Left-leaning “fact-checker” Snopes.com is now reaching out to the public for a half million dollars in funds to rescue them from their own bad management.
The site now has a page pointing to a site called SaveSnopes, which claims it is “in danger of closing its doors. So, for the first time in our history, we are turning to you, our readership, for help.” The reason? The free-to-use Snopes site has no sponsors, outside investors, or funding. It’s only source of revenue is online advertising. But that funding stream has been cut off.
“Unfortunately, we have been cut off from our historic source of advertising income,” explains Snopes. “We had previously contracted with an outside vendor to provide certain services for Snopes.com. That contractual relationship ended earlier this year, but the vendor will not acknowledge the change in contractual status and continues to essentially hold the Snopes.com web site hostage.”
CDN has had little interaction with Snopes as our posts have never come under their criticism. Only once did Snopes mention CDN and later retracted the post after realizing they had gone after the wrong organization.
It appears that a divorce may be the source of the issue:
However, according to a lawsuit between Snopes’ parent company, Bardav, and Proper Media, a media company filed on May 4, 2017, after a contentious divorce, Barbara Mikkelson sold her 50-percent equity in Bardav to Proper Media in July 2016. Further, “Defendant David Mikkelson (“Mikkelson”) has engaged in a lengthy scheme of concealment and subterfuge to gain control of the company and to drain its profits.”
The suit stated Proper Media was “already managing a significant amount of the operation of Snopes.” A Proper Media minority owner, Vincent Green, then allied himself with David Mikkelson. Since then, Proper Media claims, “Mikkelson conspired with Green to block Proper Media’s access to the personnel, accounts, tools, and data necessary to manage Snopes.”
Seeing liberal-leaning sites dying by their own devices isn’t something to cause despair. But, where one liberal fact-checker falls, 10 more will fill its place.
The amount of money that Snopes is asking for is large which raises questions – but not many more than then site’s questionable behavior had previously.
Snopes is raising money using GoFundMe. SaveSnopes’s goal is $500,000. In its first four hours, Snopes has raised over $50,000 from just under 2,000 donors. This funding campaign was started by David Mikkelson.
