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The feedback from this mailing was very illuminating. I'm going to craft a part 2 message in a few weeks taking into account some new insights: Alexa Rank Requirement I made a having an Alexa ranking a requirement to be added to the list of sites that I would monitor. About half of the suggested sites I received today for consideration did not have an Alexa rank. I suspect the person complaining about my use of Alexa had a site without an Alexa ranking. While they did not say this was the reason, I can now understand now why someone would react the way they did. Now an Alexa ranking is a very low threshold to meet but the fact is 20% of the 300 sites I have evaluated so far did not have an Alexa Rank. In fact they are still on my list of sites: https://aalbc.com/top_black_websites/top_black_sites_list.php But I have to draw a line somewhere and the Alexa rank is as good a place as any; Right now the Alexa Ranks for sites in the Top 50 range from 1,026 to 470,817 (lower is better, Google's Alexa Rank is 1, Facebook's is 3). The worst Alexa rank, for the sites with a ranking, in my database is 19,987,545. I have never see a ranking worse than 30,000,000. Having an Alexa rank is generous cutoff, but I'm open to suggestions for alternatives. While I'm the only one handling this here will need to be a cut off. I have a booksite to run after all. “I've Never Heard of Most of These Sites” This is the most common comment I've received. Indeed it is the point of this entire effort. There will be some sites you've never heard of that has produced something you will truly appreciate but never see, because it could not be found on Facebook. Facebook “Likes” Are Powerful Facebook likes are very, very powerful--for Facebook. People measure the effectiveness of their ad spend and engagement on Facebook by the number of likes they get. If does not matter if the likes do not translate in getting an email address, a sale, visitors to a website, or improved branding. Likes are the measurement tool. They are readily visible and have the added benefit of providing an ego boost. Facebook is known to holdback likes so that they are timed for maximum impact. There is i ample reason to believe that many of those Facebook Likes are fake, and one should always measure the effectiveness of those paid visitors, you might find as I did they are not very engaged visitors. Most Users Don't Visit Websites I suspect that the majority of new internet users are mobile users using social media. These types of users are much less likely to visit a website. When these users run a Google search they don't leave the Google search results page, because Google will pull answers from websites, most often Wikipedia, and present the response on the page or read it aloud. For these types of users the social media/google/Wikipedia/amazon is the internet. Demographically this is where the growth appears to be. But there is a category of users (like anyone reading this message), who wants deeper information. Like readers of books, the types of users of the web are in the minority. But like readers of books, there are enough of these types of internet users to enable independent Black owned websites to thrive. Finally Don't Forget Email In the four hours since I sent this email, several hundred extra people have visited the pages linked in my mailing. There is nothing I have ever done that has generated as much traffic as quickly from social media. Now I've had some content go "viral" and that brought thousands of additional visitors from Facebook primarily during the same period of time. But I can not ln which post will go viral and they are very rare occurrence anyway. Nothing, I've shared this year went viral, but 2017 will be the year this site see the most page views ever.

