WUFYS hit piece on ZioPedia.org

Not sure I'd agree with you as I'm a member here in good standing and I had no part in any hit-piece as most members didn't, so to blame the forum for a single members post is a bit OTT imo.

with Ringo,...I mean Ognir.Your objection should be leveled at CoZ, not WUFYS, peace to you and your loved ones.

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To Jesus Through Mary

Andrew, may I question your figures? (I do not dispute them, I question them.)

You say you get 400,000 visits per month. That seems a bit remarkable.

One web tracking service, quantcast, says you get about 2,500 monthly uniques, whereas WUFYS gets over 14,000 uniques per month (“unique” meaning a direct click on your page, as opposed to links from some other web site).

That puts you (according to quantcast anyway) at a rank of 363,386, while WUFYS is ranked 113,248 – whatever the hell that means.

I don’t know if quantcast figures are accurate, but again, 400,000 seems remarkable.

You say your 2008 budget is 50,000 USD for part-time editors, translators, graphic designers, I.T. and legal costs.

Wow. They must really nail you “down under.” We have Arabic, French, and Spanish translators who work for $0.

I’m not attacking you. I support all genuine anti-zionists.

But please, you're among friends here.
__________________________________________

Thank you for contributing to WUFYS.

Please contribute more.

Your blog deserves a response, so here it is.

Contrary to what 'Crimes of Zion' said, there is still a large proportion of articles freely available. All articles unique to ZioPedia.org such as our editorial, encyclopedia, online books and Holocaust/Revisionism section are still free.

You're right, Andrew. Under the section 'Blog Topics' at your site, there are 17 subsections, and four of them are available subscription-free. I didn't click on all 17 links - I checked five or six, and assumed the whole lot was unavailable without subscription. That was sloppy of me, so I'm sorry about that.

As far as seeking the approval of authors to republish their articles is concerned, our policy is simple too: Whenever an article hasn't been submitted by the author himself, we publish it without seeking prior approval, but notify wherever possible the author. The reason for that approach is that 99% of authors are quite happy for us to republish their articles and we want to republish them while their still 'fresh', rather than waiting several days for a reply. In the rare event that an author prefers his/her articles not to appear on our site, we take them off immediately.

As I mentioned in the blog (or "hitpiece"), I'm more than happy to have my writings published far and wide, without permission or notification, as I'm sure the other bloggers here are. This is what I wrote with regard to that issue:

No one asked for permission to reproduce it - which is fine anyway, because I never would've withheld it - but it's kinda cheeky that they're trying to make money out of our blogs while denying us (and the people that we write this stuff for) the right to see it.

Actually, I was particularly happy to find my blog on your site, because as I say, I'm a bit of a fan. I didn't whinge about that. It was never an issue.

You again:

Until reading the 'Crimes of Zion' article, I wasn't even aware, that our contents management software has a 'tagged by Zionism' function, leave alone that it - incorrectly - quotes the poster rather than the author as the author of the article. This is the first time that this bug in our content management software has been brought to my attention.

I suspected it was no more than an error, so I'm cool with that explanation. I didn't accuse you of plagiarism or foul play. I didn't even put words of that nature in the tags. The word I used was "cheeky", and I went as far as to tag it with "naughty naughty". Really, I don't give a shit that you were mistakenly credited as the author of my blog on that particular page. It's the information therein being made available to as many people as possible that matters to me.

Towards the end of 2007, financial reasons forced upon me the difficult choice between switching to a subscription model or shutting down ZioPedia.org altogether. Running a media site with 400,000+ visitors per month requires more than just a free blog or a $10/month hosting account. Our budget for 2008 is 50,000 USD, to pay for part-time editors, translators, graphic designers, I.T. and legal costs, is only a fraction of the budgets of comparable sites such as Antiwar.com or Counterpunch.org. After much deliberation and soul searching, I reluctantly chose what I consider to be the lesser of two evils.

That sounds fair enough to me, in which case my remarks about your site having "gone all pussy" are a bit harsh. If you really do have to cover costs to the tune of US$50,000 and find that impossible to do without charging for subscription, I suppose you had no choice. It's just a shame that it's resulted in your material being made less available.

The Ziopedia.Org Now Sucks blog was never intended to be a "hitpiece", but you're right: it kinda did come out that way, now that I look at it from your point of view. Moreover, when you're a blogger here at WUFYS and you chat with the same few people on a daily basis in the comment threads, sometimes you forget that what you write and publish here is going out much further than just our internal little community. That might sound like bullshit, but it happens.

What I'm going to do is edit the blog to correct my error about the editorials, encyclopedia, online books and Holocaust/Revisionism section not being free, and clean up the language a bit as a gesture of apology. I do apologise for that error, and for the harsh language. It's not my intention to make enemies within the anti-Zionist movement - as far as I'm concerned, we're on the same side. You may have noticed that I defended your site when the comment was made that Ziopedia.Org has been "exposed" and is "controlled".

I won't delete the whole blog, out of respect for the posters who took the time to comment in the thread below it.

Cheers.

Andrew,
I must admit that I also find your claimed monthly user count for ZioPedia.org a little unbelievable, and also the $50,000 annual cost a more than a bit inflated, particularly considering that antiwar.com operate on approximately five times that amount and have a number of permanent staff writers to pay.

