Websites and money

It may be tacky to talk money the day before Christmas … so let’s talk money.

Long ago, in another galaxy, some of us decided we did not wish to get into this whole advertising/monetising thing because for a dissident political blogger, it’s fraught … and how. They control you once you’re on that bandwagon. We have no tip jar, no Paypal, no nuffink. We want no money.

How do OoL and our respective sites operate … after all, there are expenses you know? 

Well firstly, we use the free hosts ggl and WP, each of which has set, Woke rules and that’s another issue again. But overall, it’s still the better choice for now … tip jars and bloggers constantly moaning about money are just a bit offputting in my book, plus we’re then on the treadmill. And as for vlogs … I detest this constant subscribe and bell thing … if it’s prominent, that ding ding ding, I for one just click out … couldna be bothered.

However … and this is a big however … there are sites where the expenses are a bit beyond and Toby’s Daily Sceptic is one. He apologised, mentioned what Paypal had done to them (never to the Woke left of course), then came this, which perhaps needs to be read by onliners:

Second, an organisation called NewsGuard, which ranks websites according to how ‘safe’ they are for companies to advertise on (among other things), decided to downgrade the Daily Sceptic on the grounds that we frequently publish ‘misinformation’ about the Covid vaccines and climate change. I was sent a long email by an employee of the company, listing all the articles on the site that had been red-flagged by supposedly impartial ‘fact checking’ organisations – as well as NewsGuard’s own employees – and inviting me to mount a defence. 

Knowing how damaging a poor NewsGuard rating can be to a site’s ability to attract advertising – and this coincided with our decision to start selling ads on the site – I sent back a lengthy response in good faith, rebutting each of the fact-checks in turn, but saying I would link to them beneath the articles in question (as well as to our rebuttals). 

I duly spent a couple of days sticking ‘postscripts’ beneath the articles, as well as below some additional pieces NewsGuard hadn’t mentioned but which had also fallen foul of fact-checkers – and I let NewsGuard know about that, thinking it would be pleased. 

After all, I thought, it would be able to tell its big clients – which include Microsoft – how it had prompted a website that publishes ‘misinformation’ to include links to dozens of fact-checking websites.

Instead, NewsGuard wrote back to tell me it had downgraded the Daily Sceptic to 37.5 out of 100, about half the points it had before. The reason was because I hadn’t said beneath the articles that the content that had been identified by the fact-checkers as false was in fact false. 

My defence is that in every case the fact-checkers hadn’t red-flagged the articles in question because they contained factually inaccurate information; rather, they just disagreed with our interpretation of the data. But – as is common among fact-checkers, who are invariably Left-of-centre – they pretended none of this was up for debate and labelled our interpretation as ‘misinformation’. 

I explained all this to my NewsGuard correspondent but it didn’t cut any ice, presumably because he shares the same ideological biases as the fact-checkers. Its website now includes the following note about the Daily Sceptic: “Proceed with caution: This website violates basic journalistic standards.”

The American Institute of Economic Research, which published the Great Barrington Declaration, has had its own difficulties with NewsGuard, which Phil Magness, Director of Research and Education at AIER, labels a “propaganda entity”. Magness’s piece on NewsGuard and how it operates is well worth your time.

Let’s just say that I (for one again) take a decidedly jaundiced view of what is done to “us” but I can’t help wondering, all the same … how come it’s always globo-Woke running these things?  I mean, are we, the supposed arch-Capitalists, not the likely ones to be running such organisations?  

How come the left, which supposedly eschews Capitalism, is the side running the money-raking schemes?  In such an authoritarian manner?

Are we so incompetent?  Or just ideologically and money-grubbingly naive?