Welcome to Season 4 of The Auburn Observer. We're offering our best deal yet.

From now until the start of football season, new Observer subs can join for $4/month or $40/year for their first 12 months.

In a little more than 24 hours from the time this is posted, Auburn football will open its 2023 fall camp. The Tigers have one month to prepare for the start of a new era, which officially kicks off Sept. 2 against UMass.

This fall camp will kick off, essentially, the fourth season of coverage here at The Auburn Observer. Due to the pandemic, our official launch date was Sept. 1, 2020, but since football season really feels like it starts in August, we’re going ahead and celebrating early.

The Observer started as an experiment to get through a COVID season. It was going to be a place for me to post my work on Auburn football and men’s basketball after getting laid off for the second time in three years, and it was going to be a place where Painter and I could keep talking about the Tigers like we did on the radio.

As many of you know, The Observer quickly turned into something that I wanted to do full-time for as long as I could. The response from readers and listeners was incredible, and this continues to be the absolute best job I could possibly have. I am blown away pretty much every single day that an independent Auburn sports nerd newsletter could be this successful — and this fun.

We’ve grown in size, making the massive addition of Dan to the main podcast and bringing Pablo and Dave onboard with Friends of the Program. We’ll continue to experiment with bonus podcast ideas in the near future, so stay tuned.

We’ve also grown in terms of our subscriber base. Our first two years at The Observer blew away all of our expectations. The third year was much more about maintaining our core readership and making modest gains through all the ups and downs of the Auburn football and basketball seasons.

The fact that I don’t have to worry about clicks or meeting some sort of subscriber quota like I had at my previous employers is so freeing. We’re perfectly happy with what we’ve got and what we’ll continue to get.

(Again: Death to the absurd corporate concept of exponential growth, which has already killed a lot of sports media.)

But we definitely are looking to add more subscribers. There’s plenty of room here.

Each year around this time, we usually have some sort of special for new subscribers. This fall camp — with all the excitement continuing to rise from Auburn’s impressive offseason — will be no different.

From now until Sept. 1, you can subscribe to The Auburn Observer with our Season 4 Special: $4 a month for your first 12 months, or $40 for an entire year.

Our normal rate is $6/month or $60/year, but we’re going to put our 4s up in the air for the next month. You can subscribe to us at a monthly rate for $4 a month, and you’ll keep that rate for up to 12 months.

Or, you could go ahead and pay $40 and get a full year — meaning you’ll essentially get two months free. (And they’ll be June and July, which are usually the least busy times on the calendar for us.)

This offer applies to gift subscriptions and group subscriptions. If you want to buy a sub for your Auburn-loving friend or family member, this is the time to do it. If you want to buy more than one subscription, this is also the time to do it.

All you have to do is click on either of those orange buttons above to get started. No promo code, no special link. This deal will be available everywhere on our site.

Once your subscription is paid, every single thing we do — newsletters and podcasts — will get sent to your email inbox, paywall-free. You will also have access to our entire back catalog of newsletters and podcast episodes, including my breakdowns of new 5-stars Perry Thompson and Demarcus Riddick, plus FOTP’s recent Auburn football wins and losses draft.

With Auburn football switching most of its fall practices to the mornings, we’ll have our Observations go up a little later on the days we have availability. My hope is that you’ll have everything you need to know from practice this Thursday and Friday in your inboxes by noon CT.

This should be an entertaining season of Auburn football, which will bleed right into another entertaining season of Auburn men’s basketball. We’ve got some fun ideas for the future, and we’ll keep giving you our go-to pieces like Observations and Aubserver Mailbags, as well as game preview and recap podcast episodes.

Thanks as always for reading, listening and supporting The Auburn Observer.

I’m still working on the sticker designs. And, if you have any merch ideas, let me know.