See you on the other side
This site will mostly go dark this weekend as we prepare our move. In the meantime, you can visit us at PNWSoccerMedia.com.
It was over a decade ago that Dave Clark first brought Sounder at Heart onto the SB Nation platform. The site and the media landscape have changed a lot since then. By now, you hopefully know that we’ve made the rather monumental decision to strike out on our own as a primarily reader-supported and independent website.
Assuming all goes well, when you visit this page on Monday that move will be complete. But over the weekend, this site will mostly go dark as we make that transition. We did some OL Reign coverage here tonight, but our follow-up coverage of their game, as well as our final World Cup open thread and most of our weekend game coverage of the Sounders-Atlanta game, can be found at our staging site PNWSoccerMedia.com.
The big thing to know about the move is you’ll need to create a new profile in order to comment. Although we’re still using Coral as our commenting platform, this will be a technically different version. It’s also important to note that it requires a different login than the one you might be using to access stories.
Speaking of accessing stories, this weekend is your last chance to take advantage of our founding members’ pricing. For now, you can buy into the Supporter membership tier for $50 for the first year and you can become an Advocate for $150/year, with the latter offer good for as long as you keep your membership active. There are also $19/year and $500/year memberships, but those prices aren’t changing. You can read about all four membership tiers here.
If you already had a free membership, you’ll probably run into some problems trying to redeem those coupons. If you just shoot me an email after you’ve agreed to pay the full price, I can manually apply the discount.
In the meantime, it’s been an absolute pleasure working for SB Nation/Vox Media over the last nine years. I’m super grateful that they’ve accommodated my request to make this move and I am blown away at how many of you have expressed your support. As I write this, we have nearly 700 paid subscribers signed up already. We still aren’t at a point where we are sustainable, but it does seem like we are off to a very good start.
With your help, I truly believe Sounder at Heart can be a beacon of hope for anyone who has become frustrated with the state of soccer media. We are purposefully avoiding investors or traditional ads because we think that serves our best interests as well as our readers’. If this works, we’d love to help other sites try something similar. Thank you for playing your part and remember, You’ll Never Yacht Alone.