Came across this video today:
It mentions something I've not heard of before, but long suspected - that the mainstream media manipulate web traffic reporting services to make themselves appear bigger and get more advertising and investment. In the video it's presented that Vice fakes half of it's traffic.
There are a number of services like Quantcast that show sites with very high traffic; and I can't imagine them with that much traffic. Are Yelp and Buzzfeed really two of the most popular sites in the US? When you add up the mainstream (left) and conservative sites you're looking at a giant skew to readership of left-leaning sites. It doesn't make sense.
More evidence came to light when after the 2016 US Presidential election The BBC, The Guardian, The New York Post and The Washington Post were all reporting dramatically increased traffic from Alexa. You can see on Archive.org that more than half this traffic was from China. Given that amount of traffic was coming from China, it suggests all the sites were actually experiencing a considerable decline. After TGP article Alexa obviously manually edited the stats and not long after that the traffic began to rise again - that time with likely more expensive US bot traffic.
Vice seems to be in a bad way financially, having had about $1 billion poured into it since 2015, including money from Soros.
Salon has just been saved from the abbyss after it was revealed it's been running at a loss for years, propped up by big money.
The Guardian had been losing huge amounts of cash for years and was only brought into the black by huge layoffs.
Then you have The Wasington Post and The New York Time bankrolled by billionaires. I'm sure there is more.
Here is a roundup of layoffs this year:
New York Mag: 32 jobs
Elle Canada & family: 28
Vice: 250
Verizon (Yahoo, AOL, HuffPost): 800
BuzzFeed: 200 (what makes it sweeter is they are accused of bumping off victims)
Condé Nast (globohomo central): 10
2018:
Vox: 50
2017:
ESPN: 150
Buzzfeed: 100
Guardian: 290
New York Times: 109
I'm sure there's more.
Any insights to these men behind the curtain?
It mentions something I've not heard of before, but long suspected - that the mainstream media manipulate web traffic reporting services to make themselves appear bigger and get more advertising and investment. In the video it's presented that Vice fakes half of it's traffic.
There are a number of services like Quantcast that show sites with very high traffic; and I can't imagine them with that much traffic. Are Yelp and Buzzfeed really two of the most popular sites in the US? When you add up the mainstream (left) and conservative sites you're looking at a giant skew to readership of left-leaning sites. It doesn't make sense.
More evidence came to light when after the 2016 US Presidential election The BBC, The Guardian, The New York Post and The Washington Post were all reporting dramatically increased traffic from Alexa. You can see on Archive.org that more than half this traffic was from China. Given that amount of traffic was coming from China, it suggests all the sites were actually experiencing a considerable decline. After TGP article Alexa obviously manually edited the stats and not long after that the traffic began to rise again - that time with likely more expensive US bot traffic.
Vice seems to be in a bad way financially, having had about $1 billion poured into it since 2015, including money from Soros.
Salon has just been saved from the abbyss after it was revealed it's been running at a loss for years, propped up by big money.
The Guardian had been losing huge amounts of cash for years and was only brought into the black by huge layoffs.
Then you have The Wasington Post and The New York Time bankrolled by billionaires. I'm sure there is more.
Here is a roundup of layoffs this year:
New York Mag: 32 jobs
Elle Canada & family: 28
Vice: 250
Verizon (Yahoo, AOL, HuffPost): 800
BuzzFeed: 200 (what makes it sweeter is they are accused of bumping off victims)
Condé Nast (globohomo central): 10
2018:
Vox: 50
2017:
ESPN: 150
Buzzfeed: 100
Guardian: 290
New York Times: 109
I'm sure there's more.
Any insights to these men behind the curtain?