It’s been nearly a year since I last updated the SimilarWeb traffic metrics for our own webzine and eighty-odd others, so I spent a couple of hours doing that. Here’s the chart, showing the totals for July, ranked by total Pageviews. Most of the other websites listed are alternative outlets, but I also included a few mainstream ones for comparison purposes.

Overall, the results were quite encouraging, even surprisingly so, especially after I considered the shifts since the September 2022 totals.

Our Pageview totals had increased by about 50% in the last year, with hours spent on the website rising by 60%. Meanwhile, some of the largest websites had actually suffered considerable declines, with ZeroHedge losing one-third of its traffic while InfoWars and The Daily Stormer both declined almost 40%, hardly surprising given the massive campaign of suppression against them. But the traffic to many other websites dropped as well, and as a consequence, we rose from the 17th spot on this particular list to the 9th, vying with Reason Magazine in total Pageviews and easily exceeding it in hours spent.

Some of the other comparisons were equally remarkable. Last year we had less than one-quarter the traffic of National Review and less than one-third that of The Daily Caller; but the combination of their declines and our rise has now given us nearly half their monthly traffic in each case. I’d certainly never expected we’d reach such a large fraction of the readership at either of those two large mainstream conservative publications.

Similarly, I was quite surprised to see that we’d pulled far ahead of such an influential establishmentarian outlet as Foreign Policy, while also getting far more Pageviews than the combined total for The New Republic and The Nation, two of America’s oldest publications, whose histories stretch back more than a century. And We’re now getting roughly four times the traffic of either The American Conservative or CounterPunch, while accumulating seven times the hours spent at the former.

Some of my remarks from last year are still just as relevant today and worth repeating:

Moreover, we have achieved this success despite the severe handicap of being banned by Facebook and having all our pages deranked by Google, with those twin gatekeepers of the global Internet thus doing whatever they can to prevent readers from finding our material.

But for me, the sweetest results came when I noticed our performance relative to that of a publication closely associated with a different Tech titan, a webzine launched almost simultaneously with our own but possessing vastly greater financial and professional resources.

Co-founded by renowned investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and backed by a pledge of enormous financial support by multi-billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the Intercept seemed likely to transform global journalism, but such was not the case.

The inputs were certainly enormous. According to the Form 990 filings, during the years 2013 to 2020, the publication absorbed almost $160 million, and with annual expenses recently running nearly $30 million per year, the aggregate total is now probably north of $200 million, an astonishing amount of money for a webzine.

Yet by the time of Greenwald’s angry resignation in October 2020, I was shocked to discover that the readership of the Intercept was only 50% greater than ours. That advantage had dropped to just 8% by January of this year, and today our traffic is more than 20% greater. Our own publication has always been run on a shoe-string, and it’s heartening to see that offering controversial, interesting content may achieve results better than that produced by an all-star team of journalists backed by an ocean of funding.

The only difference from last year is the rise in our readership combined with the continuing decline in that of the Intercept means that our monthly traffic is now more than twice theirs; meanwhile their $30 million in ongoing annual expenditures has boosted their total sunk costs to well over $200 million, an absolutely astonishing figure for a publication that these days apparently attracts far fewer readers than some one-man blogsites.

These recent readership numbers are so strong that although SimilarWeb is the leading source of web traffic metrics, I’m not sure I really believe that they’re correct. It’s also very possible that July was an unusually strong month, unlikely to be repeated.

Indeed, our numbers would have been substantially boosted by my recent trilogy of lengthy World War II pieces, the first of which attracted more early readership than almost anything else previously published on this website while doing better than any article I’d published in the last decade.

Finally, I’ve also done several recent podcast interviews in the last couple of weeks, all of which seemed to go well.

Michael Rectenwald Podcast • American Pravda • July 31, 2023 • 1hr 44m

Patrick Casey • Hidden History of Affirmative Action • August 10, 2023 • 1hr 55m

Michael Farris Podcast • RFK Jr. on JFK Assassination • August 1, 2023 • 1hr 6m

Video Link

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