Fandom Pulse Facebook Page Gets Pulled Down
Random outage follows months of traffic throttling by Google
Fandom Pulse, a pop and nerd culture news site that has been managed by novelist, vlogger and comics publisher Jon Del Arroz since late 2023 has seen its Facebook page struck this evening following months of Google throttling traffic to the site.
The site, which features commentary, reviews and news that often highlights recent flops and controversies from mainstream entertainment, had been gaining steam with its audience since around March thanks to sustained coverage / mockery of the recent season of Doctor Who. It was around this time that a noticeable drop off in traffic became apparent.
“FP has been hit before. Google slaughtered us in the middle of March. We were growing very fast and they stopped showing us in search results,” Del Arroz told me via DM. He provided analytics to back up his claim.
This morning, Del Arroz says he was greeted with a wave of warnings against spam posts. “Literally every fandom pulse article I ever posted was getting flagged as spam, so I had to sift through a thousand Facebook pop up notifications before I could even use the site. Then I started getting messages from everyone saying their posts were all taken down, too.”
The current season of Doctor Who, which topped Jodie Whittaker’s female Doctor with Ncuti Gatwa’s gay (and lame) and black Doctor with a drag queen antagonist thrown in, has been hemorrhaging viewers since its May 10 premiere. When the mainstream media’s usual charm offensive fans have become accustomed to didn’t manage to gain any traction, they proceeded to sink to levels of desperation that would make Heather Antos actually feel something akin to shame and blamed the fucking weather.
Fandom Pulse had plenty of criticism and derisive speculation regarding the show’s quality and future, saying, “The episodes released so far are nonsensical and don’t honor Doctor Who at all, while Ncuti Gatwa’s performance is over the top, sniveling, and lacking the gravitas of The Doctor. Bad Wolf has claimed he’s contracted through 2029, but with ratings like these, can he possibly last that long?”
Being that Facebook only lists two reasons for content being removed, and it seems unlikely that Fandom Pulse was thought to be misrepresenting another organization, Del Arroz believes this latest speed bump to be a flagging campaign launched by a short bus’ worth of gender confused hyperfragile lame and gay NuWho fans.
“I have been getting mega views on the site and on YouTube for my Doctor Who coverage this last week so my gut feeling is woke Doctor Who fans mass reported me, but I can’t be sure.”
Fandom Pulse could potentially find a future on Substack. As a member of the Upstream team who made the migration from a dedicated domain to this platform, it’s a move I’d recommend. You can check in with the latest developments on Fandom Pulse’s X feed here.
Just Facebook being Facebook. As far as the Google hit in March, I know of several blogs/site that depend on Google ad revenue that got hit in similar fashion in March, as well as once or twice late last year. They've been monkeying with the algo and the content creators all took a big hit.
Sometimes crap happens without it being the world just out to get you only. All you can do is figure out how to adjust/fix it and move on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can't speak for Facebook, but my own YT channel got kicked in the gut right around the same time, my ad revenue/reach is about a third of what it used to be. Shadiversity has been facing the same existential threat to his (much larger) channel since the beginning of the year, he actually pulled up his analytics and found that his videos are mostly getting pushed to existing subscribers. Nobody new is watching his stuff, or seeing it.
A lot of YouTubers discuss that ratio--anywhere from 40 to 70% of their viewers aren't subbed, so if suddenly your videos only get pushed to subscribers, your reach is brutally shortened.