Over the past almost twelve months, more than 22’000 people visited Negative White and generated 63’000 page views. However, it’s hard to assess whether these numbers are good or bad without comparison.
From my journalism experience, I know that national media in Switzerland consider a story with 63’000 pageviews per article to be well-performing. In that sense, Negative White is undeniably niche. And that’s okay. Even though music consumption has never been this high, only the most dedicated and passionate are interested in music journalism.
I try to ignore metrics as much as possible. To Negative White, as a newsletter-focused platform, the number of subscribers is far more significant than page views. And as a member-funded publication, the number of paying subscribers is the most crucial.
That said, I review our analytics at the end of the year to gain insights and draw conclusions. (Sidenote: We use Plausible for analytics, an EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant software.) Today, I’ll transparently share which stories drew the most readers.
Nemo broke the code
In February, I received an email about a traffic spike on Negative White. Since I haven’t checked the news yet, I couldn’t understand why a short news from 2023 about Nemo identifying as non-binary would suddenly go through the roof. The answer: news broke that Nemo would compete at the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland. As Nemo’s career was limited to Switzerland up to that point (he mostly sang in Swiss-German), nothing about them was available in English except for this meagre post by Negative White.
Together with another news post covering their participation’s official announcement, stories about Nemo brought over 14’000 visitors to the side—more than half of all other stories combined.
Janosch Troehler
Artificially generated music
Throughout the year, multiple stories about artificially generated music and fake albums also captured high interest. In January, I reported on the Swiss band Bell Baronets, which had been subjected to an AI scam: The scammer uploaded an AI-generated album to their Spotify profile. That’s only possible because aggregators like DistroKid have lacklustre security measures. Later, I discovered that even more of these scams were affecting Swiss bands. And in April, I wrote a ranty piece about Obscurest Vinyl, an example of a fake artist with AI-generated music taking away attention and money from real human beings.
These three stories intrigued 1200 readers.
Janosch Troehler
Interview, music, and other stories
Aside from the larger AI trend and the interest around Nemo, a couple of other stories reached the top ten. For example, the news about the passing of The Soft Moon’s Luis Vasquez or my retrospective on switching from Spotify to Apple Music.
Equally successful was the interview with Son Mieux’ Camiel Meirresonne, and two premieres also snatched a top spot: Lioba’s Paperthin and Jenobi’s Makeup.
Janosch Troehler
Metric-wise, 2024 has been an exceptional year. The Nemo-infused traffic won’t happen again anytime soon. Yet, the success of these news posts is undeniable and might prompt an easy solution: just publish more news. However, as the only writer for Negative White, I don’t have the capacity to do that reliably. And more importantly, it bores me to death.
I don’t intend to create a news-driven platform but something that takes news and asks: What does it mean? A secondary publication aimed towards analysis, critique, and perspective.
Decide on our editorial focus
Instead of running an annoying survey where you can evaluate our work in the past months, I decided only to ask you a simple and straightforward question:
What would you like to see more in 2025?
Your opinion on this is crucial; it helps me focus on what matters to you. Thank you for voting today.
