A Challenge for Conservative Voices and Media. Are You Up for It?

The other day left-wing site The Spinoff declared that they had reached 10,000 subscribers.

That is quite some achievement, so well done to Duncan and his team at The Spinoff.

Their model is a ‘pay what you can’ model but they’d prefer you to contribute $10 a month or $100 per annum. If we use the $100 per annum benchmark then The Spinoff is receiving around a million dollars per annum in revenue from members. That’s seriously impressive. Again, well done guys.

You can read what you get for that membership on their website, I’ll even provide a link. I’ll explain why shortly.

Basically a membership to The Spinoff gets you:

• A free book (if you pay over $80 a year)
• A weekly email from Alex Braae
• Member surveys

And that’s it. Their members can’t even comment on their articles. Basically they get nothing more than thanks. But, hey, it is working for them, and well done for that. I hope they get more members as a result of me highlighting this.

Of course they also have sponsored posts, essentially paid for content. They disclose this of course so that’s perfectly alright. When Duncan Grieve wrote that paying more tax is a good idea it was as a result of being paid to say that by IRD. That’s their business model, and I’m fine with that.

Their model is so successful that even National Party MPs are loud and proud supporters. Good for them.

Now what is interesting is this post from David Farrar on media bias.

Over 2,500 responses to my survey on how people see major NZ media outlets in terms of political leanings. People could assess them as strongly left leaning, somewhat left leaning, neutral, somewhat right leaning or strongly right leaning. I’ve attributed a score of -100 for strongly left, -50 for somewhat left, 0 for neutral, +50 for somewhat right and +100 for strongly right.

The weighted average for each media outlet, in order from most left to most right is:

1. The Guardian -82
2. Radio New Zealand -80
3. The Spinoff -78
4. Stuff -72
5. One News -62
6. NZ Herald – 59
7. Newshub -51
8. Scoop -46
9. Newsroom -46
10. Interest.co.nz -9
11. NewstalkZB +16
12. NBR +31

So David Farrar’s survey of more than 2500 responses lists The Spinoff as the third most left-wing site. Only NewstalkZB and NBR are considered right of centre.

This presents one with a dilemma. It is often said that the left-wing never pays for anything, yet here is the evidence before us that the left-wing does in fact pay for things. They do dip into their own pockets to pay for things they value.

The other part of the dilemma is that the left-wing dominates the media landscape. Many of them are state funded or in receipt of state advances of a sort. The most egregious example is the left-wing bias of Radio New Zealand.

So what to do?

Do we throw our hands up in horror at the challenge, or do we pick up the gauntlet thrown down by The Spin Off and try and do better.

Now, David Farrar recently started subscription content and has gained a bit over 500 subscribers. That is way less than The Spinoff but still a reasonable effort.

The BFD has a membership option too. We do have considerably more members than David Farrar, but The BFD has been doing this a fair bit longer than him. However, we are nowhere near to the 10,000 members The Spinoff has achieved.

And here’s the rub. Our traffic is very close to that of The Spinoff. Here is the Alexa traffic rankings for the past year for TheBFD, The Spinoff and Kiwiblog:

We are footing it with The Spinoff and even exceeding them but with a fraction of the resources and none of the corporate sponsors that they enjoy.

It would appear that the left-wing value the contributions of The Spinoff more than the centre-right value the contributions of Kiwiblog and The BFD. That is what the facts suggest.

For David Farrar, his members get special polling information and analysis. For members of The BFD we offer the following:

• Ad-free viewing
• MyBFD community platform
• Daily Crossword
• Daily Sudoku
• Daily Codecracker
• SonovaMin’s Cartoons
• Podcasts
• Access to INSIGHT: Politics
• Access to live Zoom sessions
• Access to exclusive video content

Plus members can comment on each and every article, with tight moderation to ensure sensible dialogue and discourse of differing ideas. On top of that we have our INSIGHT: Politics member only content, where we share a wide range of views across the political spectrum.

Since we have launched the MyBFD membership platform we have extended the functionality to include Member Lounges, Clubs and Classifieds. You can now create a document store, for yourself or to share with other members. Our Documents system supports uploading of documents into activity, profiles, groups, messages and forum replies. The documents library behaves in a similar fashion to Dropbox or Google Drive, with files that can be easily organized into folders. In the activity feed, uploaded documents display as live previews. We have strict privacy controls so you can share only what you want to share.

Shortly we will be able to integrate Zoom for private group sessions, all within the MyBFD platform. We will also be extending our Messenger to update in real time, similar to iMessage and WhatsApp. This will make our messenger much more responsive, and will allow us to extend it later on with a live chat box on the site that is in sync with the messenger.

We are also building our own Videos system in the Media component, which will support uploading of raw video files into activity, groups, messages and forum replies. The uploaded video files will be compressed and then viewable as playable videos.

I’m proud to say that Spanish Bride as Editor has built what can truly be described as a true community with shared interests and beliefs.

The BFD offers so much more for membership than The Spinoff. Yet they have 10,000 members.

So here is the challenge for you all. Do you want conservative voices and sites to whither like a fart in a hurricane, or do you want those powerful conservative voices and sites to grow to such a level that they have the resources to fight the state-funded, left-wing narrative?

With the level of funding enjoyed by The Spinoff you could enjoy monthly professional and scientific polling, more paid contributors, investigative reporting like that done by Project Veritas in the US and our own radio station with hosts you enjoy listening to. We could even build a news site to rival Stuff and The NZ Herald.

It is up to you guys. For those who already are members, we thank you for your loyal and ongoing support. Would you consider moving your membership up a level? Every little bit helps.

For those who enjoy our site but aren’t currently a member, would you consider joining? At the very least you can remove the ad content on the site and all for the cost of a soy latte a month. That’s more than you’d get out of The Spinoff, plus you can comment here.

The Spinoff has set us a challenge.

Are we going to let them beat us on membership?

Will you help us beat them?

Check out our membership plans.

It’s quite a challenge, but The BFD staff and writers believe in you. Thank you so much for your continued support.

To quote the Prime Minister…Let’s Do This.