Crowdfunded news.

"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.

What crowdfunding actually buys at our scale

Concrete picture: the WeSearch operating cost runs in low-thousands per month — server, bandwidth, domain, transactional services (Stripe fees, push notification gateway, transactional email), and a small budget for occasional dev work. There is no salary line for the founder; the project runs on free time. Donations cover the marginal costs of staying online plus a small reserve for traffic spikes (a story going viral, a new product launch, an unexpected DDoS, etc.). Anything left over goes into improvements — currently new sources, better mobile reading, expanded markets coverage, and AI-summary quality.

That picture is unromantic on purpose. Crowdfunding small operations is a known pattern (open-source maintainers, indie developers, regional bloggers) — what's less common is applying it to a public-news-aggregation product specifically. WeSearch is one of the experiments in whether the model carries over.

Why this isn't "subscription with extra steps"

Subscriptions create a line between the people who paid and the people who didn't, with paywalled content for the former. Crowdfunding doesn't. Donor or non-donor, the product is identical. We don't show "subscriber-only" stories; we don't reveal donor identity to other readers (unless the donor explicitly opts into the public donor wall at /donors); we don't offer "early access" features to paying readers. The point is that the news belongs to anyone who shows up to read it, and the funding mechanism reinforces that rather than violating it.

Risks of the crowdfunding model

• Concentration risk. If a small set of donors covered most of the budget, that would be functionally indistinguishable from sponsorship. We deliberately keep the size of any single donation small relative to total income.
• Sustainability risk. If donations dry up, the site shuts down. There's no cushion, no investor bridge round, no advertising fallback. This is a feature in one sense (it forces the product to stay genuinely useful) and a risk in another (a single bad month is operationally meaningful).
• Capacity ceiling. The model can't fund a 50-person investigative newsroom. We don't pretend otherwise.

Bottom line

• WeSearch's funding model is reader donations only — no advertisers, no investors, no premium tier, no sponsored content.
• That model fits aggregation + community discussion at our scale; it doesn't fit large-newsroom investigative journalism.
• Donors get nothing extra over non-donors. The product is the same for everyone.
• If the model works, WeSearch keeps running. If it doesn't, WeSearch shuts down. There's no advertiser-supported fallback in the architecture.

Frequently asked