Site Stuff: One day to get 91 more Military Drive contributions!

Nov 10, 2023 • 1:02 am

3.1K

We've got one day to get 91 more!

Our annual Military Drive, aimed at connecting 1,000 veterans of our Armed Forces to a one-year subscription, added 46 more subscriptions on Thursday alone -- including a single purchase of 15! -- raising our total to 909 as we move into the final hours of our deadline of Veterans Day tomorrow.

Here's how this works:

• We sell a military subscription for $20, covering a full year for any veteran. That's one-third of the regular price. However many you'd wish to donate, even if it's just one, email me at DK@DKPittsburghSports.com, and Dali will do the processing.

• We offer, through our menu and through social media, a full year free to all military. We've always covered active-duty military, but this program covers veterans, as well. The latter was our readers' idea back in 2017, which is how this got started.

• Everyone getting the military subscription gets all the ongoing benefits of being a member here, notably the ad-free experience, the commenting community, Live Qs with reporters, exclusive meetups, etc.

This obviously won't be easy, but it's doable. We've done it before and, in fact, we've never done fewer than 1,000 since this program was inspired by readers in 2017. Last year, we ended up exactly at 1,000, and we hit that two days before the deadline. A close call, but we made it.

This has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of this almost-10-year ride at DK Pittsburgh Sports, and on so many levels. We began offering active-duty for free right at launch in 2014 and, later that year, when we finally got Google Analytics connected to the site, I was able to see a pattern of several readers popping up around the same time every night from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from other military locations and bases worldwide. It was an amazing feeling. And since then, we've heard from countless military who not only enjoyed being connected to their favorite teams and fellow fans, but also eventually became contributors themselves.

This is the plan: I'm going to leave Site Stuff near the top of the home page and continuously count down the number in the headline, with literally each contribution, OK?

EXPANDING THE OFFER

We had a strong response to our job solicitation for the baseball beat vacancy, and it was so encouraging that we expanded it to encompass ... well, everything.

We're never really not hiring, so there's no harm in making that known and seeing what kind of candidates might come along. Plus, it only enhances the chance of getting what's actually the most valuable, and that's a reporter able/willing to do more than one thing. So if we put out nothing but Pirates, then we'll only get Pirates back, which is needlessly limiting.

Excited about this. Some really uplifting personalities among the entries to date.

NO MORE TITLE SCREEN!

It's been almost a month now of being blissfully ad-free for subscribers, albeit with a few lingering hiccups, and that now includes the elimination of the spinning DKPS/advertiser logo upon each refresh. Now, all a refresh means is a refresh of the page. Much faster, cleaner.

It's still avoidable: If you aren't subscribed yet or if your subscription's expired: this is our new subscribe page. Make sure you're logged in, tap on the link, and thumb down to the bottom for the SUBSCRIBE button to buy/renew at the monthly or annual level. We also have our new pages completed for student subscriptions and senior subscriptions.

BACK TO BUSINESS

• Our page-view numbers for the past week were an all-time record 1,029,652, with 48,265 unique users over the most recent full seven-day span. (Helped hugely by having not one but two Steelers games in that span.) Our most-read original piece was my column from the loss to the Jaguars, at 31,957. Our full top 10 files, right from our Google Analytics page, are at the bottom of this section.

• On the multimedia front, our podcast downloads for the past week were 134,771 and our YouTube video views for the past week were 125,207.

• Our company social media accounts are at 51,474 followers on X, 40,081 on Facebook, 25,690 on YouTube, 14,939 on Instagram ... and already 2,875 on the new Threads!