The above cover for Milton White’s Cry Down the Lonely Night dates from 1954 and features art by Barye Phillips. The novel tells the story of Nora, who wants to be loved and constantly degrades herself looking for validation. Which brings us to the fact that today marks the end of our seventh year maintaining Pulp Intl., a run that began in November 2008 with the post at this link and has lasted far longer than we expected. That’s 2,555 days, and 3,114 posts on the site. We know—it’s shocking. It still doesn’t truly sink in.
For a while this was the most trafficked pulp-themed website in the world, as near as we were able to tell from our analytics measured against research we did about other sites. For an entire year we pulled in about 50,000 unique visitors a month. Since then Google has adjusted its rankings and is penalizing sites that aren’t fully compatible with various mobile apps.
What that seems to mean is though we still have killer traffic, thanks to all of you, we would have to rework Pulp Intl. to retain a high ranking—i.e., like Nora, we’d have to degrade ourselves looking for validation. But we’re not going to bother, because there will inevitably be even more streamlined internet interfaces, and we won’t fit into those either. So we think we’ll just stay as we are—imperfect, arcane, and incompatible with mobile tech. At least for now. Here’s hoping for more great years ahead.
