Hooray! Met Our Fifth Goal, and on to the Sixth: Expanding Our Reach

If you don’t need to be persuaded to give but simply have not had time, please go straight to our fundraiser page to chip in!

Thanks to your generous and speedy responses, we’ve hit our first five targets: funding essential tech plumbing, bonuses to our loyal guest writers (who given their expertise, dedication and caliber of their work, deserve more than meager standard writer pay levels), increasing staffing to provide for continued expanded Links; supporting the comments section; and providing the staffing to provide our 24/7 coverage without burning out of yours truly. Let me stress again: your donations have and continue to make all these critical items possible. And at 1138 donors, we’re exceeded our initial donor goal of 1100 contributors for this fundraiser. So we are raising our donor target to 1350!

Because this fundraiser is going well, we are including the goal of funding for expanding our reach. In this hostile environment for small independent sites, we need to be spending more time than we have to bring in new readers.

Our traffic is holding solid despite being downgraded in Google, like many independent websites like The Intercept, Truthdig, and Counterpunch, and facing the prospect of overt censorship and deplatforming for the heinous sin of pointing out that many studies and real-world evidence don’t support the strong claims made for the vaccines.

While the good news is we are holding our own, the bad news is that despite the fact that our content has only gotten better (and we think more relevant) over time, we are working harder than ever just to stay in place.

So whether you are able to contribute financially to this fundraiser or not, spreading the word about Naked Capitalism is also absolutely essential for us to continue to thrive. Encouraging people who might like our work to check out Naked Capitalism is critically important (as is chipping in via our fundraiser page if you haven’t had the time to do so already).

Readers keep sending us notes of gratitude along with their donations. For instance, from peon:

NC is my most trusted news source. In a time when most of the news has an agenda NC is priceless. Please accept my sincere thanks for the work the NC crew do.

And Ed M:

Your blog has totally changed my world view. I now see those who follow Fox/CNN/MSNBC as being part of their own pandemonium, most obvious with the Fox pandemonium since I am retired and mostly know older, often very conservative people. MSM silos, and pandemonium is perfect because outside of their personal life experiences people are like parrots in discussing issues. Granted, parrots are noisy all the time, so it’s a stretch – until people start talking about important issues.

It’s like nobody can remember history. “People have the memory of fruit flies” – Lambert

So what might help to increase visiblity? The first idea would be for Yves to take up some of the requests she gets to be interviewed in podcasts, which she has been unable to accept even when from allies like John Donlan of Radio War Nerd.

We wish we had the time to do podcasts of our own, but doing anything in addition to what we do now introduces a lot more complexity (for instance, podcasts require not just specialized equipment but sound editing, and so more people which means more people and tasks to supervise, which lands on Yves’ desk and takes time away from producing written content).

But we can’t be assured, even if we took up all the high quality interview opportunities that came across the transom, that they’d come up regularly enough to increase our visibility.

A second idea is to do more book reviews. They also take more time than regular posts and hence require more site resources but help with creating more visibility with other writers, who then might refer to or link to Naked Capitalism more often. And mind you, we don’t mean currying favor, a very un-NC thing to do. A sharp negative review of a deserving target often appeals to like-minded professional writers, even if the target takes umbrage.

And of course our regular readers enjoy a more varied post diet too.

Finally, Yves could also revive the offer to write for New York Magazine regularly, as often as twice a month.

We think this is an important defensive move given the increasing hostility of search engines and social media towards independent news sites.

In addition, those of you who encourage people you know to read the site might find an introduction first to a New York Magazine piece and then to the site can counter knee-jerk “what, a blog?” skepticism.

As you might appreciate, magazine articles take much more time to produce than a similar-length post at Naked Capitalism, due both to needing to change my voice for a different audience, to documenting sources for the fact-checking police, to working with an editor. The compensation isn’t enough to make up for the time I’d need for coverage by Lambert and Jerri-Lynn to make up for that.

We are setting a target of $9,500 for this goal and we are already $4,615 towards it. Notice we have kept this goal modest compared to the others.

If we wind up not using all the funds in the goal to help with various external visibility efforts, they will go to support more original reporting. So please, help us be even bigger and badder by going to the Tip Jar and giving as generously as you can! Whether $5 or $5,000. They all help us make this site hum.