It was a record-breaking month for 5Pillarz with our best-ever traffic figures since we launched the site six months ago, writes Roshan Muhammed Salih.
During the last month we had 86,400 unique visitors to the site, 102,500 visits and nearly 131,000 page views.
This represents a near trebling of the previous month’s figures and means that we are now among the top Muslim websites in the UK in terms of visitor traffic.
The reasons for this success are the following in my opinion:
1. The hard work of the tiny 5Pillarz team who do not receive a penny for their efforts.
2. The willingness of our many contributors to keep sending us articles and ideas.
3. The trust that 5Pillarz has engendered among our readers by its determination to be stick by the principles of quality, professionalism, accuracy, fairness, transparency, accountability, diversity of opinion and non-sectarianism.
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4. The fact that our readers are sharing our articles widely.
Finances
However, despite all the good news above we are still in financial trouble and are now losing money for the first time. And I repeat that this is not a sustainable situation long-term if this site is to survive and thrive.
Last month we received around £320 in donations but spent around £400 in advertising and technical maintenance. We were unable to spend any money whatsoever on journalism.
We have also been unable to find any suitable volunteers to help us with the journalism aspect of the website despite the fact that we are offering budding journalists a fantastic opportunity to hone their skills.
Nevertheless, we are determined to plough on and our priorities for the future remain two-fold.
Firstly, we want to grow the site editorially and that means taking on more journalism volunteers.
Secondly, we are looking for investors to pump money into this site to put it on a professional footing.
However, while we wait for the “sugar daddies” to come on board in the short-term we need to raise £500 a month to deliver good content on a site which loads quickly.
So again and urgently we are 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!
So if you value what we are trying to do on 5Pillarz (ie give the Muslim community an independent, professional, honest, unbiased online platform to air its views) please donate URGENTLY via the following link by PayPal, direct debit, credit or debit card. Thank you!
https://5pillarsuk.com/support-our-site/
