Posted on April 26, 2020

AmRen Punches Above Its Weight

Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, April 26, 2020

We have built-in obstacles to reaching new readers. Many schools, colleges, and offices use WiFi programs that block our site completely. Many social media platforms won’t let us use them, and if someone tweets a link to us Twitter warns that our site could give him a virus. YouTube sometimes puts our videos into a deep freeze that makes them nearly impossible to find and hard to share. Journalists who write about us often don’t link to us, and Google clearly modifies its search results to keep AmRen ranking low. Every year, the amount of staff time and energy dedicated to finding workarounds to these digital blockades increases.

Despite all these obstacles, we continue to grow, and are more popular than plenty of news and opinion websites that have far more resources and favorable press. Here are some data from SimilarWeb.com, which analyzes web traffic.

AmRen Traffic in March of 2020

SimilarWeb notes that our traffic coming from the United States rose 8.27 percent from February to March, and the increases were even higher for Canada (8.74 percent) and the UK (17.22 percent). The upward-pointing green triangles mean traffic is going up, while downward-pointing red triangles mean the opposite. Although it is strange that SimilarWeb miscategorized AR as “Arts and Entertainment,” that does not change our global or country ranking. In may not seem impressive to be number 18,806 in the United States (including porn sites, which are always popular), but here is some context.

Human Events Traffic in March 2020

For decades, Human Events was an important Conservatism Inc publication. It shut down a few years ago but soon relaunched as a slick new Trumpian site. It has no problem with deplatforming, and its managing editor, Ian Miles Cheong, has over 100,000 followers on Twitter (Jared Taylor was permanently banned from Twitter years ago), but what it publishes is uninspiring. It’s within the Beltway and attracts well-known writers, but AmRen is still much more widely read.

The same is true of a number of paleoconservative sites. They are much more “respectable,” and are never deplatformed, but don’t grow much beyond small cliques of readers. Here are numbers for the high-toned Catholic magazine First Things:

First Things traffic in March of 2020

The longtime favorite of America’s paleocons, Chronicles, has so little traffic that SimilarWeb doesn’t have numbers for it:

Not Enough Data for Chronicles

Chronicles traffic in March of 2020

Some popular dissident websites, such as Taki’s Magazine, are less popular than we are:

Takimag traffic in March of 2020

Much has been made over the last few years of the rise of the socialist wing of the Democrat Party. Like nationalists on the right, it has a number of relatively new websites. Despite its revolutionary pretenses, they face no censorship, and are often praisesd by the mainstream . However, American Renaissance still brings in more readers than most of them:

The Baffler traffic in March of 2020

Current Affairs traffic in March of 2020

The New Inquiry traffic in March of 2020

Even the Southern Poverty Law Center, with its hundreds of employees, half a billion dollars, offshore bank accounts, and reverential coverage by the media, is just barely more popular than American Renaissance:

SPLC traffic in March of 2020

Flannery O’Connor once said, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Perhaps if she were alive today, she might add that the truth does not change according to anyone’s ability to stifle or promote it. So thanks for reading, sharing content on social media, and donating. As Thomas Jefferson said, “There is no truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world” — and on that front, AmRen continues to make progress.