Christmas came early for me this year. A certain Paul Elam, in an attempt to prove to his donors that his garbage website is more influential than ever, recently posted a screenshot of the traffic stats for A Voice for Men.
By doing so, he inadvertently provided proof that We Hunted the Mammoth is drawing considerably more traffic than his terrible site.
I’ll get to my stats in a second. But first, here’s Paul’s screenshot of AVFM’s traffic:
In his fundraising appeal, Elam declares that “we are gaining steam and momentum.” A post stickied to the front page of his site, meanwhile, informs visitors that “traffic to AVFM has been buzzing for quite a while now.”
Which is a bit weird, because the traffic stats he just posted don’t show that at all. They suggest, rather, that site traffic has basically stalled out at a little less than 800k pageviews a month, down a bit from its peak in June — when AVFM was getting a bit of press attention for its first conference. (The reason the last bar on the graph is so low is that it reflects less than a full month of traffic.)
Thanks for sharing, Paul! Since you were so generous with your stats, let me give you a look at the stats for We Hunted the Mammoth over a similar period.
Make sure to compare the numbers on the left hand side of each pic — and you’ll see that AVFM has yet to come in spitting distance of a million pageviews a month. We Hunted the Mammoth blasted past a million pageviews in October and almost-but-not-quite hit a million last month.
Yep, the story here is that after spending quite a while trailing AVFM, We Hunted the Mammoth really took off this year, and for the past several months has been trouncing AVFM’s traffic. Even though I’ve been taking a bit of a break over the last few weeks — I was pretty burned out — traffic for WHTM could well beat AVFM this month as well.
Then again, maybe Paul’s new cooking column — no, really, he’s already posted the first one — will spice up AVFM’s traffic a little, as it were.
What makes all this even more delicious is that AVFM has more than two dozen names on its masthead. Alongside an assortment of alleged editors and “news directors” from around the world, it boasts both a “Resident Historian” and an “Activism Director.”
It raises, by its own account, more than $100,000 a year to fund its “operations” and pay for the personal expenses of one Paul Elam.
Yet somehow my blog, with a staff of one, is drawing more traffic than the flagship site of the alleged “Men’s Human Rights” movement. I’m happy to see that those who so generously donate money and time and talent to help support We Hunted the Mammoth are getting a lot more bang for the buck than AVFM’s much-abused donors.
The standard line amongst AVFM apologists is that I’m “irrelevant.” If I’m so unimportant, Paul, why are more people reading my website than yours?
Oh, and Merry Christmas!
Shh, nobody tell him that a diet without any sugars at all is both nigh-impossible and a quick way to kill a person.
So, the MRA diet is just not eating at all? No wonder they’re so cranky and mean. They’re just hungry! Apparently without a wife or mother to spoonfeed them, they can’t work out how to feed themselves.
@Bina
Hey don’t blame goons for this, we hate the MRAs as much as anyone else.
It’s the kitties that do it. How often does AVFM post lots of pictures of cats?
I usually call the combination of hungry and angry because you’re hungry “hangry”, but I guess in this case “mangry” would be more appropriate.
Holy shit, he writes about food just like he writes about feminism. This paragraph is a perfect example.
1. He thinks he knows what you think about something.
2. But you’re wrong.
3. Go Google it, he can’t be assed to provide a link.
4. Something pompous.
5. This thing that no one has believed since 1994 will kill you. He is here to set you straight.
Seriously, I don’t think anyone has ever advocated that everyone eat a fat-free diet. Dean Ornish advocates a nearly fat-free diet for reversal of heart disease, but almost no one has been able to stick with it. We used to think that eating low fat would automatically lead to weight loss, but diets don’t work, so most people don’t think that any more. And how long have most people known that we need good fats in our diet? I remember salmon being considered a healthy thing to eat for the omega-3’s easily 20 years ago. And everyone I know has been into coconut oil for health benefits for 5 years or more. (I’m not completely convinced on the science, but coconut oil makes amazing roll-out cookies, so I’m off to the store for more.)
I think maybe they get their nutrient facts from the same place they get everything else: their posteriors and possibly children posting on tumblr.
(No offence to children posting on tumblr but it might not be the first place to look for realityfacts).