While more indicative than 100% accurate, the Alexa stats below show that WUFYS has considerably more traffic and a much higher reach than Ziopedia.org, and it operates on a standard hosting account little different from the one on which you run Ziopedia.org.

How you choose to run Ziopedia is your own business, and I am loathe to be critical, but when it comes to publishing the work of others and then charging for access to that work, it seems to me that the prudent thing to do would be to seek the permission of the authors first. I know that keeping a site like yours running requires treading a very fine line, but there is little point in alienating supporters and potential collaborators.

Daily Reach Comparison

Thanks, for posting at WUFYS.

I'm glad that you have an opportunity to dispel some of the issues some readers had about your site.

All anti-zionist work is greatly appreciated here. No one ever needs to "ask permission" before republishing any articles I post here or at the previous blogspot. I do, however, recommend that you keep the articles as accessible to as many people as conceivably possible.

As for the comparable reach of different anti-zionist sites, I don't like to compare because we're on the same side. But, it's good to keep track of your own stats - just to make sure that readership is on the rise and not the opposite.

Keep up the good work - good luck with meeting your costs. So, far we've managed to keep WUFYS voluntary, therefore low cost. That may change in the future. But, I hope that it doesn't. I hope it continues to grow on a voluntary basis. But, I wish we could get together to make it more organized and productive.

Peace.

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"Money" has no value - people do.

I can only go by the numbers that the statistical tools our webserver provides and according to those we had around 400,000 visitors for the past few months.

The only way for Alexa and other 3rd party vendors to provide accurate website stats is by getting the webmasters to include a snooping script onto their sites for them. While this is a good way for advertisers to get accurate data from an independent provider, for a dissident site like ours this is unfortunately not an option. The privacy and security of our readers is paramount.

Those statistic tools provide not only information about how many visitors from which country have visited the site, but the individual visitors' IP addresses, allowing 'Big Brother' to personally identify them and cause trouble.

The Alexa numbers published are coming from visitors who have installed the Alexa toolbar, a user installed spyware Alexa has developed in conjunction with Amazon to track the websites people are visiting. What the discrepancies between Alexa's numbers and ours tell us is that only a very small percentage of our U.S. and Australian readers have the Alexa toolbar installed, maybe because of privacy concerns. According to Alexa, 25% of our readers are from the U.K., when in fact only 5% of them are. Alexa's numbers for the U.S. and Canada are equally out; according to them only 24% respectively 17.5% of our readers are from there, when in fact over 50% respectively only 5% are. The Australian numbers are even worse. Instead of the correct 10%, Alexa tells us less than 1%.

Given the large number of U.S. and Australian readers that aren't picked up by Alexa, our traffic ranking in those countries and our overall ranking is completely out. If the U.K. and Canadian numbers are any indication, our correct overall traffic ranking should be under 10,000. The Alexa numbers do also confirm the double digit monthly growth of our site.

Read more...

For starters, let me assure everyone who feels compelled to lecture me on the 50K budget for 2008, that I know what I'm doing. Not only have I worked in I.T. my entire life and have years of fundraising and operations experience of non-profit organisations. I have an MBA with one of the highest ranking business school in the world and over 10 years of management experience, managing teams of 30+ staff. All of the above might sound a bit arrogant, but I'm sick and tired of being patronised by people who don't know what they are talking about.

Before criticising my decision to introduce a partly subscription based model, try to put yourself in my shoes. In the first 21 months of ZioPedia.org, this site has developped from a 1-2 hours/day hobby to a 70+ hours/week vocation. Due to the exceptional growth, which I welcome of course, I was forced to repeated server upgrades and changes to the hosting arrangement. In addition, several waves of hack attacks by Jew know who have caused considerable costs in I.T. support. And although we have a number of volunteer editors and translators, their number is now way big enough to keep up with the dozens of articles that get submitted to us every day.

The situation I was in towards the end of last year was comparable to that of a transport company that is getting so much business in that its existing trucks can no longer cope. They either acquire more powerful trucks, or eventually their existing trucks will break and loose their customers.

Andrew Winkler
Editor/Publisher
ZioPedia - All There Is To Know About Zionism

Given the level of infiltration of the dissident media scene by government agencies, it's only understandable that there is a lot of mistrust - if not paranoia - in the scene.

My rule of thumb is this: shoe-string budget sites that tackle issues that really hurt our ruling elite - such as Israeli and Neocon responsibility for 9/11, Israel's right to exist and the veracity of the official Holocaust story - and that do not enjoy any corporate advertising or sponsorships, are most likely genuine dissident sites. Hi gloss, corporate looking sites that consistently steer away from those mentioned issues and send out the same subliminal messages as the corporate media, albeit packaged as criticism of the government, are most likely infested with, if not controlled by psyops spooks.

Andrew Winkler
Editor/Publisher
ZioPedia - All There Is To Know About Zionism

Andrew Winkler: I consider Israel to be the most racist and violent political entity on the planet, far worse for example than South Africa before the end of Apartheid. It is an embarrassment to mankind and must be replaced with a free, united and egalitarian Palestine. At the end of the day, it’s up to the Palestinians to decide whether they can live next door to their tormenters of 60 years. I couldn’t.

http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/editorial/%22elie_wiesel_and_the_big_lie%22/

Hello Andrew.

And so I thank you very much! Great articles about truth are always worth repeating.