootstrapping the funding of the publication through those early days. But it was time to put it out to pasture.
Besides no longer being needed for the business, there was also simply no reasonable way to tie the "Lifetime Subscriptions" and the "Affiliate Program" together. The two simply do not work together on the back-end (they function in very different ways, from an administrative standpoint).
To everyone who picked up a Lifetime Subscription over the early years: Thank you. You helped keep the lights on at The Lunduke Journal as it was finding itself and maturing as a publication. You made all of this possible. Your support -- both financial and otherwise -- has meant the absolute world to me.
I'm going to repeat these bullet points to make sure everyone knows exactly what is happening:
- New Lifetime Subscriptions will be available until Friday, October 11th, 2024. After which, no new Lifetime Subscriptions can be purchased.
- All Lifetime Subscriptions obtained will be honored. For life. Naturally.
- As one last hurrah of the Lifetime Subscriptions, I've discounted them to $200 for their final days.
Details on how to grab them are below. Zero pressure. If you've ever wanted one, I wanted to provide one last chance to do so.
How To Get a Lifetime Subscription
All the benefits of a Standard Monthly subscription... but pay once and never need to pay again. $200.
- Go to Lunduke.Locals.com/support.
- Select "Give Once".
- Enter "200" into the amount field.
- After checking out, Lunduke will toss you an email once your account is set to full lifetime status.
How To Get a Lifetime Subscription (with Bitcoin)
You can also obtain a Lifetime Subscription via Bitcoin.
- Make sure you have a Lunduke.Locals.com account (a free account works just fine).
- Send $200 worth of Bitcoin (or more) to the following address:
bc1qyjakve8fywm8pz2v99v57yhjj0vzr2vjze6fcq
- Email "[email protected]" with the following information: What time you made the transaction, how much was sent (in Bitcoin), and the email address you use (or plan to use) on Locals.com.
Here's a handy-dandy QR code you can scan that also has a Bitcoin Wallet Address for The Lunduke Journal:
