Counter-Currents/North American New Right Newsletter: May 2011

[1]1,806 words

Dear Friends,

This is an exciting time. Counter-Currents/North American New Right is approaching our first birthday. June 11, 2010 is the day we first went online.

I am happy to announce that this month there’s good news . . .  and more good news.

1. Our Blog

In May, we added 68 posts to the website (the exact number we added last month), for a total of 877 posts since going online on June 11, 2010. We also added just under 600 new comments in May (just under what we added last month). 

2. Our Readership and Web Traffic

After a decline in traffic in April, we experienced a sharp upsurge in May, making May our best month ever. Our full traffic statistics are printed below, but here is a quick summary: In May, we had 78,103 visits (up 20,066 from 58,037 in April, a huge increase of 34.57%). We had 36,596 unique visitors (up 16,505 from 20,091 in March — this is an even bigger increase of 82.15%). These visitors looked at 274,841 pages (which is up 51,550 from 223,291 pages in April, an increase of 23%).

Our visitors racked up 1,334,472 “hits” (which is down from 2,729,449 in April, a decrease of about 50%). Our bandwidth usage also went down from  54.65 gigabytes to 47.59.

Month Unique Visitors Number of Visits Pages Viewed “Hits” Bandwidth
June 6,145 10,328 70,732 200,824 6.08 GB
July 9,387 17,329 119,254 348,172 10.01 GB
August 12,174 22,348 93,379 333,614 10.17 GB
September 17,063 34,510 147,051 580,550 16.39 GB
October 17,848 35,921 140,365 611,367 17.93 GB
November 26,054 48,336 171,833 915,553 26.39 GB
December 26,161 50,975 192,905 1,101,829 27.79 GB
January 28,583 60,005 198,249 1,736,067 34.06 GB
February 29,737 61,519 213,121 2,081,558 40.13 GB
March 29,768 62,077 220,053 2,485,001 52.21 GB
April 20,091 58,037 223,291 2,729,449 54.65 GB
May 36,596 78,103 274,841 1,334,472 47.59 GB

What explains all of these changes?

First, the amount of posts and comments remained constant from April to May. Since editorial input is my department, I really can’t take credit for the changes — although my two very topical articles on the death of Osama Bin Laden might have brought new readers. The real credit, however, has to go to Michael Polignano, our Webmaster, as well as to Google and Bing.

Mike’s contribution was to speed up the site considerably by hosting a lot of our data on other servers, a very cheap method which cut the number of “hits” to our web hosting company in half even as the number of readers was considerably growing. This meant that the site was faster and easier to navigate and that alone probably made it more appealing to readers and search engines. This is why our “hits” and “bandwidth” usage were down last month even though our traffic was up.

Search engines like Google and Bing also provided a huge amount of our new traffic. This might have been facilitated by Mike’s performance upgrades. But another factor, I am sure, is that May was term paper time. I believe that a lot of our new traffic came from college students doing research online and encountering Counter-Currents through search engine results. This is borne out by our top ten articles for May.

3. May’s Top Ten Articles (with date of publication and number of readers)

  • Irmin Vinson, “Some Thoughts on Hitler,” April 20, 2011: 8,307
  • Daniel Michaels, “Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe,” April 21, 2011: 4,606
  • Gregory Hood, Review of Scarface, February 27, 2011: 2,131
  • Vic Olvir, “Sylvia Plath: Stasis in Darkness,” November 9, 2010: 1,952
  • Greg Johnson, Review of Jared Taylor’s White Identity, May 13, 2011: 1,950
  • Greg Johnson, “The Woman Question in White Nationalism,” May 25, 2011: 1,912
  • Greg Johnson, “Murder Inc.,” May 1, 2011: 1,906
  • Andrew Hamilton, “The Courage of Jodi Foster,” May 16, 2011: 1,849
  • Greg Johnson, “Osama Bin Laden Really is Dead,” May 4,2011: 1,831
  • Amanda Bradley, Review of Harold Covington’s The Stars In Their Path, May 5, 2011: 1,780

The top four articles were published in previous months, one of them last November. Our traffic data indicate that our traffic to these pieces is coming from search engines, not links on other websites.

[2]4. Our Newest Title

Our fifth book, the new edition of Ward Kendall’s dystopian science-fiction novel Hold Back This Day is now in print. Alex Kurtagic gave it a glowing review at The Occidental Observer, and we are now lining up interviews with Ward Kendall and other reviews. You can order Hold Back This Day from Amazon.com or directly from Counter-Currents by clicking here [3].

5. Our Next Title

Our next title to go to press is Collin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods: Essays on Paganism in a God-Forsaken World. This volume contains nine essays by Collin Cleary plus my own Editor’s Introduction. Seven of the essays have been previously published in Tyr and Runa, but two of them contain substantial additional material omitted from Tyr. Two additional essays have not appeared in print before. This collection clearly demonstrates that Collin Cleary is one of the most original and important thinkers in the neo-pagan movement.

We plan to send Summoning the Gods to press before June 11 and have it in print in early July.

