"Crowdfunded news" is sometimes used loosely to mean "any news project that takes donations." We mean something more specific: news whose only sources of revenue are direct contributions from readers, with no advertising, no equity capital, and no premium-tier subscription. That's a small category, and WeSearch is in it.
The model in plain English
WeSearch has one revenue surface: /donate, a Stripe checkout link. Readers donate one-time or monthly, in any amount. Hosting, bandwidth, domain registration, processing fees, and occasional dev time come out of those donations. Anything left over goes into improvements.
There are no advertisers in the funnel. There are no investors in the cap table (no cap table at all — WeSearch isn't incorporated as a venture-funded entity). There is no premium tier with extra features for paying readers; everyone gets the same site regardless of whether they donate.
Why the incentive structure is different
Advertising-funded news aligns the publisher's incentives with the advertiser's: maximize attention, optimize for engagement, profile the reader to charge advertisers more. The reader is the product.
Subscription-funded news aligns incentives somewhat better — the reader is paying directly — but it segments the audience into payers and non-payers, gates access behind a wall, and tends to push toward content that retains existing subscribers (often by reinforcing their priors) rather than reaching new readers.
Crowdfunded news aligns incentives with continued public goodwill. If you don't keep the site honest and useful, donations dry up. There's no tier to upsell, no advertiser to pander to, no investor to satisfy. The publisher's job is simply to keep producing the thing that made readers want to chip in.
Where it doesn't work
Crowdfunding doesn't fund a 200-person investigative-journalism operation. The unit economics are wrong: the per-reader contribution doesn't scale to support the kind of multi-month reporting that requires teams, lawyers, and travel budgets. WeSearch deals with this by being upfront about not producing investigative journalism — we aggregate other publishers' work and run a community discussion layer. The original reporting comes from the sources we link to. Crowdfunding works for our model because our model is small.
Comparable projects
- The Guardian (partial). Mostly advertising and grants, but a notable share of revenue is reader contributions. Has shown that "if you can, please support us" works at scale.
- Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation). Pure crowdfunding. Different content model but similar funding structure.
- NPR / public radio. Listener-supported model, fifty years of running. Combination of pledge drives and corporate underwriting.
- Patreon-funded newsletters. Substack and similar platforms have made crowdfunded individual journalism viable at small scale.
- Pivot to nonprofit ProPublica / Texas Tribune. Foundation grants + reader donations.
How to support
If WeSearch is useful and you want to keep it open, the way to help is /donate. One-time, monthly, any amount. Donations of any size help. If you can't donate, recommending the site to one friend who reads news regularly is, in expectation, more valuable than $5.