Are We Witnessing the Autodestruction of Church Militant?

I've had little to say about the recent Church Militant vs SSPX kerfuffle because it was being covered in depth by other excellent sources. However, I recently began to wonder 'Why?' Why would CM engage in an obvious attempt to destroy one of the strongest bastions of Tradition in the Church?

I have a theory as to the answer. It looks to me like CM realised that they were a failing enterprise and thought that by stirring up an unneeded controversy they could recover from the slump they were in. Here are some statistics on CM's reach over the past year and a half.

In October 2018, CM was averaging just over 70,000 page views a day, their unique daily visitor count was around 1,400 per day, and their Alexa ranking was around 45,000. Not bad for a 'niche' site with a limited appeal to the general public.

The slump was beginning tho'. The slide continued until July 2019, when CM ran the shocking headline,  'Is the the SSPX Sheltering a Sexual Predator?' The answer, of course, was 'No', as is explained in both the official press release of the USA District of the SSPX and this article in Catholic Family News, by Matt Gaspers.

This calumnious attack on a Priest who was not even a member of the SSPX in an attempt to damage the Society resulted in a small 'bounce' in their numbers, bringing their page views back up to about 50,000 per day. Unique visitors and their Alexa ranking got a similar 'bounce' to around 1,000 per day and 63,000 respectively (The smaller the Alexa ranking, the more reach the site has).

However, moving on, their numbers continued to get worse and worse. Then, late last month they decided to go all in with an attack on the SSPX. Every technique of yellow journalism was used complete with lurid, sensational headlines, shoddy 'journalism', outright lies and false accusations, implications of corruption in the civil authorities involved, you name it, they've used it!

Has it helped? It doesn't seem to have done so. The last day logged shows they had 31,489 page views (about 45% of the number when logging began), 630 unique visitors (again, about 45% of the starting figure), and their Alexa rank had risen to 101,305 from 45,000.

Having stooped to lows to which even the Fishwrap wouldn't stoop, it looks like their latest attempt at saving their bacon has been a miserable failure.

I can't say that I'm sorry. There was a time that I followed CM closely. In the early days of this blog I often shared videos from their YouTube channel and articles from their website, and had them listed in the sidebar. Thanks to their descent into the filth of gutter 'journalism', I no longer follow them, have unsubscribed from their YouTube channel, and have removed links to them from the sidebar.

All the statistics cited above come from Trackalytics:

Trackalytics: Church Militant