Less than 30 minutes ago I sent an email (the entire message is at the end of this post) to my entire mailing list. Anyone one who knows me is familiar with the theme. What makes this issue different is that it does not just deal with Black book sites; it deals with the entire Black owned World Wide Web and how little of it we own and control. Even I was alarmed because I'm having difficulty finding 50 websites with a meaningful level of traffic. What is so striking is that we spending so much time hyping the benefits of social media and we have completely overlooked our ownership. This is like bragging about how warm and comfortable Massa's house while most of us live in crappy shacks we don't even own. What puzzles me is that there is no outrage, no alarm, no concern? This why I find our bitching over a stupid Dove commercial so exasperating. But check this out. This is the very first response I received in reaction to the message was the following: Why is everything controlled by Alexa rank? Is Alexa "black-owned"? Is Howard University the only HBCU that is "Alexa-ranked" and is therefore on your list? What's up? I replied with the following message: Hi XXXXXXX, Everything is not Alexa ranked. I used a proprietary method of ranking websites The AALBC Score and that is Black owned. I find Akexa to be a rather poor indicator of judging the relative traffic of websites. I only use it to help me separate sites that get very little traffic from those that do. On that basis the Alexa Ranks is adequate. Of the HBCU’s I checked, Howard had the strongest overall AALBC Score. If you have any websites you’d like to suggest I more than welcome you to add them to the list of sites to be considered. The instructions are in my original email. Thanks for the feedback it was helpful. Peace, Troy Now this message is from my own tribe! This reader completely missed the point and spirit of my message. I'm not sure how I could have communicated my message any differently to help them understand my point. Does anyone see where I went wrong? So far this message, after only 32 minutes, is the most shared message I've sent in a long time, so it is apparently resonating with some readers. Which is encouraging. I just hope this issue gets some coverage and that Black folks start to patronize Black websites, before the web is complete owned by Amazon and Facebook owned websites. A few weeks ago, I created a list of “The Top 25 Black-Owned Websites.” Over the past week I've reviewed, improved, and expanded that effort. The result is a list of “The Top 50 Black-Owned Websites.” I’ve even come up with a ranking system to objectively score the relative strength of each website. The truth is, the list only has 38 websites. I’ve having a great deal of difficulty identifying 50 Black-owned websites who meet a rather moderate level of performance criteria, and I’ve evaluated hundreds of sites. I was so taken aback by the lack of large Black-owned websites, that I was compelled to write an article, “We Must Patronize Black-Owned Websites or Lose Them.” My goal is to raise awareness and to issue a call to action. Despite the fact that websites are easier than ever to create and more people have Internet access than ever before, Black websites are growing weaker, more difficult to find, and presumably less profitable. TROY, help me identify and promote our top Black-owned website’s by posting the website’s information on AALBC.com. Please share this message with anyone you think will help. We can’t allow a couple of social media websites and a search engine to serve as gatekeepers who control access to, and profit from, our culture on the web. Peace & Love, Troy Johnson, Founder & Webmaster, AALBC.com AALBC.com eNewsletter – October 16, 2017 - Supplemental © 2017 AALBC.com, LLC | 1325 5th Ave Apt 2K, New York, NY 10029

My buddy, Ron Kavanaugh, who runs the Literary Freedom Project, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign for his upcoming literary conference. Support Mosaic Literary Conferences’s Fundraiser Ron actually started a website dedicated to Black book before AALBC.com launched. He discontinued his website in 2014, for all the reasons reason I've lamented over the years. We met each other back in 1998 at a now defunct bookstore Nkiru Books in Brooklyn. One of the store's booksellers introduced us, because he was aware of both of our websites. Ron actually went to the same high school and graduated the same year I did, but we did not know each other in school (it was a big school). Interestingly, our friend, @Mel Hopkins, was also a member of that class (it was also great school).

I think i am typical of people who to whom all of these figures and statistics go over the head of. What i am curious to know about this battle between black entrepreneur Davids against white monopolistic Goliaths is whether there is any info that suggests that black web sites owned by white corporations are misleading black people, telling them lies, "controlling their narrative", not representing what's authentic and are a negative destructive force in the black community? Are these sites shaping back opinion - or are they shaped by black opinion? Is the fact that these sites, which attract a vast audience and provide a platform for black issues, represent profitable business ventures for their owners something that should be a major concern to anyone other than the black rivals of these white capitalists? I always have a problem with regarding consumers as victims if they take advantage of the useful, convenient and often valuable services made available to them by those who exist to serve them. Isn't there something to be said about reciprocation? (My turn to play the devil's advocate.)

So many things to ask and say about this clarion call but first, 1) what qualifies as a website? 2) Does a website with an owner's domain hosted on wordpress.com (DOT COM) or blogger.com qualify for ranking? 3) Or do you need to build on wordpress.org (DOT ORG) website with separate hosting. 4) What if it's a blog with a static page plus a single entry per day... 5)