Before It's News: clickbait or bastion of free speech?

Blogger is by far the biggest platform of its kind. I’ve been on it for eight years.

A few months after I fired up The View From Falling Downs, I got an email from someone at Before It’s News asking if they could “syndicate” my blog. I’d never heard of it. It looked to me like they “syndicated” damn near anything they could get their hands on, from corporate press releases to weather reports. Their business model, as far as I can tell, involves generating internet traffic to sell advertising. A lot of the stuff you’ll read there seems aimed at people who truly believe God anointed  Donald Trump to make America great again.

As my web traffic has been increasingly throttled by Google algorithms, I thought I’d take a look and see if anyone is reading my pithy insights at Before It’s News. I tallied up the total views for everything I wrote in September. Twenty-six posts on Blogger garnered a total of 312 views.

Only twenty-three of those made it onto Before It’s News. Maybe they’ve got algos too? But those twenty three posts got 1,837 views.

Twelve views per post on the biggest blogging platform in the world.

Eighty views per post on a fringe website.

That’s the power of the algorithm!