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The Italians have a saying that revenge is like dessert, it is best served cold. Now, I am not saying that this post is about revenge, yet individuals not properly formed in the Catholic Tradition can be excused for thinking otherwise. 😉
In today’s post, we return to our VIRTUAL REALITY theme. This post is in essence a confirmation of the accuracy of our objective analytical template and specifically our Pierce/Ockham Pragmatic Methodology. (see here) While reading the below, please keep in mind that this “victory lap” should to seen as being performed with the utmost Catholic humility.
We begin over at the Mundabor blog and his post titled Bye Bye, Crux (see here). This post deals with the news that the New York Time/Boston Globe has pulled financial backing from the “c”atholic in name only (CINO) magazine Crux. (see here) The key takeaway from Mundabor’s observation is the following:
“Crux had a huge problem from the start. It was the attempt to create a Catholic publication made by people who don’t believe in Catholicism. It’s not that easy.”
This above conclusion passes the Numquam Ponenda est Pluralitas Sine Necessitate smell test.
Furthermore, I would add that Crux had a far greater flaw. That flaw can be summed up as follows: Curx existed in a VIRTUAL REALITY. But more about that below.
The reason that I am bringing this matter to your attention is that it was exactly one year ago that your humble blogger noticed something… as the expression goes, “smelling rotten in the state of Denmark”, with respect to Crux’s website. The reason that this blog got involved in this matter was due to a disparaging post made regarding the Pew Sitter Catholic news aggregator by one of Crux’s contributors. Here is how this disparaging remark was phrased:
“”PewSitter is small fry. It’s a tempest in a teapot!” you might protest, but what the furor over the PewSitter headline reveals is that American Catholicism is divided as never before. Some conservatives who feel threatened by Pope Francis have retreated into a right-wing, paranoid enclave from which they broadcast panicked videos, sarcastic blog posts, and uber-orthodox traditionalist jeremiads.”
Here is the skinny about what our methodology uncovered about Crux’s online presence.
In our post titled Who You Calling “Small Fry”? (see here) we observed and then went on to analyze, an anomaly with respect to a poll put up at the Crux website.The reason that this poll interested us is that we could not find any objective data with respect to the number of unique visitors nor site visits on the Crux portal. This poll also was noticed by another blogger, Fr. Z., and he asked his visitors to go over to Crux and vote. What was of interest to your’s truly was the fact that Fr. Z’s blog does have objective data points from which one can extrapolate the data which interested yours truly. Furthermore, the results generated by the “Fr. Z voting bloc”, in just the first few hours, provide us with a window into the “real traffic” at the Crux’s website.
What was of particular interest to us was that in the matter of a few hours, the “Fr. Z. bloc” was able to complete change the results of the poll. Here is the table that we put up to support our contention:
In other words, the number of Fr. Z’s voters that went across and voted, were able to completely dominate the Crux visitors who voted.
This observation led to the conclusion that the number of Fr. Z’s visitors must be vastly greater than the number of Crux visitors since Fr. Z’s. visitors were able to completely reverse in a very significant manner the initial results of the Crux poll.
Since Fr.Z’s website contained information in the form of data points that allowed us to gauge with a very high degree of certainty, the number of visitors to his blog, we were able then to extrapolate what the “most likely” number of visitors to the Crux website could be. Once again, this information was not provided by Crux itself on its website. On the basis of our analysis, we determined that the number of unique visitors to the Crux website in March of 2015 was in the neighborhood of 7500 daily. In turn, the number of visitors to the Pew Sitter website was 17,785 in that same time period.
