If you don’t need to be persuaded to give but simply have not had time, please go straight to our fundraiser page to chip in!
Thanks to your generous and prompt responses, we’ve 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.
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 more time than bringing in new readers.
Our traffic is holding solid despite repeatedly being downgraded in Google, like many independent websites like The Intercept, Truthdig, and Counterpunch, and facing the prospect of overt censorship and deplatforming for the heinous sins of questioning conventional narratives on major issues like the role of vaccines in fighting Covid and the progress of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
While we are holding our own, but even with our content has only been getting better (and we think more relevant) over time, we are working harder than ever just to stay in place.
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 keep sending us notes of appreciation along with their donations. For instance, from Dick S:
After much wandering, I have ended up in WA where I discovered naked capitalism around 2019.
n c quickly activated my realization that I failed to learn any economics at university. My mathematics and computer training then quickly convinced me that “mathematizing” economics is a foolish attempt to make econ look like a science. I have also used my training to show how the concept of AI is also a flim-flam attempt to simply justify a lot of complicated computer programming. This latter is well known by many working in the area, but is one more set of words to encourage grant money. PR is not the exclusive practice of celebreties and sports.
Growing old, discovering that there are many topics still of interest and skepticism have been encouraged by my reading of n c. I guess that I must now donate.
And madarka:
Just left my donation. NC is invaluable to me, I’ve been a regular reader since 2008, and this site’s relevance, quality and sheer prescience has only increased. My thanks to you all, Yves, Lambert and the mods. Maybe one day the stars will align and you’ll convene a meet up, like in the halcyon days of 2019.
And Jason D:
Thank you for many years of keeping me informed and connected to the wonderful community you have developed at Naked Capitalism.
So what might help to increase visibility? First would be for Yves to take more interview requests. Many of you did like our recent appearance on one of Gonzalo Lira’s Roundtables. However, Yves has been too often been unable to accept requests even when from allies like John Donlan of Radio War Nerd.
We wish we had the time to do podcasts of our own, but doing anything in addition to what we do now introduces a lot more complexity, which lands on Yves’ desk and takes time away from producing written content.
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.
Second 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.
Finally, Yves could also revive the offer to write for New York Magazine regularly, as often as twice a month.
We are setting a target of $10,500 for this goal and have just started on it, at $55 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!