We’re nearly two months into 2023, so on the cusp of our busiest weeks, it seemed like a good time to give the faithful a check-in on how things are going here at The Barking Crow. (Just kidding, I was just due for a blog post and didn’t have any quicker ideas.)
Results are good. Pageviews is the metric we track around here, and those are up. In January, site traffic was 155% better than 2022’s (not 55%, 155%), and we’re tracking for a similar performance this month, set to pass last year’s February total later today, with the days only growing as we approach Selection Sunday. One of the fun things about running an operation that started so small is that the growth rate is enormous. Today alone, we had double the pageviews we’d get in individual months three years ago. And 2020 was a good year for us! There is, though—as always—a long ways to go. 155% is good, but we want (and possibly need) to do better.
Content on the site is also, I would opine, good. We’re keeping some variety in our blog posts, we’re covering more sports than just our niches, the daily notes from Joe and Stu have loyal readerships and catch a search-engine wave here and there. There’s still improvement we’d like to make—some days we’re scrambling and the notes come out late or short or both—but we’re happy enough with our content right now, which is a big deal for us. Our blog posts are our fundamentals. They’re the core of what we do. It’s important that we do them well, and it’s heartening to feel good about them even as things start to get chaotic.
We’re still struggling to get our predictive models where we’d like them to be. Our bracketology model is doing fine, but we’re late on improvements and expansion that could add a lot to fans’ experience. Our motorsports models are nowhere to be found, we never got bracketology built out for women’s basketball, and college baseball and softball are underway with nothing from us on the subject. This is an ongoing process, but it’s an area of focus right now, and to be honest, we aren’t having a ton of success making it happen.
Our social media content is also not what we’d like it to be. This isn’t as bad as many assume—social media can be overrated in importance, even in the realm of digital media. We get the giant majority of our traffic through search engines, with another sizable chunk coming from readers who stumbled across us and have since stuck around (you all are our favorites, by the way—I can’t say how deep it hits when strangers loyally follow our work). With Twitter so unstable right now, this is heartening, but we want a more robust presence on all social media. That would help in a few ways: pulling traffic to the site, establishing connection with readers/followers, and building an alternative platform for ads. Also, having a healthy social media presence outside of Twitter would help give people a place to find us if Twitter does kick the can.
We haven’t gotten ads on the site yet, which is probably a bonus for the user experience but is costing us some money. That’s on the list, but we’d rather offer things worth reading for free than place ads alongside crap. The content has to come first. We’ll get the ads up there soon enough.
The Austin 52 essay series did not pan out. This isn’t terrible for the site—my stuff is always the most peripheral, and it’s almost entirely independent from Joe’s and Stu’s—but I enjoy writing the essays and we know a lot of you enjoy reading them, so we’re hoping to get something else of that ilk going again soon.
Overall, it’s heartening to list all these things we want to do and are trying to do and aren’t successfully doing and to then turn around and see the site performing as well as it is. Pageviews are up. Twitter followers are up. We aren’t doubled over with fatigue yet, even as March’s madness approaches (there was some of the fatigue this weekend—this Bridge Mode for the bracketology is a killer, which made Saturday a very early morning around the nest). Fargo is healthy and happy and has amassed a great collection of sticks on the balcony. Things are good. We’re starting to suspect that we’re maxing out what we can do with our current staff, and that we may need to expand our personnel a little in the near-ish future, but we should have the revenue to do some of that expansion soon as well. We are in a healthy spot a few months into our fifth year, and that is good. There is so much work to do, but things are going well.
Thanks, as always, for being here, and to those of you here specifically for NIT season: Enjoy the ride. It’s looking like a good one, if all that search traffic coming in from the states of North Carolina and Nebraska is any indication.
‘Til next time,
Bark.
