Behind FULCRUM News' Rapid Ascent In The Post-Coronavirus Media Hellscape

As it turns out, you lose many friends when you put truth ahead of all else, but you gain a lot of web site traffic. It all works out in the final hour.

Several years ago we predicted that if PizzaGate — the bizarre but essentially real scandal involving the Podesta emails, James Alefantis, and the Clintons — was never prosecuted, and it largely hasn’t been as of late April 2020, then the younger generation would eventually re-surface all the old posts and videos… they would piece together the sloppy coverup attempt from the MSM and the blanket denials without addressing the content of any of the emails… and that is exactly what has happened online, perhaps stoked to fresh heights by a world suddenly stuck at home all day and searching for strange topics on the Internet.

Those who were too young to understand or care about PizzaGate back in 2016, are now in college and in the adult world, and the oddity surrounding those 2016 WikiLeaks — including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s ensuing arrest, and unending solitary confinement, like he’s a dangerous X-Man character with unknown superpowers — it’s all rushing back.

And you can’t sentence the truth to solitary confinement, not for long anyway, not on the Internet.

FULCRUM has hit “hockey stick graph” stage growth for our site traffic, driven by a commitment to investigative reporting.

FULCRUM News is seeing unprecedented site traffic, rivaled only by unprecedented downloads of our free daily news podcast, which now ranks as a top News podcast in the United States, Canada, France, and elsewhere.

Further, as some online media brands spent up their goodwill essentially melting down over the coronavirus pandemic — treating it as a War of the Worlds style humanity grand finale event — FULCRUM remained calm, even-keeled, sober in words if not always in mind, and committed to the facts as they emerged.

There’s no doubt our steadfast commitment to PizzaGate, which is again seeing some kind of resurgence in interest, and our level reporting of COVID19 have earned us many new site readers & community members.

And despite similar economic pressures to what many of you are experiencing temporarily at the moment, we are keeping our newsletter subscription at an approachable and populist ten bucks to get in, as many of you have done in recent days.

The increase in site traffic has led to a subsequent increase in newsletter subscriptions; it’s safe to say COVID19, in its own way, has been a boon for FULCRUM. We welcome all the new subscribers and readers!

A casual observer of the industry would think that a “COVID traffic boom” might benefit others in online news publishing equally, but this has not been so — some of the larger, older online brands are suffering from headwinds that simply aren’t able to impact our much leaner business structure at FULCRUM. For example, many online magazines & news brands rely on annual conferences for a substantial portion of their baseline revenue. With air travel and hotel bookings at a near standstill nationwide, those revenue streams have been very hard hit, while their increase in web site traffic has largely not offset that unexpected loss in income.

For FULCRUM News, the unexpected increase in site traffic has been nearly all upside, and as some of you have noticed — new community members bring new opinions and a new vibrancy to our daily coverage. We have no unexpected loss from canceled events or conferences to make up for.

We do, however, plan to continue covering the unprecedented abuse of NEXO users last month by that platform, when they involuntarily liquidated many of their 550,000 users. They cost us money, we have the records and email communications of their theft & ensuing malfeasance — and as with PizzaGate, we will never be quiet until millions know our side of the story, intimately and completely.

The NEXO platform failure, something other online media outlets have been shy to tackle because they take ad money from NEXO and do sponsored posts with them, has also in contrarian fashion been a traffic boon for us: we are willing and able to continue covering their deceptive “crypto-backed loans” platform, because we do not take ad money from them, and because we have proof they stole from us last month.

Many users, unable to have their voice heard elsewhere, have found FULCRUM and become enthusiastic supporters of our Washington, DC-based investigative journalism — which yes, now will include looking into exactly what happened with NEXO’s platform last month, on March 12 and 13 specifically, which is when many users were “sold out” against their will, and in some cases without prior notification.

To readers old and new alike, welcome and thank you for the vote of confidence.

-Team FULCRUM