Every now and then, we like to update readers on what’s going on around here. Often, these updates lead to exercises in humility, because we say we’re working on things, those things never come to fruition, and we feel some embarrassment. Are we learning? Yes. Are we stopping the updates? No. Going around the horn, then:
Fargo
Fargo is back at daycare today for the first time since we got home from Christmas. After eight weeks on the injured list (is it still the injured list if an athlete’s sick?), she’s beginning her rehab assignment, and while we miss her around the office today, it’s been nice to get up to go to the bathroom without asking ourselves whether said bathroom trip will awaken a puppy who will then demand to play with us for an hour.
Hopefully, her intestines can handle what will likely be a mild increase in the amount of other dogs’ poop she’s eating. That, or the new food will have robbed her of her appetite for other dogs’ poop. Most of all, hopefully she’s having fun up there in Round Rock and comes home feeling good.
Money, Part I
At some point yesterday, this month became our third-highest month of pageviews in site history. On the one hand, this is good, especially with eight days left in the month. On the other, eight months this year (all of them but the ones between April and July) should, at their conclusion, be our highest-pageview month in history if we’re hitting our growth targets. In other words, we’re growing quickly, but we’re short of our (necessarily ambitious) targets.
Those of you here to read things—blog posts, essays, etc.—may be a little surprised to hear we’re experiencing this growth, since our content has slowed. The explanation is simple: We get the large plurality of our traffic from our analytical work, and specifically from our NIT Bracketology, where we’re one of effectively three players in the niche (despite Stu’s best efforts, we have friendly-enough relationships with the other two, but I’m getting sidetracked here). We’re hoping to build on this. We’d like the comedy and good-writing portions of the blog to carry weight, too, but it’s easier to get analytics out there, at least for us, so we’re leaning into that, easing up on the blog posts and essays in order to spend more time on bracketology and similar endeavors.
Joe’s Modeling
No, Joe is not going to be featured in any cologne advertisements in the knowable future. He is, though, working on smoothing out the bracketology model’s rough edges (Gonzaga should not be projecting as a 2-seed right now), and he’s been at work again on the NASCAR model. Nothing might come of the NASCAR model, but something might. We’ll see. (See? Getting better at not overpromising.) We’re hoping to have the bracketology updates into the model this week so we can keep the conference tournament season informative and fun for NIT fans and less tasteful college basketball fans alike, but again, we might not get there (really want to get there, though). Keep an eye out for a return of probabilities, our own Bubble Watch, and more of those PowerPoint-based graphics Stu’s been putting up with stock photos of teams’ nicknames lurking in the background. Again, though, might not happen!
Money, Part II
To dovetail back into the comedy side…
We’d really like to bring back MilkTime. We’ve been teasing it for years and working on it behind the scenes for many parts of those years. The best way it could happen, and we’ve mentioned this plenty over the last few months, seems to be merch sales. We’re looking to do a merch refresh (probably as soon as we get the bracketology squared away) with funds going towards the resurrection of your favorite dairy-adjacent podcast. If you’re interested in merch or have ideas for merch you’d like to purchase, please reach out. Doesn’t have to be MilkTime-specific, or even The Barking Crow-specific. We want to tailor our offerings to you. Doing otherwise kind of defeats the purpose.
Brackets!
Lastly, our summer brackets will be returning soon—we observe summer as beginning in April and ending in August, because 1) we live in Texas, so it’s already fairly hot, and 2) that’s what’s convenient with the college football and basketball schedules—so get brainstorming ideas. As with the merch, we want to tailor these to you. Although I have been told we’re going to do a “Worst Cities in America” bracket and just include the 64 most populous cities in Florida not named Miami, so apologies in advance for that.
