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Coronavirus. Climate change. Worldwide unrest. Mass extinctions. Killer robots. There’s a lot of stuff to worry about, and more things get added to the list daily. (Seriously, the robots—why do the scientists keep making them?!)

So let’s get this out of the way right now: I’m not here to give you anything else to worry about. But I am going to ask you to subscribe, because Ars could use your help.

From the forum to the front page

For folks who may not pay obsessive attention to every Ars writer’s history, I came to Ars shortly after the site was founded in 1998. I made a forum account in 2000 so I could get help with a computer build issue. (It turned out that I needed to install my motherboard’s VIA 4-in-1 drivers—and man, I do not miss that crap). Ars has been my online home for almost as long as I’ve been using the Internet; I was a subscriber for years before it even occurred to me that I might actually be able to work here.

And there’s just nowhere else like it. There are lots of sites with communities just as old and with just as many in-jokes, but there are few other sites that have managed to thrive as functional businesses for 20-plus years.

Ars still matters because we’re still doing what the site has been doing since the beginning: creating great work by hiring smart people who know stuff. We do our best to pay people what they’re worth—when you’re supporting Ars, you’re supporting a site that employs about 20 people in editorial operations. We’re proud that we’re not like most other publications and our writers are actual employees, not a pile of contractors.

Working as (more or less) a journalist for a website is not the career I imagined—I’m a crotchety old storage administrator with a background in aerospace. But I’ve been here for almost eight years, and I can’t imagine having any other job for the rest of my life.

This is it. This is what I want to do, because Ars is an incredible place. We’ve been granted the freedom to write about incredible things, from deadly Slip-n-Slide accidents to historic space flight to ’90s BBS nostalgia to horse-killing farts. There’s no site on the Internet like Ars, and it’s all because of you fabulous, wild, crazy readers.

Now Ars needs your help so that my colleagues and I can keep doing what we do.

Money makes the world go ’round

Ars Technica is funded by selling both subscriptions and ads, but the ad business is going through its own COVID19-related problems. Ars is doing reasonably well right now thanks to smart business decisions, but more subscriptions would insulate us better from whatever financial pressures are coming.

Subscriptions are magical things—they do a lot more for Ars than simply bringing in some recurring yearly revenue. One of the biggest things subscriptions do is demonstrate in concrete (i.e., “financial”) terms to the Condé Nast mothership that Ars is a publication that readers love and want to spend money on directly. When you figure that into the equation, you folks who subscribe give us the most powerful negotiating tool we can possibly have when we go to the table every year to fight for our piece of the Condé pie. And it’s the subscription program that currently lets us eschew any kind of paywall for our content, which nearly all other Condé Nast brands use.

Getting a subscription is literally the most effective way to help the site and the people who work here—it’s more effective than viewing ads, writing letters, making positive comments, or thoughts-‘n’-prayers. It’s the most powerful statement of support you can make.

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY ONLY

So here’s the deal: we have two levels of subscriptions, and we’re discounting the more expensive one for this week.

The first tier is our $25-per-year Ars Pro subscription. Subscribers at the Ars Pro level get the following benefits:

• No ads anywhere
• No tracking scripts (though Twitter and other embeds have their own scripts we cannot control)
• “Classic View”—a widescreen-optimized old-school Ars homepage layout
• Access to subscriber-only forums where the real Ars graybeards hang out
• Full-text RSS feeds of all our articles
• PDF downloads of all our articles

The second tier is the $50-per-year Ars Pro++ subscription, currently discounted to $40 with the coupon code springPlusPlus20.

Pro++ subscriptions get everything from the Pro tier, with two additional benefits:

• Your choice of a YubiKey 5 NFC ($45 value) or YubiKey 5C ($50 value), both of which add an extra layer of security to your computing experience
• An optional “clean reading view” that strips Ars articles down to their essentials for easy consumption

If you have the means and the desire to support the site, please consider subscribing. I know it’s hard to feel safe in a world filled with crime and viruses and robots, but we’re here for you.