Tag: media

Clay Travis celebrates being bought by the Murdoch Cube:

So how do you get kids, who have tremendous advantages you didn’t have, to work hard and compete in the future? That’s what I’m going to spend the next 10-15 years working on with my boys. And it’s a new concern that I’m grappling with right now.

But after we signed the papers to sell OutKick, I turned to my wife and told her there would never be any kids, grandkids or great-grandkids who had to worry about money during our lifetimes. (They all may blow it after we die.) And that was a pretty incredible moment to have as parents, and hopefully future grandparents and great-grandparents too.

I also told my wife that since she’s going to live to be over 100 years old and I think I’m probably going to die around 51 years old from working too much that she’s going to be a really rich widow for a long time.

On the one hand, you can’t fault an entrepreneur for living the dream. Selling out is the original objective for most startups. On the other hand, if you’re preaching about the importance of independent media, being your own boss, and the evils of the corrupt mainstream media, then how on Earth can you justify selling out to the very people responsible for the problem in the first place? It’s not merely hypocritical, it’s outright wrong.

Anyhow, I thought this graphic below was an interesting comparison. Note that SimilarWeb seriously underestimates VP’s pageviews – which according to Google were over 8 million in January – but I assume it does the same for everyone, so it’s the relative aspect that matters. Fortunately, no media company is interesting in acquiring VP and I have absolutely no interest in taking any tickets. Among other things, I know how fast what appears to be “generational money” can vanish, even during the founder’s lifetime. You may be able to outkick the coverage, but once you take it, you can’t outkick the ticket.

Gandhi’s Law: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Drudge’s Addendum: After which they buy you out and undo everything you accomplished.

The Drudge Report’s drift from its original Internet rebelliousness took another step into mainstream irrelevance with a purge this week of links to pioneering conservative sites The Gateway Pundit, World Net Daily, Free Republic, Daily Wire and Western Journal, and Lucianne.com. Also reportedly gone are links to the late Rush Limbaugh’s site and columnist David Limbaugh.

Infowars and ZeroHedge survived the purge, however one report observed ZeroHedge was delisted for a time this week.

The Drudge Report has gone through a sharp change in recent years leading to speculation about whether reclusive owner-editor Matt Drudge secretly sold the site and relinquished control. Regardless, the site is not what it used to be and has lost substantial traffic.

Last month the Press Gazette reported the Drudge Report lost over forty percent of its traffic year-on-year from February 2020 to February 2021, “Influential conservative news aggregation site the Drudge Report saw its year-on-year visits fall by 41{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} from 71.4 million to 42.4 million.”

This is why the entrepreneur’s dream of being acquired or going public is so ultimately futile. Because unless you’re creating something purely for the love of filthy lucre, selling out is going to destroy what you created. The more effective and beautiful your creation, the more demand there will be to subvert it, if not entirely invert it.

Joseph Farah of WND saw it coming.

In the early days, WND had the distinguished honor of having more links back on Drudge than any other website. Joseph Farah was the second one. How did I achieve it way back in the ’90s? I simply asked for it. Yes, Drudge and I had a real relationship. That’s how I knew in recent years that it wasn’t Drudge in charge. He sold it – or sold out. 

Fortunately, there is still Infogalactic News for all your daily aggregated news links. 

Not bad, considering that unlike its traffic peers, this is just a blog that doesn’t even purport to be any sort of magazine or corporate endeavor. I’m a little surprised there are more visits here than to The Unz Review, given the higher pageviews there, but Ron features deeper and more varied content, so I suppose that makes sense. Anyhow, Ron is right to observe that while the converged social media companies can take a bite out of our traffic, they can’t stop the greater part of the signal.

Remember, the only thing you can be certain is false is what the mainstream media says is true. AC points out that the curious thing about DMX’s death isn’t that there were what appear to have been false claims made about him overdosing, but rather, the way the false narrative was instantly pushed worldwide.

Family member confirms rapper DMX was given the Covid vaccine days before his lethal heart attack, and say the heart attack that led to his death was not from a drug overdose. Even more amazing to me than the fact they killed him with their Umbrella Corporation vaccine, is the fact the Cabal propaganda machine, that is mainstream media reporters, immediately knew he had died from the vaccine, and knew they had to cover it up, and manufactured the drug overdose cover story (sullying his name in death, in the process, to save their mass experiment on the human race). Otherwise, if the story just came in he died from a heart attack, a clueless reporter would report he died from a heart attack alone, and then they’d have waited for more information. Ask yourself, how did the media know immediately that he was vaccinated, the heart attack was due to it, and they needed a made up cover story? 

