Ron Unz inadvertently discovers why taking the ticket is a fool’s short-lived game:
Just over a month ago I was riding high and celebrating the steady upward progress of our alternative media webzine. I proudly noted that our traffic had now far surpassed that of the venerable New Republic, a century old publication that had spent decades as America’s most influential opinion magazine.
But pride goeth before the fall. At the end of April we were suddenly purged and banned by Facebook, the world’s leading social network. Not only was our rudimentary Facebook page removed, but every last item of our website content was declared illegal, with all past and future links eliminated. Any attempt to post our material on Facebook now produces an error message reporting that the content is “abusive” and a violation of “community standards.”
Although I personally don’t use Facebook or other social networks, billions of people do, and totally excluding all of our content from that important distribution channel eventually produced a 20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e} drop in our regular daily traffic, a serious blow that set us back many months.
Whatever they give you, they can – and they will – take away from you. And contra the backwards reasoning of the average conservative, the bigger you are, the more at risk you become. That’s why UATV’s Basic subscribers will all be receiving invitations to the new site today as well as why you will never see a Facebook page for UATV or a Facebook ad for it.
The good news for Mr. Unz is that only 20 percent of his audience was Facebook-based. He’s better off growing organically without it. After all, this blog is still averaging around 100k pageviews per day despite the best efforts of the social media mafia to deny it links.