Introducing Club gCaptain

 

 

 

 

Since 2007, gCaptain has delivered quality articles for the maritime and offshore industries with a focus on depth, accuracy, and personal stories. We’ve written thousands of articles, covered news with facts and expert opinions and have shared stories on how our industry is evolving as the world changes around us.

Now, we’re ready for the next important step. Today, we are thrilled to introduce Club gCaptain.

Club gCaptain

Club gCaptain offers exclusive access to extra content, delivered to your inbox every week. At $10/month or $100/year, our most loyal readers will be able to enjoy some great perks.

Starting THIS Friday Club gCaptain membership will receive:

• A Weekly newsletter, delivered every week on Friday 
• Quarterly magazine, delivered every few months
• Exclusive access to occasional discounts, inside information and free downloads

You can subscribe to Club gCaptain here ($10/month) or here ($100/year) today. You’ll receive the first issue of the Weekly this Friday, March 11th, directly to the email address you sign up with.

After purchasing a subscription, you’ll be able to manage all your settings and view your Club profile at gCaptain.memberful.com. You’ll get a receipt via email from Memberful, and the email you used will be automatically added to our MailChimp list to receive newsletters every week. That’s it.

I feel like Club gCaptain is an important next step for gCaptain and will strengthen our relationship with our readers. Allow me to share a few thoughts on why we’re doing this along with more details on what this club will actually be.

Why Club gCaptain?

We’ve grown a lot in eight years, and we want to keep making gCaptain the best independent blog in the maritime industry and we want it to remain free. This is why Club gCaptain is not a paywall for the site and it will not contain the most important and timely news articles, those will continue to appear free of charge on the homepage of our site. 

So if the important and timely news (e.g. ship incidents, new regulations, large scale projects, etc) will remain free for all to read then what “extra” content will be sent only to subscribers? The first article I wrote for gCaptain, way back in May 2007, featured a new and innovative way to brew coffee aboard ship. Back then Keurig coffee machines where a new and exciting innovation that no one had ever heard of. Today, nearly every hotel room or lobby has a Keurig system installed… and we, at gCaptain, have moved onto some much better ways to make coffee. We want to share those new systems with you and bring back some other fun and interesting articles about our favorite tools and toys along with book and movie reviews and other stuff that was peripherally related to ships. In short we want Club gCaptain to be fun and interesting.

We also want to bring back our most popular feature from the early days, Maritime Monday (YES, we are bringing it back in limited form!); a list of links to interesting articles around the web.

Some of you may be thinking “You said this is an ‘important step’ in the evolution of gCaptain. How is fun and interesting content – coffee makers and movie reviews – important?” Well some of the information, like book reviews, will be  important information to the well read mariner but… the rest will not be important. Not really. Not directly. Yet Club gCaptain will be important to all readers because, for the first time ever, gCaptain will have a product, something we can sell, something that will collect revenue and this revenue will be plugged back into gCaptain… money that will allow us to expand our coverage, collect data, hire writers and fund investigations. The small monthly sum each of you contribute will, collectively, have a large impact on the quality of the free news and information many of you have grown to love. This is why we are calling it a “club”.

So I repeat, We’re not putting gCaptain articles behind a subscription… not today, and not in the future. That would defeat the entire purpose of gCaptain: helping people discover important maritime news and information. We’re simply not interested in changing how gCaptain operates. Our website will remain free and open to everyone because it’s the right thing to do.

Club gCaptain is, primarily, a way to unlock additional content that serves as companion material to the website. It’s delivered by email because we believe in the feeling of joy and surprise when receiving a new issue of Club gCaptain Weekly each week.

On top of the extra content that you pay for, you’ll also get a chance to be an awesome reader who makes a direct contribution to the gCaptain team. Effectively, Club gCaptain will enable us to expand and produce even more articles for the site. It’s a virtuous cycle: I want to keep publishing gCaptain forever and our team wants to continue to have a positive daily impact on the industry. Hopefully, with time those readers who care about the quality of the news they read will choose to become Club members, getting more great content in return and facilitating further expansions.

I’ve personally thought about this for a long time and have watched as other, non-maritime, news sites that we love similar to this. Countless readers have asked us to enable donations on gCaptain for years, but that never felt right to me. While we are humbled by such requests, I’ve always wanted to offer something in return. Today, I know what we can offer.

We believe that you’re gonna love this club and we promise that there will be “secret” members only perks that will make membership even more valuable in the coming months. And we want this to be a club in which the membership has a voice so, each subscription will ship with the direct email and contact information of our team and my own personal phone number in the unlikely event you’re not completely satisfied with the club. 

-John

P.S. We are close to launching something much bigger. An idea that has me up late at night with anticipation. A chance to connect with some of you directly, on a level not previously possible. It will be BIG and FUN and IMPORTANT and will be an opportunity open, initially, only to gCaptain club members.

P.S.2. Want to learn more before subscribing? Then please Click HERE.

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