When Jewish Values Go Viral
The website has been going in its current form since 2006. Prior to this JfJfP only had a very limited website which was hand-edited making it impossible for the non-technical to manage it. Also it was poorly indexed on search engines and was just a basic HTML site with no interaction.
I created a replacement which uses WordPress, a free content management system, and this enabled us to post regular content and create a news feed for the first time. We also added the automated weekly newsletters, the creation and distribution of which had been laborious and manual. We still use this today and it allows us to add new features easily such as the new Donate button which has raised 500 quid in only a couple of weeks, almost all from people who found us on Facebook. We have also spent money advertising our page which is responsible for finding us about 20% of our page subscribers. Not bad for a hundred quid!
This website did very well and allowed us to scale up our posting and to put much more onto the site. People heard about the site through googling, word of mouth, and links people posted to our articles. We grew the weekly newsletter to 2748 current recipients.
Typically, prior to July this year, we were getting 7000 visitors per month and 15000 views. We launched the Facebook page on 9th July 2014. In July we have had 27500 visitors and 56000 views. Here you can see what has happened over the course of the month (apologies for the gap in the middle, we were not capturing stats for a few days). Now the reason we weren’t capturing stats is because we almost immediately had to upgrade our hosting package to cope with a new level of traffic. That proved insufficient and we had to move onto a dedicated host of our own and hugely step up the bandwidth.
Then on the 29th the site crashed and went offline. At first I had suspicions about a Denial of Service attack by the Israeli Ziobot Cyber Warfare department. Then I got this email from Nethosted, a major UK hosting provider.
“Your VPS has actually exceeded the 800GB bandwidth limit, obviously the current circumstances are exceptional, your VPS is using a fairly amazing amount of bandwidth, as far as I’m aware it’s more than any VPS, client or dedicated server we’ve ever had!“
Since then we have grown our fanbase on Facebook which is about to hit 5000 page likes. For comparison, we passed the Jewish News a while back and are closing in rapidly on the Jewish Chronicle! At the current rate of people flocking to our page we will be more popular than them within a week!
As of 31st July 2014
On July 20th (11 days after creating our page on Facebook) we wrote to the Jewish News thusly:
“Dear Jewish News,
They say week is a long time in politics. We have had our Facebook page for a whole week now.
You describe yourself as “Britain’s BIGGEST Jewish newspaper”, having steadily grown your circulation since 1997.
We do now have more page likes than you, however we are not technically speaking a newspaper so please, no need to change your slogan on our account.
If you would be interested in advertising on our page please get in touch. As a matter of policy we do not carry ads for settlement-produced goods.
Just saying.
Best regards
Jews for Justice for Palestinians”
We are currently drafting the equivalent letter for the JC 🙂
Also we are now selling these fabulous T Shirts and have shifted a dozen since they went on sale yesterday afternoon. Order yours now by clicking here… ORDER HERE