Which led us to conclude the following:
If the above calculations are a true reflection of the daily readership of this website that is owned by the New York Times and Boston Globe HUGE media conglomerate, and if this website is generating the above extrapolated level of traffic, than we are not dealing here with an artificially created “alternative reality” but rather with an entirely different animal; what we are dealing with in this case is nothing short of a…
VIRTUAL REALITY
However, this is not the end of the story. In the comment box, your humble blogger received a message that our analysis could be inaccurate. Here is what the commentor “Foolishness” wrote:
“You can find objective website traffic rankings through alexa.com and if you register, (you can do that for free), you can do site comparisons and they will provide a convenient little graph so you can see how pewsitter,com, Father Z’s blog, and Cruxnow.com compare. :Last i checked Crux is getting more traffic on the web than either, but far less than the solid pro-life LifeSiteNews.com.” (original text)
So we revisited that matter in a follow up post titled Rise of the Machines – “Small Fry” Revisited (see here). The reason we did this was, as we explained:
“So naturally, since this blog is the Catholic blog of a Catholic blogger, who believes in a Catholic God, triumphalist doctrinal certainty, including but not limited to the Eight Commandant and “objective truth”, a follow-up post was in order. Therefore, not wanting to spend the rest of eternity in … ahammmm, I quickly went to the alexa.com website, registered and pulled up the websites in question to check out if my initial observations were correct.”
And after taking into account all this new information, we still concluded that our original analysis was OBJECTIVELY CORRECT.
Here is how we concluded this post:
Which brings this blogger back to the “composition of visitor/voter” issue. After the above evidence is examined, it is still highly likely that the original results were accurate, under a slight correction to the definition of our assumption.
And how did we explain the disparity between Crux, who was rated as the 15,769th website in popularity in the US, according to Alexa Traffic Rankings, while Fr. Z was 23,187th and Pew Sitter was a distant third at 69,047th? Here is what we wrote:
From today’s analysis, it would appear that the “offensive NYT/BG” website has approximately ≈2000 legitimate voting visitors for every ≈2900 visitors to Fr. Z’s blog that vote in his polls.
As far as the rest of the traffic to the “offensive” NYT/BG website, hard to say who or what they are.
Could be robots for all we know.
And this is how we left off the subject matter.
Back to this past weekend, via the Mundabor website, and the announcement that the NYT/Boston Globe were pulling the figurative plug on Crux, i.e. terminating its financial support for Crux magazine. Here is the passage: (see here)
Eighteen months later, The Boston Globe has bailed. In a letter to staffers, the Globe’s editor Brian McGrory announced that the paper is shutting down the vertical on April 1st, a move which will involve two to three editorial layoffs and one business layoff, according to a spokesperson.
And this is the end of the story.
Oh, OMT, it was not Pew Sitter but Crux who was the “Small Fry”!
Concluding, with respect to the commentary on this sad state of affairs, not to mention waisted time and effort, and the needless cash burn, Mundabor nails it.
With respect to the bigger picture, i.e the OBJECTIVE REALITY behind the Crux venture,we knew that there was something “horribly wrong” with Crux, their business model and their performance. We knew this as early as 6 months after their launch. The only question still open as of the March 2015 analysis was this:
How long will the HUGE news conglomerate New York Times/Boston Globe keep funding this losing venture?
And now we can also answer this question definitively: 18 months.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, says I!
The Deus Ex Machina Blog 
I actually wouldn’t doubt that CRUX gets a fair bit more traffic than Pewsitter – or at least, I am open to the possibility that they do.
Unlike Pewsitter, however, CRUX has a much, much bigger institutional footprint to sustain. They have journalists and staff to pay; office space to pay for. Pewsitter by contrast has almost no overhead, near as I can tell.
The GLOBE built a business model that assumed they could sustain a full-fledged Catholic news media outlet with adequate advertising. As it turns out, that business model did not play out. We don’t know the full reasons why, but it sounds like the ad dollars were not what they expected. Perhaps they just had a poor sales staff, but more likely, there just isn’t the interest by major advertisers in doing any serious advertising at CRUX. I think you’re right to zero in on traffic, Sarmaticus – while Alexa may not be an accurate gauge here, the hard reality is that advertisers at this point are not going to buy in if you can’t show the traffic.