That was aimed at serrana, he does sound the same arguing with imaginary nutritionists as with imaginary feminists.
There was a clear troll in the comments of that vox day post, calling themselves Amanda who kept coming swooping in talking about rape and the patriarchy and basically behaving as I have heard feminists behave from people who don’t understand what a feminist is. But everyone was engaging as if s/he was real. And like, ‘huh, typical feminist, so sad you hate all men’. And I didn’t know if maybe they were all in on it or what was going on. Most odd.
OT partner just made some chivda but I have a cold so couldn’t taste how spicyhot it is now my throat is on fire. =(
Wait, are they Going Their Own Way from food now? Oh, let it be so!
Well, there’s a perfect example of how evil food is. Sugar is just a gold-digging succubus. Turn your back for a second, and it’ll sue you for primary custody of your hips.
Jesus Christ, that’s an unholy amount of traffic for both of you. The manhater/ womanhater war is a bigger draw than I thought.
Have you tried similarweb instead of alexa? Seems accurate and is nicer looking.
“Manhater/womanhater war”? You mean people who consider women to be human beings versus rapists and abusers who don’t?
Hey, M. That’s so unfair to delicioustacos.
Some of those people just want abuse to be legal, and are sad that they can’t get away with it, and aren’t actually abusers yet.
I’m a long time reader/lurker and it makes my SJW-Feminazi-Cat-Lady heart happy when MRAs fail.
I just wish that they would fail so hard they disappear from the face of the internet.
There’s two reasons for this development. One: People honestly love feminism. Decent people love anything that favours equality and spreads peace and justice. It makes them feel good and the rising tide raises all boats.
And two: Mr. ferrets in a David Futrelle suit is honestly damn funny, I know his humour got me hooked to this website.
Elam said that the industrialized food conspiracy is bigger even than gamergate. NO CONSPIRACY IS BIGGER THAN GAMERGATE.
Where’s the man hating on this blog. Cite examples. I’ll wait.
Before you get started, a helpful hint. Criticizing an individual man is not the same as hating all men.
Aww man, I was expecting a recipe from Paul Elam’s food column… All I got was a bunch of pompous bloviating and conspiratorial rhetoric.
The piece really does exemplify Paul Elam’s problem with reality. Yes, there is an abundance of sugar in everything. Sugar is, in fact, addicting. No, that doesn’t mean a shadowy corporation is out to kill you. No, that doesn’t mean sugar is the be-all end-all of things that are put into foods to make you eat them (the list includes oil, fat, and salt as well).
He picks up on a couple true things, then internally decides what he thinks reality should be, then stubbornly ignores how his model fails, tending to blame conspiracy for conflicting information.
But seriously, I want to see Elam make a cake or a souffle or some other difficult recipe, just to see him obstinantly refuse conventional wisdom and insist that the mess before him is what that food actually should be.
I love that Mr. Elam is including a cooking column on AVFM. Makes it look a tad like Women’s Day or Redbook, or any number of “traditional” women’s mags.
Not that there is anything wrong with that… 🙂
But Kirbywarp, recipe development and testing is hard, recipes have to be written in a specific format, and then people will want a good photograph. He’ll have to hire six more editors for that.
Weirwood, I’m not saying Futrelle hates men. Just that he’s part of a big fake internet war where each side needs fresh outrages from the other to continue existing. And I can’t slag him for it, since I’m part of it too.
So, “Feminist/ Antifeminist” war would have been a more accurate choice of words on my part. But it doesn’t sound as cool.
Lemme guess, it’s actually about ethics in game journalism.
@delicioustacos:
What you apparently don’t get is that the outrages feminists deal with come from real life issues, like any other civil rights movement. Nothing fake about it, nothing specifically about the internet, and especially nothing required from Elam’s brand of antifeminism.
They need us because they have set themselves in opposition to us. We don’t need them, and we’d be rather thankful if they would just go away.
I would have said “well, at least it’s a good sign of feminism’s progress that people can conceive of it as a ‘big fake internet war,'” but I quickly remembered that people have been calling feminism a ‘big fake war’ since it first existed. 😐
Shall we just ignore the devils advocate? Yes ok good.
Who is it that said ‘why would you choose to advocate for the devil?’*
*devil signifying the bad side of things instead of the religious whatevz