It’s been a big month for New Matilda. September is on track to be the largest in the 11-year history of the site, with over 1.2 million page reads.
This month we’ve also finally cracked the ‘Top 100,000’ on Alexa.com, putting New Matilda in the top 0.01 percent of websites in the world.
We jumped more than 30,000 in the rankings (see graphic below) thanks to a lift in story count, and some strong scoops and analysis.
More broadly, since May last year, traffic to the site has increased by more than 300 per cent. Most of the signs are very, very good.
And yet, our subscription base has continued to shrink over the past six months. More people are reading New Matilda, but less people are supporting us financially.
Our new site is almost ready, and it will enable readers to subscribe monthly (as opposed to yearly). It will also make reading much easier (particularly on mobiles) and the presentation of our news will improve substantially.
But we need your help to stay alive in the interim.
New Matilda is fiercely independent – we rely almost entirely on reader subscriptions for our survival (which you can grab here).
Our dream is to build a subscriber base of 20,000, which will enable us to pay all our writers and contributors fairly. As it currently stands, our publisher and editor, Chris Graham does not draw any wages from New Matilda – he does other full-time work to pay his bills (and some of New Matilda’s).
Our contributing editor, Wendy Bacon does it all for the love as well, as does our pro bono lawyer Geoff Holland. Quite a few of our regular contributors also donate their work, and none of our staff (Ange, Max and Thom) or our contributors earn what would be considered reasonable recompense for their skills, their dedication and their time.
Our team keeps slogging away because we believe in the power and importance of independent media.
We want to be self-sustaining. We want to be able focus all our efforts on hard-hitting, independent investigative reporting, as opposed to having to find additional work to pay the bills.
But we can’t do that without reader support.
If you rely on New Matilda for truly independent media, then please consider subscribing or donating to support our work.
Everyone knows the mainstream media model is broken, but relatively few know that if everyone who read New Matilda in the course of a month donated just $1, we would have more than enough money to provide an independent media service that would rival any of the major outlets.
The dream is actually not that big, and by no means out of our reach with your support.
As always, we have goodies to give away for higher-level subscribers, and you can even pick a not-for-profit or Aboriginal business to donate free advertising to.
The media model doesn’t get much more ethical or independent than New Matilda, a fact of which we’re immensely proud. And while we’ll always operate on the sniff of an oil rag, and squeeze as much as we can out of the revenue we get, your support can help reshape the media landscape in Australia.
If you’re already a subscriber, you can extend or increase your subscription level here. But thanks either way for your valued support.
If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider joining today.
And whatever you do, sharing this story far and wide on social media also helps us enormously.