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

Special thanks to all of you who responded so quickly and generously to our red alert yesterday, “We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming for This Important Announcement” where we warned that we were so badly behind where we usually were in the fundraiser that I might have to take no pay for the upcoming 12 months. That is not sustainable and if that outcome came to pass, I would have to consider the dire outcome of radically restructuring or even shuttering the site in late 2024.

Many of you went quickly to the Tip Jar or sent e-mails pledging to send checks, some by readers with limited means who still very much want Naked Capitalism to thrive and prosper, some by the well off who made hefty gifts.

So we have now handsomely exceeded our original donor (now donations goal, since some have given twice) of 1100 donations, and are now at 1207. I am increasing our donor goal to 1350. Let’s see if we can now beat that.

Thanks to so many generous and prompt responses, we’ve now hit our first five targets: funding essential tech plumbing, bonuses to our loyal guest writers, increasing staffing for continued expanded Links; supporting the comments section; and providing the staffing of our 24/7 coverage without burning out the writing team. Let me stress again: your donations have and continue to make all these critical items possible.

But we are still not where we need to be! We are still behind, but not as alarmingly as before. So if you have not donated yet, please make a stop at the donation page and dig deep! Whatever you can give helps this site thrive!

As in recent years, we are including the goal of funding for expanding our reach. This is a hostile environment for small independent sites, so we need spend to more time than bringing in new readers.

Our traffic is holding solid despite repeatedly 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 sins of questioning conventional narratives on major issues like the role of vaccines in fighting Covid and the progress of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Even with our content has only been getting 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 thrive. Encouraging people who might like our work to check out Naked Capitalism is critically important (as is cchipping in via our fundraiser page if you haven’t had the time to do so already).

Readers sent us very emphatic messages about how important Naked Capitalism is to them. For instance, from John Z:

I cannot stand the idea that you might have to cut back. I would be lost without NC as it is my main source of sanity in this crazy world.

I can’t even talk to most of my friends and family about current events as they are captured by the mainstream narrative and are unwilling to investigate other points of view.

Thank you for all that you and the NC team do to make this world more understandable.

And Shelby H:

Still the best site on the net! Thanks for all you do – lighting a candle in the darkness ‘ we sure do need it…

And dftbs:

Thank you for all you and the team at NC do. While I have less time to be an active member of the community, your hard work is incredibly appreciated and I look forward to NC as now the 10th thing I do in the morning, after diapers and bottles and so on.

My best to you and the NC crew.

So what might help to increase visibility? Before we get to new things we can do, please consider using the Songbooks as a way to introduce people to Naked Capitalism, particularly fans of pop music or colleagues with a sardonic sense of humor. The overview and the pdfs are here.

First would be for Yves to take more interview requests. We too often have to turn them down because they come in too close to the “hit time” for me to be able to do them and not shirk off on posts.

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, 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.

Second would be 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 this is something our other accomplished writers could take up if they found a book that suited them.

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

Third, we could professionalize our newsletter (right now it is for regulars and has a homespun look) by changing to a slicker layout and/or possibly having a second leaner and slicker version. We currently use the newsletter as a loyalty-builder for established readers. We could build a second mailing list of potentially receptive candidates, with so-called influencers like columnists, journalists, and economists. For instance, we don’t send our newsletter to our MMT allies. So we need to build this list and upgrade the layout. If you have any newsletter layouts you like (spare and easy to read are best), please send an example with the subject line “Newsletter model” to yves-at-nakedcapitalism-dot-com

We are setting a target of $10,500 for this goal and have just started on it, at $1,155 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 keep this site humming!