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

Thanks to so many generous and speedy 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.

Your support of our “small donation” challenge pushed us over the top with our fifth goal, so now we are on to a new one, of expanding our reach, as in taking steps to attract new readers.

But we are still not where we need to be! We are still behind where we need to have enough cash in the till for the upcoming year. So please head to the Tip Jar to do your part.

Our average per donation is very healthy, but the total number of donations is seriously lagging. Having said that, we are at just under 1000 donations towards our initial target of 1100 and are increasing that goal to 1250. But in past years, we’ve hit that donor goal earlier.

So if you have not donated yet, please go immediately to the donation page and dig deep! Whatever you can give helps this site flourish!

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 bringing in new readers.

Our traffic is holding solid despite repeatedly Google downgrades, putting us in the ranks of independent websites like The Intercept, Truthdig, Jacobin, WSWS, and Counterpunch. The effort to engage in message control has become more intense this year. For instance, YouTube demonetized MintPress’ channel, and deleted former CIA analyst Larry Johnson’s channel. Meta banned The Cradle from Facebook, where it had had 107,000 followers. And that’s before getting to the FBI raid on Scott Ritter’s home, on the dubious grounds that he was an unregistered foreign agent, with their search and seizure going well beyond what the warrant allowed.

We have had quite a few readers say this year that the site keeps getting better. Yet traffic-wise, we are working harder than ever just to stay in place.

So what might help to increase visibility? Before we get to new things we can do, please consider sending friends, family, and colleagues the Naked Capitalism Songbooks as a teaser, particularly fans of pop music or those with a sardonic sense of humor. Get your copy of this year’s release here.

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 tell us how important Naked Capitalism is to them. For instance, from Lynn H:

Greetings from Portugal, Yves!

As I think you know I am a very long-time reader and I so value Naked Capitalism for the information and education that you provide and the sense of community (even for people like me who only lurk).

With the time difference, NC is no longer the first thing I read in the morning, but it continues to be the most important thing I read. So, I wait (impatiently!) to read the Daily Links at 12pm and the afternoon Watercooler at 7pm!

Thank you again for all of your hard work, and I also very much appreciate the efforts of Lambert, Nick, Conor and your moderators and the NC readers who contribute their knowledge. I simply don’t know where I would be without Naked Capitalism as a resource..

And Gerry Y:

I’ve been checking in with NC almost daily since +/-2007.

The best and most diverse: research, reporting, and comment section available on the web!!

Here’s hoping that NC continues for as long as possible.

Please pass on my deepest appreciation to you and all your staff who help make NC possible.

And Susan R:

A check is in the mail for $500. If my husband can subscribe to the paper addition of the New York Times for the Art, Entertainment and Food sections, I can match that with a contribution to Naked Capitalism for news and opinions we can use.

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.

Last year, your donations for this goal went to good use, but not exactly as intended. One of our big priorities was re-launching our newsletter, to somewhat expand the mailing list from current readers to potential and actual allies in the media and to make it look less homespun. We were about 80% of the way there when the effort was sidetracked with Yves having to deal with Google’s threat to demonetize some ads, which if not beaten back, would set the stage for more of the same. Even though this fundraiser is far and away our biggest source of income, we are so lean we can’t afford to lose any revenue source. Even though we were successful, thanks in no small measure to the help of Matt Taibbi, Rajiv Sethi, and our ad service.

So we’d like to get the new and improved newsletter done and launched.

A second approach 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.

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.

Third 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.

We are setting a target of $11,000 for this goal and have just started on it, at $985 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!