Nice to see Lucire can still pick up kudos with Feedspot putting it into their top 100 fashion magazines, ranking it at 21st.
Not bad after 27 years, and going on 28, with a fraction of the budget of the multinationals.
We’re two behind Women’s Wear Daily, and three ahead of British Vogue.
We do miss a decent, curated list of websites. In this day and age, when you can’t trust search engines because of all the disinformation they index, and sometimes (in the case of Google) even fund and rank highly, a credible, human-edited selection is just what you need.
Curlie (formerly the Open Directory Project) still does one, and the fashion magazines’ sections are up-to-date; and Feedspot’s Anuj Agarwal has taken his time to produce something of his own accord. It’s well worth checking out.
I read the following from Prof Emeritus Christopher May, citing Ruchir Sharma in the FT:
a new round of tariffs from the Court of Tangerine Tyrant may not result in negotiations or retaliations, but rather (as it did in his first term) encourage countries (and blocs) to pivot away from US markets.
The direct quotation:
Since 2017, the US has abandoned talks on partnerships with the EU and Asia, and cut not a single new trade deal. Meanwhile, the EU has negotiated eight agreements and China has concluded nine, including a landmark 15-nation partnership in Asia.
Other than frictionless goods, it’s going to be tougher dealing with the US. Even though they didn’t pull out of the Universal Postal Union, it still became much more expensive for us to send anything there, and if their new president wishes to exit the Union again this time, and succeed, I expect prices to rise even more sharply. He may be targeting China, but it affects others, too.
Recently, too, printing in the US has shot up—we saw one price rise by 80 per cent over a few months, and if they implement tariffs, I can’t see that changing. The US doesn’t have much of its own paper—it imports it—and paper can make up half the cost of a print job.
We served the US market strongly with our fonts and websites, but certainly in the last decade demand for what we offer has shifted eastward. Prof May’s post on Mastodon suggests companies will do this even more consciously, and governments themselves are busy inking trade deals and leaving the US behind. All this will force trade away from the US.
That might not matter to those who supported Trump, but the fact is the US does not make everything it needs, and fortress America is going to make some things mighty expensive there, especially if the US is de-prioritized as an export market.
Last December, we issued a press release saying we would move to non-tracking ads during 2025 to preserve reader privacy. I doubt anyone picked it up because of the terrible timing. Or that the advertising publications we sent it to thought it a ridiculous notion, or that we were too small for such a move to have any meaning. Still, I thought it worthwhile.
I was vague about the timing because I wasn’t sure when we would conclude everything. Seems the advertisers have done it for us and we have now achieved that with this blog, Lucire, and Autocade.
During January, one of the ad networks served an ad across all our sites with a swear word and sexist material, including cartoon characters with female frontal nudity, and when I enquired with them—and asked if they were in a position to serve non-tracking ads—they remained silent.
The network was removed pending the investigation but since there’s no reply, it stays offline. We switched others off except for ours, where we know there are no trackers.
There may be exceptions where some old ad network code was hard-coded on to the page. As to the Tradedoubler affiliate ads, no fallbacks are there, so I believe that their tracking is only relevant as far as their merchants are concerned. Your data do not wind up going to Google. Tradedoubler’s a European firm, so they have better laws about privacy and data than US ones.
Lucire Rouge still has networked ads in its rotation, as do licensed Lucire websites.
Google et al have tentacles everywhere, so please continue to take what precautions you need to. You never know if a website theme has Google trackers. But we’ve stopped our ads being a Google tracking medium, to the best of our knowledge. I’m happy to stamp out any more that you find. My duty is to you for supporting us, not to a Big Tech outfit that funds and serves indexed disinformation.
And as the year of the dragon or taniwha concludes, may I wish everyone a happy New Year tomorrow.