At Snopes, a Quest to Debunk Misinformation Online

nytimes.com

23 pointspeter1236 comments

Great to see some figures on snopes. 7-8 million uniques per month, $3000 bandwidth bill, 2 staff.

With those sorts of numbers I'm sure they could optimise and monetize the site better than that. I bet if they had a paid email list ($5-10/yr)where you got the debunks/explanations 24-48 hours ahead of anyone else you'd get quite a few conversiosns. Maybe even enough revenue to change the horrid site design and clunky search.

Great site though.

It's the two founders, plus two additional employees, so I think it would be more correct to say that their number of staff total is four.

It's a good project. I find the way Snopes disables highlighting and copying very irritating though. I always have to disable javascript when I'm there.

I agree. The value of Snopes is debunking mass emails. What I want to do is email a short citation, but it's a royal pain-in-the-ass and, as is always the case, it doesn't really stop sites that want to scrape Snopes content.

Yeah but their content probably gets more links. Clearly it is one component of an incidentally winning strategy.

The fact that they are net-successful doesn't mean that every aspect of their approach is a good idea.

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