Friday, January 27, 2017

Traffic and Publicity of the Holocaust Controversies Blog

Recently, the Holocaust Controversies (HC) blog has surpassed two million page views since June 2010 (the blog was actually founded in 2006, but the counter was reset at that time for unknown reasons). Since readers tend to recur and check out more than one page, this is not to be confused with "unique visitors" and even less so with unique persons. Still, two million page views in 6.5 years seems like some decent traffic considering that the blog is about an atrocious part of human history and its denial by a fringe group - not exactly a subject predestined  to attract the masses.

It is interesting to compare the traffic of HC with that of Holocaust denier sites. Inconvenient History (also known as "Incoherent Hysteria" among us) publishes some annual statistics on its visitors. The data for 2016 has not been released yet, so we have to take that for 2015. According to this, the site had received 239,400 page views from 86,254 "users". The latter seems to refer to "unique visitors". Because of the possibiliy and practice to block and delete cookies and the use of multiple devices to access the internet, the number unique persons visiting can be assumed to be way lower than that.

I did not find any data on the number of visitors in the build-in stats of the HC blog, but according to the monthly page views shown in the graph, in 2015 the blog had experienced 377,076 page views and an increase of 26% compared to the previous year, thus easily outperforming Inconvenient History with its 239,400 page views and only 18% increase from 2014 to 2015. Take-home-message: yes, traffic on one of the leading denier sites was increasing, but that on this anti-denial blog has grown faster and on a higher level. 

Table 1 shows the top 10 of the most viewed postings of the HC blog since June 2010. It is evident that a lot of traffic is generated by postings on graphic evidence of Nazi atrocities, apparently that's something many people are looking for on text and image search engines.

Table 1: Most viewed posts (since 2010)
Post Page Views
Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes 96,849
Mass Graves and Dead Bodies 66,061
Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction? 25,177
Index of Published Evidence on Mass Extermination in Auschwitz 23,439
The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (1) 23,197
The dumbest Holocaust denial icon: the Auschwitz swimming pool 21,236
Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and Scientific Racism 17,545
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard 14,830
Mass Graves at Nazi Extermination Camps 13,084
How Reliable and Authentic is the Broad Report? 12,640

One would suppose that the Holocaust Controversies blog - as most internet blogs - should have a hard to time to get noticed in traditional media, such as printed books and journals. So far I have counted 16 citations on google books and google scholar (see Table 2). Furthermore, the blog has been mentioned in the newspapers The Jewish Chronicle and - most recently - The Observer as well as at the news site The Huffington Post

Table 2: Citations of Holocaust Controversies in the literature.
Book/journal Year
Stephen E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial As an International Movement 2009
Adam Jones, Evoking genocide:scholars and activists describe the works that shaped their lives 2009
Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction 2010
Pascal Cziborra, KZ-Autobiografien: Geschichtsfälschungen zwischen Erinnerungsversagen, Selbstinszenierung und Holocaust-Propaganda 2012
Emmett Laor, The Invention of The ''Palestinians' 2012
Nancy E. Rupprecht, Wendy Koenig, The Holocaust and World War II: In History and In Memory 2012
Bernd Weilbooks, Unvergessene Nachbarn 2013
Danny Orbach, Mark Solonin, Calculated Indifference: The Soviet Union and Requests to Bomb Auschwitz (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2013) 2013
Peter Haber, Eva Pfanzelter, Historyblogosphere: Bloggen in den Geschichtswissenschaften 2013
Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung 2013
Karel Fracapane, Matthias Haß, Holocaust Education in a Global Context 2014
Dubravka Zarkov, Marlies Glasius, Narratives of Justice In and Out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond 2014
Victoria Khiterer, Ryan Barrick, David Misal, The Holocaust: Memories and History 2014
Cathie Carmichael, Richard C. Maguire, The Routledge History of Genocide 2015
Agnes Grunwald-Spier, Who Betrayed the Jews?: The Realities of Nazi Persecution in the Holocaust 2016
Caroline Joan S. Picart, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Cecil Greek,  Framing Law and Crime: An Interdisciplinary Anthology 2016

10 comments:

  1. I know you've been a great resource to me and others. Keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congratulations and keep up the great work

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  3. I like your blog a lot because it has the only full debunking of "Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry". It's a very valuable resource.

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  4. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the HC white paper and HC blogs are referred to on several pages of Emory University's Debunking Holocaust Denial series.

    And that HC was endorsed on the (unfortunately no longer active) site of The Holocaust History Project (see links, no. 10).

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  5. "Bernd Weilbooks". It's Bernd Weil.

    You also get cited in the 2016 book by Russian geographer and historian Pavel Polian Istoriomor, or The Drilling into the Brain of Memory: Battles for the Truth about the GULAG, Deportations, the War and the Holocaust.

    http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/10/10/punished-peoples-fight-putins-war-on-history-with-monuments-to-their-deportations/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Polian

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  6. Hi Roberto, tHHP might not be active or online at its original adress, but it's available there:
    http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/

    And I updated the links page to the last version that includes HC:
    http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/links/

    The copies that allowed me to put tHHP back online were not always the last versions and presented various inconsistencies that i still try to make disappear, little by little.

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  7. As MGK grudgingly acknowledged, HC are also cited in this work:

    http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0353/biblio03.php

    [A. Kokh and P. Polian, Otritsanije otritsanija, ili Bitva pod Aushvitsem: debaty o demografii i geopolitike Kholokosta. Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz:Debates about the Demography and Geo-Politics of the Holocaust]

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  8. Hi Gilles,

    Thanks for the links, and I liked the comment under http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/phdnthhp.html:

    "We are continually, but slowly, fixing that but, hey, we are not like the Holocaust denying lunatics: we have a life..."

    Bingo!

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  9. Needless to say, your excellent blog is the brick and mortar for my own, non-scholarly attempt to expose and debunk revisionism:

    imgur.com/a/725A7

    ReplyDelete

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