Yesterday, we asked for your help, and you responded. Thanks to you, we welcomed 400 new Longreads Members.

We’re now at 1,400 members—that’s great progress, but we’re still less than halfway to our goal of 5,000 Longreads Members. We need your help to keep spreading the word.

You can share your support on Twitter here.

We’re also excited to announce that the team at Digg has purchased a group membership for its staff! We’d like to thank them for their support.

If your company would like to buy a Longreads Membership for its employees, simply use our PayPal donation page to purchase them ($30/year for each employee), then email us with the names of your employees: hello@longreads.com.

We’ll keep updating you on our progress, and thank you again for everything.

We’ve also had a few questions come up about our plans, so I thought I’d answer them here:

Why 5,000 Members?

It’s not only the number we need to actively sustain and improve our service, but it’s also a number that, for us, would cover more than 50% of all operating expenses. The rest of our revenue will come from advertising—through sponsorships and tasteful display advertising and affiliate revenue.

Do you pay publishers and writers?

This is another reason why the Longreads Membership is important—it will pay not just us, but we set aside a portion of those member dues to pay writers and publishers for each “Longreads Member Pick” that we publish. These are stories and book chapters that are not otherwise available for free on the web.

The more members we have, the more Member Picks we can afford to bring to you.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.