It’s getting harder and harder for the media to deny the adverse effects of the not-vaccine, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

Spotify is slowly chipping away at Joe Rogan’s podcast library:

Months after random, woke, and easily replaceable Spotify employees threatened to strike until Joe Rogan is censored, the podcast service quietly removed 42 — 42! — “controversial” episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience.

According to Digital Music News, which first noticed the removals, Spotify took down a recent episode with Dave Asprey, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, who claims he will live to 180. I’m not sure if Asprey will make it to 180, but fans of JRE won’t get to hear his case anymore.

Other recently canceled episodes include interviews with Brian Redban, seven episodes with David Seaman, four episodes with comedian Chris D’Elia, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulous, and Eddie Bravo.

Taking the ticket will reliably result in regret of one sort or another. 

For the same reason that book reviews are not books. Ann Althouse turns off the comment section. Instapundit readers do not approve:

“Keep it the way it is” — that is, let comments flow into new posts unmoderated and deal with problems as they come up by deleting the trolls and the spam and so forth. I like the free flow too, but unlike the rest of you, I have to continually tend to the problems, and whenever I step away from the blog to go about my life in the material world, I have background static: I wonder what’s happening in the comments. Do I need to get in there and deal with a troll infestation? There was an open door to anyone in the world to make a mess of a place that I had bound myself to protect and that I had protected for 17 years.

I didn’t try to skew the poll by telling you about the burden it has become for me. I just wanted to see what you thought, and it’s nice to know that the majority of poll-takers were happy with the experience I had worked so hard to create. The behind-the-scenes work for me isn’t something that should concern you. Quite the opposite. The backstage labor isn’t part of the show. 

I was interested to see what people would say in the comments. That’s the up side of comments for me. I like to read what people have to say. I’m used to the sense of seeing the readers and feeling the camaraderie. But somewhere along the way in that thread that is now up over 600 comments — many of which are from me, responding to people — I could see that there is only one answer that gives me what I’m afraid I must take for myself. And that is the end of comments. 

I’ve chosen the least popular option — if you don’t count the “Something else,” which wasn’t any specific option at all. You can email me by clicking here. If you email me, you need to say if you don’t want to be quoted on the blog, because I may select quotes from the email to use in updates to the blog. But the freewheeling chattiness of the comments section is gone. I’m sad to lose it. 

In that long thread yesterday, a lot of people told me that they come to my blog not for me but for the comments. They seemed to think that argued in favor of my continuing to carry the burden of moderating the comments. It cut the other way. I didn’t plan for yesterday to be so momentous, but it was that argument — augmented with the threat that I would lose traffic, the all-important, precious traffic — that pushed me toward decisive action.

Althouse needn’t worry. A simple survey of the ratio of pageviews to comments demonstrates that only a tiny fraction of readers on any blog comment on it, which makes it particularly amusing to hear all the commenters talking about how the reason they go to a site is for the comments. That’s not true. There is a word for a site where people go just to read the comments, and that is Twitter. Except the reality is that they mostly go there to scream into the void, as most tweets are completely ignored by everyone else there.

The number of self-interested comments at Instapundit – nearly 700 – complaining about her decision are downright amusing. They appear to be mostly motivated by their sudden inability to force their Very Important Opinions on those who did not request them.