So why was their traffic not as high as hoped? Yes, they’re a liberal “virtual reality” which is less likely to be trusted or visited by enough of the most serious Catholics. But there’s a cautionary tale here, too: It is not at all clear that a highly orthodox, traditional-friendly news site comparable to CRUX would have survived, either. The hard reality is that the Catholic Church in much of the U.S. is in rapid demographic decline – more rapid than most people realize (or chanceries want to admit). In fact, someone who did some market research on this a couple years ago ended up concluding that the number serious Catholics who actually sink significant time and resources into purchasing Catholic paraphernalia probably amounts to no more than a couple million people in the U.S. Out of those two million, there’s probably not above a couple hundred thousand traditionalists, even on a broad definition. Out of 70 plus million American Catholics, that ain’t much.
I wish we *did* have a first rate, professional *orthodox* Catholic news outlet in this country. Unfortunately, we really don’t. The Register really doesn’t count. EWTN does a passable imitation as far as broadcast media is concerned, but for digital/print, it’s thin pickings out there….lots of blogs, a few aggregators, the diocesan newspapers, some news services, but otherwise…
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HI Richard:
Thanks for your input.
Yes agree with what you write.
What I found interesting, and the reason that I wrote my posts was due to Crux initiating a fight with Pew Sitter.
I understand that we are dealing with apples (news aggregator) and oranges (industry publications – Crux and Fr. Z.) and that site visits are treated differently.
However, what I found odd was that… what I would call the “active reader” was absent from Crux’s visitors “composition”.
If you look at the linked Atlantic post, Allen states that he had 1m views monthly. This is not a lot for a major news organization with their footprint as you rightly observed. Yet the even worse news is that “whoever” or “whatever” generated their site visits did not venture to interact on it. I find it hard to believe that someone who comes onto a religious portal would not want to engage in polls put up on that site. At least/worst, interact in a similar percentage to those who visit Fr. Z blog. The first thing that comes to mind in this case was “Indonesian click farms”.
And when taking into account how Fr. Z’s visitors manhandled the Crux poll, the inferences draw themselves out automatically.
As to your point about a “first rate” professional orthodox Catholic news outlet, I think that Catholic population is too fractured in (small) part, and too indifferent in (larger) part to make this a sustainable venture.
But I guess we will see how this “new” Crux with the KofC sponsorship works out.
S.A.
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“I think that Catholic population is too fractured in (small) part, and too indifferent in (larger) part to make this a sustainable venture.”
Perhaps. Or at least, not on anything like the same business model as CRUX. Either that, or we get the KofC willing to run it at a loss.
It is a shame, because I would *like* to have a first rate outfit of journalists who are ALSO reasonably orthodox covering the Church in the U.S.
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The commenter “Foolishness” is a journalist for the Canadian Catholic Press, our “official” catholic press, and is very sympathetic to liberals, likes too play both sides, etc. Thusly, to place your statistical analysis into question with a comment as such is not a surprise. Have to maintain the narrative.
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Hi:
Yes, I am aware of this fact. I got the impression that she is a bit confused. Need to pray for her so that she will find the “path of light”.
S.A.
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Excellent post, as always.
I also note that Alexa is little better than a fraud. Their calculation system is made so, that if you have Alexa on your site it will let you slowly but steadily “go up” in the ranking. I have made this observation a couple of times. Then I have stopped using Alexa. Basically, is a system of self-promotion of those who use it.
M
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HI:
In the follow-up post to the original, I looked at the results that Alexa was showing and they were not credible. The math speaks for itself.
I inferred that Crux was using “click farms” somewhere in the Far East to generate traffic. It would explain why they had “higher” views, but those views were not translating into poll participants.
But either way you slice it, the site was a fraud. And the real “God of surprises” finally put it out of it’s misery. 🙂
SA
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This is an amazing post. I am new to the series of “Small Fry” posts but the extrapolation is quite impressive, and the conclusions are right on. congrats on this post
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It was one of those things that was begging to be done.
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