ANews Analytics: Metrics, Impact and Engagement

The obsolete computer on fire represents ANews' commitment to only the latest and greatest in technology.

Anarchist News is renown for being at the forefront of cutting edge when it comes to social media. One only needs to look at our social media pages -namely facebook and twitter- to testify our great success. But there is always much room for improvement, and although to this date (April 1st 2021) we might be industry leaders (as the only anarchist news website with comments), we need to be always on the lookout for competitive advantages to remain relevant in such a competitive market.

We also care very much about our users, clients, costumers and followers, so for the sake of transparency, digital community accountability and interactive participatory co-creation, we will share our our goals as a collective, the metrics we use to measure them and go through our analytics so you may give us feedback about how to best increase our followers and our engagement. But first we will address some feedback we have received via email (always send us your feedback: thecollective [at] aprilfools [dot] org) while safeguarding the anonymity of those who sent it:

"urgent!...ALITES ROUFIANOI, PLEASE STOP POSTING FOREVER!! AND NEVER POSTING NEWS FROM [redacted]"

It saddens us to declare that we will not be posting news from that source for the time-being (April 1st 2021, until further notice).

"you shouldn't have an online chat platform if you don't give a shit about what they think in terms of comment deletion."

But we do care! Our sincere apologies, dearest of users (currently on the top 1% of our users contributing close to 98% of our comments under different aliases).

It seems the problem we were facing with regards to comment deletion is that the A.I. we had trained to moderate the comments -as we couldn't keep up with them otherwise- was set to filter out shitposts. All along we've tried in vain to make special rules to allow for more shitposts, but the A.I. still managed to filter a lot of the verbal diarrhea. So by popular demand, we've decided to open the floodgates and allow the full range of textual excrement by scrapping the A.I. altogether.

Having addressed these concerns, we will proceed with our goals, metrics and analytics:

Number of Comments as Metric for Engagement: Time Series Analysis

The two main goals of Anarchist News are to increase our number of readers and followers on social media, as well as increasing the time our readership spends seating in front of a screen reading our lovingly curated content.

After carrying out a time-series analysis of the number of comments in our Topic of the Week posts and after accounting for cyclical and seasonal effects, we have a statistically significant positive secular trend across the years up until today's date (April 1st 2021), and this is great news because more comments = better. We encourage our main trolls to keep up the good work of posting multiple times using different aliases and personalities, though going through that effort really isn't necessary. For the sake of transparency, we all know who's who, so don't mind putting up with appearances, just type and random string of letters and hit send. The more, the better; you really can't comment enough.

We've also implemented some measures towards achieving our main goals:

Search Engine Optimization Through Backlinks

As an experiment, as you may have noticed, we have been including links to previous Topic of the Week posts in our more recent Topic of the Week posts. This helps our ranking in leading search engine algorithms.

Clickbait Titles and Content

For a while now, we have been significantly altering titles and content of the news stories we post in an effort to get more clicks. We have also take to writing communiques and sending them to other popular sites so that we can then post them here. We're sharing for the sake of transparency, we count on your discretion.

Embedded Sponsored Content and Native Advertisement

The comments you may have seen spamming malware riddled links that lead to dark web market sites are part of various lucrative business partnerships we have made with various enterprising individuals and individual enterprises. Even many of the articles we've posted have been cooked up just to sell you a product. For example, the arson communiques are to incentivize fossil fuel consumption, and we get royalties from big petroleum companies. We're open for business as always, please keep sending us your proposals at thecollective [at] aprilfools [dot] org. We promise we spend all our money ethically on online marketing research and front-end development. We will soon be posting a quarterly report of our finances on our Instagram page.

Room for Improvement

We're considering being more active on TikTok, Twitch and YouTube, as well as opening OnlyFans and ManyVids accounts to post new content. Sadly, there are not enough of us to go around. We encourage our readership to join our Patreon, members at the $200 a month tier and above have a chance to make the new content that we will post on those platforms.

We also beg Channel Zero to let us advertise our podcast. We will try to be more active on the streets whenever it's going down to capture shaky cam footage of liberals getting beat by cops and write long report-backs about the tactical lessons we've learned from our participant observation. We hope to submit this original content to IGD and CrimethInc.

There are 5 Comments

wow. it sucks that the @news crew feels forced to resort to the standard capitalist mentality of "grow, grow, grow". harsh.

correct me if i'm wrong: they want to have more comments because they are humans and want more conversation and attention.

However, I do think @news should be a little more skeptical about SEO, i see SEO to be a clever method for reaching people, but at the same time it's a very real corporate ideology. I was having a conversation about this with my brother the other week...a lot of the internet now adays is buried in commercialism, and Google clearly is still the dominant tyrant of the internet...they clearly have too much data to be tremendously helpful to the NSA, FBI, etc., but their role in the grand scheme of things seems pretty sinister to me.

But whatever, if you must use SEO, then use SEO i s'pose. Thanks for your work. Much luv.

Hard times in late late late capitalism. Gotta anarchocapitalize those anarchoclicks, baby!

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