• The point of blogging is to offer the service of commentary. Blogger’s who turn off comments are forgetting why people came in the first place.
• she discontinued comments because they almost 100{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} disagree with her. If a site wont let me or others comment, I dont go there. I read sites not only for what the owner says, but to gauge opinion.
• Goodbye Althouse. No comments, no visit. The comments were the only attraction for me.
• Not going to Ann any more. I read her and the comments. Without the comments then there is only her, which is not enough for me to go there.
• Watch as her reader numbers decrease as her “community” becomes less interested in a one-sided interaction info/news resource that became just one more out of many. She could have easily chosen not to respond personally to comments that were always going to include voices that called her out for previous issues or disagreed with her current opinion. She is simply unwilling/unable to take that route, despite the simple fact that she herself knows and acknowledges that many of her readers come for the comments. For the interaction of other voices besides her own. Now she doesn’t have to deal with any criticism that she would ever have to respond to though. And really, that is the point. Is anyone supposed to have empathy for her situation? I do not feel any.
• Without comments you have an echo chamber.
• I went there FOR the comments. Went, past tense.
• Bumner. At her site in particular, the comments were as informative and entertaining as her posts- which tended to be very short. I wonder what the metrics say when a site gives up comments? I know I don’t frequent many sites that don’t allow comments. And my activity notably drops way off on a site that had comments and then drops them.
• The comments were always by far the best part of Althouse’s site. You didn’t miss much by skipping her posts and going straight to the comments. Hasn’t been much reason to go there for awhile, none now.
• Getting rid of comments will disappear readers almost as fast as putting it behind a paywall.

The media is systematically eliminating the ability to comment on their relentless propaganda:

As of Feb. 1, we are removing comments from most of Inquirer.com. Comments will still be available on Sports stories and our Inquirer Live events, and there will be other ways for people to engage with our journalism and our journalists, including our letters section, social media channels and other features that our readers have become accustomed to, as well as new capabilities that we’re developing.

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

It’s not just Inquirer staff who are disaffected by the comments on many stories. We routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating and detract from the journalism we publish.

Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.

For more than a decade, we’ve tried to improve the commenting climate on our sites. The goal has been to create a forum for a civil, open exchange of ideas where readers could offer relevant feedback and criticism of our work.

Over the years, we’ve invested in several methods to try and accomplish this. None of it has worked. The comments at the bottom of far too many Inquirer.com stories are toxic, and this has accelerated due to the mounting extremism and election denialism polluting the national discourse. You deserve better than that.

What’s telling about this is that large media organizations like the Inquirer could easily institute a system that would prevent trolling. For example, they could permit only actual subscribers to the physical newspaper to comment, just to suggest one of many possible solutions. Their real objection, of course, was their inability to control the comment narrative.

This isn’t to say that the constant trolling and hasbara isn’t a legitimate problem. It is a problem, though an easily solvable one. But the media has never been interested in anyone actually being able to talk back to them.

Regardless, this won’t affect their traffic at all. Commenters vastly overestimate their own significance, as they tend to make up less than one percent of the readership of any given Internet site. That’s why I find it amusing whenever I receive an email informing me that I should be concerned that some would-be commenter finds it impossible to leave his very important opinions here for our edification.

Piers Morgan understands the importance of not apologizing when you haven’t done anything wrong:

Meghan Markle wrote to ITV’s boss to complain about Piers Morgan hours before the Good Morning Britain co-host quit on the day the show scored its highest ever ratings and beat BBC Breakfast, it was revealed today.  

The Duchess of Sussex insists she was not upset that Mr Morgan said he ‘didn’t believe a word she said’ in her Oprah interview – but was worried about how his comments could affect people attempting to deal with their own mental health problems, an insider told the Press Association.

Standing firm today, Mr Morgan told reporters outside his West London home: ‘If I have to fall on my sword for expressing an honestly held opinion about Meghan Markle and that diatribe of bilge that she came out with in that interview, so be it.’   

On Monday Ms Markle went directly to ITV’s CEO Dame Carolyn McCall, the former boss of the left-wing Guardian newspaper, who signed off on the broadcaster’s £1million deal to show the Oprah interview and said yesterday they were ‘dealing with’ the GMB host.   

Mr Morgan is understood to have been ordered to apologise – but he refused and quit instead saying he had the right to tell viewers his ‘honestly held opinions’ and declaring: ‘Freedom of speech is a hill I’m happy to die on’.  

Good for him. The deceitful, grifting Hellmouth whore simply can’t bear to take any criticism whatsoever, and she has destroyed everything she touched with the exception of Suits, in which she was a tertiary and mostly irrelevant character. If he holds his ground, Morgan will end up coming out of this kerfluffle on top.

It’s rather amusing how the British press is having such a hard time figuring out why she hates the British Royal Family so much.

