It's safe to say we've never had a year quite like 2022.
Let's count some of the ways:
• Overall revenues reached into seven figures for the first time. We still haven't done December's financials for me to be precise in this space, but heading into the final month, we'd been on pace to end up at around $1.1 million. And that's just ... wow, amazing. And honestly, it's not something we foresaw this fresh off the pandemic.
• Subscription revenue increased by 22%. That was helped, obviously, by a midyear price increase, our first of any kind since 2018. But within that, we also offered readers the option of paying literally however much they could afford. All they needed to do was reach out, and many did, understandably so. As a result, we were able to finish the year with a +778 active subscriber count. A good, good year on the written front.
• Podcast revenue -- not including videos or video versions of podcasts -- exceeded subscription revenue for the first time. And it did so by nearly doubling what it'd brought in 2021, multiplying by 1.7 times, to be exact. I've already got reason to believe that'll cool significantly in 2023, but the leap that was already taken was plenty welcome, to put it mildly. Within this, podcasts were downloaded 11,589,200 times, an 88% increase from 2021. Our unique listeners per day more than doubled.
• Video revenue, based almost entirely on YouTube, more than doubled with a 121% increase from 2021. And I've got to tell you, this one felt like a bigger deal than the podcasts, even though it represented less than a quarter of the podcasts' revenue. The growth rate and consistency of this area is exceptional. Within this, our videos were seen 6,227,904 times in 2022, a 64% increase from 2021.
• Our Downtown HQ/shop, officially opened April 29, 2022, made a modest profit over those first eight months. And if I'm telling the truth, I wasn't sure it'd happen that soon, given the extra overhead involved in starting from scratch. But our readers came through in a huge way on this front by buying more than $40,000 worth of what we called Building Bricks to put up on a wall inside the place, allowing us to make the surroundings as first-class as we could.
• Editorially, we expanded our full-time staff, including the hirings of Danny Shirey, Chris Halicke, Corey Crisan and -- finally with us all the way -- Cory Giger. We also took Ramon Foster's show daily and added Matt Williamson's invaluable NFL analysis in written and podcast form. But we also didn't forget where we came from, celebrating a seventh anniversary for Taylor Haase, our most tenured staffer, and a third for Alex Stumpf. It's quite the group. And because of the additional revenue and staff, we also returned to full-time, full-travel coverage of Pitt football, Pitt men's basketball and Penn State football. Our readers responded in a big way to having Penn State back and ... eh, they're getting there on Pitt. Let's just say the past few days were encouraging.
I'll tackle what's to come in 2023 in the next Site Stuff. Suffice it to say for now it's going to involve one very big initiative toward raising our overall coverage to the next tier.
INSIDE THE WORKS
• We'll soon be discontinuing our boxscores, statistics, standings and schedules. This is disappointing. I loved those and was even deeply involved in designing them. But no one was using them -- only 152 total page views in the past week -- and they cost well into five figures annually. That's just a poor usage of company funding, and hoping it'd reverse itself didn't amount to much of a plan.
• Those links on the blue horizontal bar across the team pages will be changed to offer readers portals to different types of content within those team pages, such as news, columns, minor leagues, draft, etc. It's existing content. Just another portal for reaching it.
• The Point Park University Friday Insider will undergo a significant change soon. And yet, it won't be a change at all.
• Another big point of emphasis in the coming calendar year will be dealing directly with our few remaining Lunatic subscribers, meaning the ones still on three-year subscriptions. That length/level hasn't existed since early 2020, so a lot of those are coming due. But they don't auto-renew, so we'll be going out of our way to contact everyone to ensure we keep them in the fold.
• Our developers at BoomPress are aware that the live files can get bogged down, and they're working on modifications to the servers to keep everything moving quickly.
• Yes, that means needing to enter a comment multiple times during a game.
• Travel on tap: We'll see what develops on the football front. If the Steelers make the playoffs, it'd obviously be on the road. Probably Kansas City again, with my luck. ... Taylor Haase will fly to cover the Penguins in Raleigh, N.C., next weekend, and I'll fly up to Ottawa midweek for the next trip.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 441,459, with our weekly goal being 500,000. Our most-read original piece was my Steelers-Ravens game column from Baltimore, at 9,315. Broken down by team traffic, articles on the Steelers brought 23.5% of our readership, the Penguins 16.6%, Pitt 6.3%, the Pirates 5.9%, and Penn State 5.8%.
• On the multimedia front, our podcast downloads for the past week were 124,775, with our weekly goal being 150,000, and our YouTube video views for the past week were 151,584, with our weekly goal being 150,000.
• Our company social media accounts are at 48,319 followers on Twitter, 38,553 on Facebook, 19,269 on YouTube, 14,783 on Instagram, 178 on TikTok.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com