Somewhere we find value at The Barking Crow is giving you all these occasional updates on where the enterprise stands. It’s an outward-facing exercise in its nature—we’re looping you in on our thoughts and plans—but it provides some inner clarity, by forcing us to write it all down. So, for both ourselves and the diehards, three thoughts about our approach as we enter 2023, and one note on my work:
Business vs. Art
We’ve alluded to this a few times, but over the last few years we’ve wrapped our heads around ourselves in a new way. The Barking Crow isn’t exactly a business. Legally, it’s one, and it functions like one in a lot of respects, but by our definition, “business” isn’t the word that describes us. “Business,” to us, means you looked at the market and found a spot you thought you could make money, then set about trying to make money in that spot. Business is more strategic than what we’re doing. What we’re doing is this: We create what we want to create and hope someone eventually—indirectly, in our case, because our eventual primary revenue source should be advertisements—pays us for that work.
We do rely on some strategy—we’ve been tailoring our written content more towards search engines since we cracked Google News last year—but we aren’t doing this because we think there’s an NIT/Joe Kelly/Fargo-shaped hole in the sports media market. We’re doing this because it brings us life.
That Said…
Expect to see ads soon on The Barking Crow. Potentially in the next few weeks. We want to be careful with these—our reader experience is essential, so we don’t want to be bogging down computers and phones or provoking ad clicks with pop-ups like Brad Davison drawing a charge—but we’re at the point where not having ads is a forfeiture of money. The only reason we don’t have them already is that we need to put together our Terms & Conditions, and those are sitting next to 112 of their closest friends on our sprawling to-do list.
Also, expect to see a website redesign at some point in 2023. Our design these last four years has served us well by being extraordinarily simple and not getting in the way, but it’s made it hard to browse casually (the recommended posts have always been a grab bag) and it lends itself to some staleness. We aren’t going to have automatically playing videos or anything of that sort, but we’re going to try to liven things up a bit and afford ourselves smoother integration with our social media efforts.
On the social media side, it’s an interesting time. Twitter is tumultuous right now. TikTok is a national security threat the degree of which is still being debated and may lead to dramatic changes in the social media landscape. Facebook and Instagram are bloated and scrambling but retain immense market power. YouTube has tons of users, and its revenue-per-user is in line with the industry, but it’s the one with which we’re least familiar in terms of what we could and should be doing there. Reddit has potential as a driver of traffic and a following-builder, but we’ve rarely set foot there, and it’s a traffic/follower acquirer rather than a monetizable end destination like the others on this list.
We continue to aspire to resurrect MilkTime, and we have a gameplan, but we need some revenue at our back to give that project a runway, so the only likely launch time for it at the moment is September. If it isn’t September, it’s probably 2024 or later.
The possibility of pivoting Stu’s Notes and Joe’s Notes—or at least Joe’s, which are more consistently read—into Substack-style email newsletters is on the table, in part or in full.
Our Aspirations
We have a bad tendency, historically, to talk a big game and accomplish ten percent of what we set out to do. The latter part isn’t the problem—we’re probably pretty close to maxing out our capabilities at all times—but we want to be clear that we’re trying to do most things, not planning on doing them. For better and worse.
Overall, the blog is doing quite well by objective measures and doing quite poorly by others. From 2019 to 2020, we grew traffic by roughly 350%. From 2020 to 2021, we grew it by roughly 50%. From 2021 to 2022, we grew it by roughly 50% again. These are great growth rates. Unfortunately, we started so small that for this to be a full-time enterprise, we need something like 500 times our current traffic (or a dramatic increase in our projection for revenue-per-pageview/follower/etc., which might happen when we launch ads but isn’t something we’re banking on happening). At that 50% growth rate, that’s 17 years away. We aren’t going to wait 17 years. Either we get back towards the 350% growth rate soon, at least for a few years, or we dramatically scale this blog back and seek other primary employment. Please click! Please follow! Please tell your friends!
Stuart McGrath
My role here has always been the hardest to define. NIT Stu’s role is clear enough, Joe Stunardi’s role is clearest, Fargo is a dog, I’m in some gaps. The place we’ve had the most success with my content was the Sunday Essays, though, and that’s why we started Austin 52—our new essay series—last week. Hopefully it gives some of what the Sunday Essays gave to readers, while giving me what I was trying to get out of those Austin poems last year, which was a memory of the way the months cycle around here, a city I love dearly and will almost definitely not inhabit forever. Also…we might hit the politics content. But we need to stay detached on that. No need to feed the beast.
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Thank you, as always, for reading and following The Barking Crow. If this is art, we couldn’t do it without your participation. So, for another year, thank you, and:
Bark.
Super interesting! Thanks for sharing!