Meghan hates Princess Kate for the same reason every moderately attractive girl with ambitions of being the popular hot girl hates the beautiful head cheerleader. It’s nothing more than raw, unmitigated envy. Meghan can’t compete with Kate’s position, class, style, or popularity, and her genetics prevent her from ever being considered “an English Rose”, so naturally she hates the other woman with the passion of ten thousand burning hells.

Remember, the mainstream Narrative is always, Always, ALWAYS false:

Narrative 1: Dangerous stretch of roadway, lots of curves, lots of crashes.  FALSE

The first piece of physical evidence, consistent with a “loss of control” of the Hyundai is found on the center median strip separating the northbound lanes of Hawthorne from the southbound lanes.  Taking this as the first point where we can say that the collision sequence had begun, the approach to this location is more or less a straight shot for just under 900 feet.  The tip of the median is at the start of a long, gradual bend in the roadway to the right – though this bend has a critical speed in excess of 130 miles per hour (the maximum speed at which vehicles could, if they so desired, negotiate the turn without leaving yaw marks) and accordingly is not of the nature which would cause an operator to lose control of their vehicle. 

It should be mentioned that Hawthorne Boulevard northbound, in this immediate area, is on a downgrade which approaches 10{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08}.  This downgrade, while steep, can still be safely and easily navigated consistent with data from the California Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) – a Statewide database maintained by UC Berkeley – which shows that there were no other collisions for the 11 years prior to this one which occurred within approximately 0.5 miles of this location. 

I have no idea why they would lie about the crash or the danger of the roadway, nor do I particularly care how Tiger Woods elects to screw up his life again. I just wanted to point out that even with regards to something as seemingly unimportant and easy to verify as whether a stretch of road is dangerous or not is concerned, the mainstream Narrative is false.

Imagine what sort of lies they are telling you about the genuinely important stuff.

It’s amusing to see how the gammas in the media are resentful of the fact that people are beginning to understand what sigma males are:

This unresolvable friction — you have to realize your place on the ladder, but you are delusional if you put yourself outside and above it — is probably why the sigma offshoot has not achieved saturation. By providing an asterisk to the core dogma of dominance, it allows men to reframe antisocial tendencies as power rather than weakness. Texts like The Sigma Male Codex: Rules for the Sigma Male are ultra-flattering to the presumably sigma reader, telling him that he’s a deeply intelligent and effortlessly attractive guy… because he’s “the quietest man in the room,” “keeps a wall built up around him to keep certain people out and “would never dream of hanging out with a large group of males.”

It’s introversion and inaction rebranded as mysterious cool — the rōnin forging his path alone — whereas the rest of us see a loser who should get a life. Comparing yourself to John Wick, an action-movie assassin with a dead wife and the entire underworld trying to murder him for the full length of the franchise, shows a warped perspective at minimum.

In his heart of hearts, the red-pilled man doesn’t actually want to be an alpha. It’s too much bro performance, too many hours in the gym and at the office, too basic a profile. Therefore, he creates the inner world of the sigma — he is a unique and fearless Übermensch in his mind, and whether reality conforms to this projection is immaterial, as he can always convince himself it does.

You’d think that a sigma, allegedly uninterested in social class and convention, wouldn’t be this consumed with proving his freedom from these limitations; indeed, you might say that a true sigma is the man who has never heard of any of this cringe bullshit, as he’s happily off hiking in the desert or making experimental art or straight up fucking, and couldn’t possibly care besides. To judge by the internet, however, a sigma is a guy who huffs his own farts until they start to smell like transcendent wisdom, then tries to market this narcissism to the same pretentious twerps who were calling themselves “sapiosexuals” not long ago.

As should be more than obvious by my literally shutting down the blog that discussed these things and complete lack of effort to push anything related to the socio-sexual hierarchy on anyone, I wasn’t trying to market anything, let alone narcissism, when I categorized observable male behavior patterns. The SSH is nothing more than an organized set of observations that happens to permit one to usefully understand and anticipate the behavior of a wide variety of men. If one finds it useful, use it. If not, then don’t.

Furthermore, the point of defining the sigma male behavioral pattern was to highlight the obvious differences between two very different patterns that were both being identified as alpha by the more basic sexual hierarchy. It certainly wasn’t to give gammas, much less omegas, yet another avenue to indulge their delusional self-redefinitions.

And yes, getting one’s panties in a bunch over other people’s observations is quintessential gamma behavior. But then, if you’ve been reading here a while, you already knew that.