Orinoco Tribune fourth anniversary emblem. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
Caracas, November 15, 2022 (OrinocoTribune.com)— The last week of November marks the fourth anniversary of Orinoco Tribune, a Venezuela-based independent and anti-imperialist website that has become a reference for news and opinion pieces about Venezuela, Latin America, and the Global South, in the English language.
In four years, Orinoco Tribune has been visited by almost one million readers. We have published almost 15,000 posts, consisting of approximately 13.6 million words. This represents more than 675,000 working hours in publishing work alone. This total excludes the time spent solving technical issues, promoting through social media platforms, coordination meetings, and producing multimedia content—all of which have demanded more time from us in recent months—or the time spent researching and writing our original content, Orinoco Tribune Specials.
During this time, we have consistently improved our global ranking, according to the Alexa ranking service, reaching our peak last December, when we were at the 35,000 mark globally, and at about 100,000 in the US.
The Alexa ranking is about to be discontinued this December, after more than 20 years of service. Alexa’s figures are not widely available but are still reachable using certain tools. For that reason, we were able to learn that we are currently, as of November 9, ranked at the 49,000 level globally and at the 226,000 level in the US. This means that Orinoco Tribune has consistently remained in the top 50,000 ranking globally for more than two years. This correlates with the efforts we have expended in improving quality, expanding our reach with original and multimedia content, and offering a different perspective from that of mainstream media and liberal analysis presented to the English-speaking world, not only about Venezuela and Latin America but on various global issues.
With the latest Alexa data tabulated by our team, on November 9, Orinoco Tribune was able to benchmark itself with other relevant websites at the global and the US level. We present the results below and clarify that some websites do not have US ranking data and, for that reason, were excluded from the US ranking chart. We pride ourselves on being among the top five websites in the Alexa Global Ranking among longstanding and heavily financed websites with paid staff and a corporate structure, such as The Intercept, Últimas Noticias, Telesur, or Efecto Cocuyo (a domestic right-wing Venezuelan website), among others.
Contrasting Alexa figures with the US ranking, we clearly see that our 226,000 ranking in the US is a representation of the global reach we have outside the United States, where we have moved from 90,000 to 250,000 in the last two years. This means that we need to keep pushing to have a better presence in the US, but also means that our goal of reaching global audiences has been successful. For Orinoco Tribune, having a better reach in the US is important, but it is not our most important goal, as we usually present approaches that are critical of the political environment in the US, including the deviations we see among liberal and leftists in that country.
Orinoco Tribune’s staff has been growing and all of them are volunteers with only one exception, our editor. This growth represents a big help but also makes our operation more complex and susceptible to errors, and for that reason we offer our apologies, but also request the help of our readers in letting us know when you identify mistakes in our publishing, translation, or editing work.
We are a 100% reader-financed website. We have decided not to rely on advertisements, large corporate or foundation donations, and we reject any form of paid content. This provides us with complete independence from “suggestions” from outside our editorial team. This also represents a large financial burden that limits our capacity to grow, remunerate our staff, or upgrade our technical infrastructure. For these reasons, we send our heartfelt appreciation to those who have supported us financially in recent years, and we encourage those that haven’t to do so. Please do not take our services for granted, as they cannot survive without the financial help that any endeavor demands.
For this reason, and because donations have fallen sharply in recent months, we are inviting our friends and readers to make donations using the different gateways we offer. For this anniversary, we are launching a pledge drive to increase our monthly donations by at least $200, meaning ten new $20 dollar monthly pledges, or twenty new $10 dollar monthly pledges. You can always make one-time donations via our Paypal/Stripe gateway—we will also appreciate that—but monthly donations are the most valuable for us because they allow us to plan in a more efficient way.
We also have a wedding registry open on Amazon in case it is easy for you to support us by contributing equipment that we urgently need and that will help make our work more efficient. Simply contribute the cost of the item and it will be delivered directly to us.
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To reach this anniversary goal, we invite you to participate through our fiscal sponsorship program with the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). Their fees are lower, those fees always go to good causes, and they are tax deductible, meaning you can request them to be deducted from your taxes if you are in the United States. Patreon is the other service we offer for monthly donations, another option if you are not able to do it via the AfGJ.
We have big plans for the coming years: increasing our presence through our YouTube channel and our original content, meaning more videos also shared via TikTok and Instagram, social media platforms that are on the rise. We also have organized an online four-year anniversary event that we will broadcast using YouTube Live. This event is “A Brief History of Chavismo: a Conversation with our Editorial Team with Q&A,” it will consist of a presentation by our editor and founder, Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza, together with members of our editorial team. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, November 30, at 2pm (EST), and we encourage all our friends and followers to help us spread the word about it and to join us. We will try to answer all your questions in the Q&A section.
We cannot finish this note without acknowledging the amazing work of our editorial team, including Yullma Hernandez, Saheli Chowdhury, Steve Lalla, Khalil Wall-Johnson, Dana Nidal, Robert Quinones, Frantz Voltura, Kelley Zhou, Adrian Fu, Sara Ferreira, Mateo Flores, and Elizabeth Ferrari. Their help has been key to improving our work.
We are always open to new volunteers. The first step to join us is reading our Who we are page. It is very important for us that all applicants are quality-driven with very good English writing skills, self-motivated, and of course, socialist and anti-imperialist-minded.
We are sure we will celebrate our fifth anniversary in 2023 in a better financial position and with a solid team capable of providing you with the quality and alternative information that the current times demand. See you then!
Orinoco Tribune Special by staff
OT/JRE/SL