After the Cleary book goes to press and we pass our first anniversary, I will send the first volume of North American New Right to the printers. North American New Right is our annual print journal that contains our best articles from each year. Its purpose is to provide an outlet for longer, scholarly articles and reviews that are best read in print rather than online.

Like all of our books, North American New Right will be published in hardcover and paperback, but the hardcover edition will only be available to our “Vanguardists” — those who donate $120 or more per year to Counter-Currents.

Also in the works are books by Kerry Bolton, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Edmund Connelly, and Trevor Lynch, plus new titles from Michael O’Meara and Greg Johnson.

6. I Continue to Write

In addition to my editorial work, I personally wrote 11 new posts in May, six of them quite substantial (for a total of 91), and I did 2 new translations (for a total of 41).

7. Our Articles Continue to be Reprinted

In May, 11 more of our articles were published on Robert Steuckers’ Euro-Synergies [4], the leading European New Right blog. A total of 102 articles have now been reprinted at Euro-Synergies, more than 10% of our total output of 877 posts. For a full report, click here [5].

Euro-Synergies, furthermore, is not the only site reprinting our material. See also The West’s Darkest Hour [6] and Thoughts Against Time [7].

10. Our Articles Continue to be Translated

In May, 4 more translations of articles from Counter-Currents appeared in translation, and others may well be out there. We now count 75 translations into German, Russian, Swedish, and Czech. For a full report, click here [8]. We would love to encourage more translations. Please contact us if you would like to translate material for Counter-Currents.

Since websites come and go, and we do not want these translations to be lost, we are continuing to bring these translations online here. On the right hand sidebar of this site, below the heading English Translations, you will find the heading Other Translations, with subheadings by language. Eventually, all foreign language versions of Counter-Currents articles will be archived here.

11. Our First Anniversary

Our first anniversary is approaching on June 11, and we will have a lot of accomplishments to brag about, a lot of plans to roll out for our second year, and yes, we will be launching a fund-raising drive. But why wait until the 11th? Give today.

There are now 31 individuals making monthly donations to Counter-Currents, up from 29 last month, and ten additional donors have sent non-recurring donations. That is 41 people. Thank you for helping us to survive and grow.

The 41 individuals who have made donations to Counter-Currents are just over 10% of the people who are on this mailing list, and the mailing list is a small fraction of our regular readers. We call the group of people who have made, or pledged to make, donations of $120 or more in a year “the Vanguard”: they went first. They did not wait to follow others. There are 35 so far, which is less than 10% of the 366 people on this list.

If you have been thinking about supporting our efforts, now is the time to begin.

You can make two different types of donations:

  • A single donation of any size.
  • A recurring donation of any size.

To make a donation, click https://counter-currents.com/donate/ [9]

One incentive to join the Vanguard is that we have decided to limit the deluxe hardcover edition of our annual journal North American New Right to 200 numbered copies, which will be available only to Vanguard members, i.e., donors who give $120 or more in a given year, either in lump sums or by monthly donations.

The donation page also explains other incentives available to monthly donors: https://counter-currents.com/donate/ [9]

12. The Amazon.com Affiliate Program

Wouldn’t it be great if you could choose where your sales taxes go? Well, Amazon.com’s Affiliate Program allows you to earmark 7% of your Amazon purchases to Counter-Currents at no additional cost to you. That is about the average sales tax that Americans pay.

That’s why we are so grateful to all of you who have been using Counter-Currents affiliate links to make your purchases at Amazon.com.

In April, 150 items were ordered this way, and Counter-Currents received just over $233 in commissions, 7% of the purchase price. This is particularly impressive, given that only a small percentage of our readers are actually using these linksI would estimate fewer than 10% of the people on this newsletter list. (This is just a guess. Amazon.com protects your privacy even when you buy through an affiliate link.) If everyone reading this were to take part in this program, our support would grow considerably.

If you have Amazon.com bookmarked on your computer, click the following link and then replace your bookmark with the page that appears. This will allow you to go directly to Amazon.com, and Counter-Currents will receive the same commission.

http://www.amazon.com/b?_encoding=UTF8&site-redirect=&node=53&tag=thesavdevarc-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 [10]

This link takes you to the Non-Fiction Books page. For some reason, Amazon.com will not allow us to construct a link to their home page. Also, we cannot build links to Amazon.com stores outside the US. If there is a particular Amazon.com page to which you usually go first, email me [11] and let me know, and I will happily construct a custom affiliate link for you. It is that important that we make it easy for you to participate.

Note: The affiliate link gives Counter-Currents a commission on anything you buy on Amazon.com, on any page, so long as you enter Amazon through one of the links.

13. Our New Server

Because our previous web-hosting company suffered an attack [12] that briefly infected our website, we decided to move Counter-Currents to our own server. As of 10 p.m. PST on May 31, 2011, the changeover was complete. Our new server which will improve the speed of our site, increase our security, and give us plenty of room to grow. It is more expensive, but it is worth it. Our donors helped make it possible. Thank you.

14. Final Thoughts

As I said in my last newsletter, April was a cruel month. Our statistics wavered, but my faith that we are doing the right thing did not. I want to thank you for keeping faith as well. Now we are back on track.

Thank you again for your loyal readership and support.

Yours sincerely,

Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
& North American New Right