5Pillarz is three months old and from a readership point of view we are going from strength to strength, writes editor Roshan Muhammed Salih.
During the last month we attracted nearly 61,000 unique visitors to the site, nearly 72,000 visits and over 91,000 page views.
All these figures were a huge increase on the previous month when we had 33,000 unique visitors, 46,000 visits and 64,000 page views.
The main reason for this upward trend was undoubtedly the amount of visitors we got from Egypt who were attracted to the site by the articles and videos we posted on the Egyptian crisis.
During the last month around 23% of our readers came from Egypt which was only surpassed by the number of readers from the United Kingdom itself. Astonishingly, the 5Pillarz website was visited by people in 150 different countries over the past 30 days.
Bad news
But that’s where the good news ends because despite the increase in readership we had a terrible month financially.
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Unfortunately, reader donations almost dried up last month as we received only £45. Depressingly, this compares unfavourably with the £450 we received in donations during our first month and means that we have no money in the bank to run the site.
All the money we have and more was spent on advertising the site on Facebook (£220) but unfortunately we will now have to stop doing this. We were unable to spend any money whatsoever on journalism or website maintenance and that is not a sustainable situation if we are to deliver great content on a site which loads quickly.
In a nutshell, we need around £500 a month to run the site comfortably and more to expand insha Allah, but obviously it is impossible to do this if we are receiving no funds.
Our immediate priorties are to transfer the site onto a faster server so that it can handle the amount of visitors it is getting and to have some money spare in the bank to spend on journalism.
So we are now looking to you, our readers, to help keep this site alive, independent and on a sustainable footing by setting up a direct debit with us of only £5 or £10 a month. If we could get 50 readers to donate £10 a month that would ease our financial worries, or alternatively 100 readers to donate £5 a month. This is probably less than many of us spend on eating a meal.
Therefore, if you value what we are trying to do on 5Pillarz (ie give the Muslim community an independent, professional, honest, unbiased online platorm to air its views) please donate URGENTLY via the following link by PayPal, direct debit, credit or debit card.
https://5pillarsuk.com/support-our-site/
Thank you!
@RMSalih
