“October 7 forced everyone who works on Palestine to respond to the urgency of the moment. For Mondoweiss, that meant expanding our reporting.”
Adam Horowitz
Our Mission
Mondoweiss is an independent website devoted to informing readers about developments in Palestine/Israel and related U.S. foreign politics. We provide news and analysis regarding the struggle for Palestinian human rights unavailable through the mainstream media.
Letter from Adam Horowitz, Executive Editor
Dear Friends,
October 7 forced everyone who works on Palestine to respond to the urgency of the moment. For Mondoweiss, that meant expanding our reporting.
With the support from donors, Mondoweiss has been strengthening our newsroom in Palestine and the United States for several years. Most noteworthy has been the addition of our Gaza correspondent, Tareq Hajjaj, who continues reporting while surviving the most heart-wrenching conditions, and Mohammed El-Kurd, who joined Mondoweiss as Culture Editor in August. In addition, we also recruited new Palestine-based correspondents to help publish daily news dispatches since October 7 (for 81 days and counting) and report overlooked stories throughout Palestine.
Today, our team is providing critical coverage documenting the impact of Israeli apartheid, coverage that will hopefully lead to accountability.
Your investment in our team is what makes this reporting possible. As heartbreaking as knowing all the harrowing details is, not knowing them is worse. We thank you for making our work possible and for your readership and support.
For 2024, our commitment is to continue reporting the news that mobilizes people to action and helps fuel the Palestine solidarity movement.
In solidarity,
Adam
The year in numbers
Readership
- Over 3 million visitors visited our website. This is a 115% increase over 2022.
- We saw over 5.9 million pageviews (individual pages viewed). This is a 107% increase from last year.
- There are over 25,000 subscribers to our email newsletters. Our high-value email offerings saw a 40% increase in subscribers from October 2023.
Mondoweiss provides reporting from and about Palestine that you cannot find elsewhere. Particularly in times of conflict, people turn to us for vital context.
In the chart below, the light green illustrates the visitors to our site, and the dark green shows the pageviews our site has handled over the past three months.
This huge surge in traffic brought increased operating costs, adding around $1,000 per month that we are still carrying.
Website Top 5 Articles
Social Media Performance
For the last two years, Mondoweiss has expanded its social media reach by increasing its content creation. In particular, our short videos intended for Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts have a record number of views. However, as with many other Palestine-related content, our accounts have been subject to censorship by deactivating our accounts, restricting the number of viewers for certain posts, and post removal, among other restrictions.
Our content across five key platforms – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok – has reached over 68,500,000 people. Here are some highlights from 2023.
Instagram Growth
We had seen steady, though somewhat slow, growth in followers on Instagram over the course of the year. Obviously, the events of October 7 changed that. Our Instagram account now has over 130,000 followers and keeps on expanding thanks to the quality of the short-form videos published weekly.
Standout Instagram Content
9.7 million views
2.4 million views
578,000 views
Twitter / X Growth
Twitter / X continues to be a key social media platform for publishers. Our follower count and engagement have grown steadily throughout the year, especially following October 7.
Standout Twitter Content
Here are a few high-performing Tweets. Visit our profile to see more.
YouTube Growth
YouTube’s short-form video format, Shorts, has grown in popularity throughout the year. We published a few of these earlier in the year that went viral and sparked a wave of large subscriber growth. This growth continues following the events of October 7. We have capitalized on this by regularly publishing more of the Shorts videos and recently launching a new interview program, Witnessing Palestine, to retain our new subscribers.
Last year, we published an in-depth documentary called Inside Israeli Apartheid, which looked at the mechanics of the system Israel built to control Palestinian life. Following the October 7 attacks and Israel’s genocidal response, viewers turned to that video to help understand the context. It is now the most-viewed long-form video on our channel, with over 150,000 views.
Standout YouTube Content
Podcast Growth
In 2023, we published 16 episodes of The Mondoweiss Podcast, one away from completing our 70th episode. We have over 1,000 subscribers across the many different platforms available to listen to podcasts. We also publish these episodes on YouTube and Facebook. Here are a few of our standout episodes from this year.
Engagements and partnerships
During 2023, our work and staff were featured in other media, including MSNBC, Al Jazeera, USA Today, and Democracy Now.
Mondoweiss collaborated with diverse organizations, including The Jerusalem Fund, The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, The Real News Network, and others. We published and highlighted the important organizations working towards liberation, such as Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Palestine Global Mental Health Network, the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, Palestine Action, the BDS movement, Progressive International, and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Giving Numbers
Mondoweiss has very loyal donors who understand that this struggle is a long-term undertaking. Here are a few top-level insights about our supporters:
- Between January and December 2023, Mondoweiss received donations from 3,188 individual donors, including 828 recurring gifts.
- 172 donors have been donating for 10 years or more.
- 580 have been Mondoweiss donors for 5 years or more.
Financials
Mondoweiss works with a Fiscal Year starting on September 1 and concluding on August 31. These numbers are from the previous fiscal year 2022-2023. For the fiscal year, Mondoweiss approved a deficit budget for the first time due to significant organizational growth with the hiring of several staff members in Palestine and the U.S. We used $85,000 from our reserve fund.
Revenue
Individual donors: $744,238
Foundations $120,800
Merchandise and other income: $5,746
Total: $870,784
Expenses
Operations: $141,739
Technology & Video Production: $74,464
Personnel: $694,980
Freelance Articles $44,760
Total: $955,943
Your support is critical
With your support, we will continue covering the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the ongoing events in Gaza, as well as amplifying the Palestine movement worldwide. Together, we will make sure to keep reporting Palestinian stories, even when the rest of the world looks away.