Our new app's been in our subscribers' hands for nearly a month, and I hope you've noticed it's become only better since the launch, thanks to multiple updates.
Maybe I can make it even better right here.
Any time there's new tech in our lives, it can take time to figure it all out. So, with that in mind, I whipped up this list of five fun things you might not have known that it already offers:
• Activate those alerts: We have a lot of readers asking what happened to app alerts. Well, they're there, and they work, but you've got to turn them on yourself. Do that by tapping your profile button in the top left corner, scroll down to Preferences, tap Select, then choose which alerts you'd prefer to receive ... or not.
• Check our hottest stories: When you have a commenting screen open, go to the blue stripe across the top and tap Trending. You'll then see a list of our most visited articles of the day. You can either tap the article to go read it, or you can go directly to the comments for that article. (I love this one!)
• The Brewing schedule: I handle this myself. It's a daily schedule of everything our teams -- and we, in turn -- are doing, listed chronologically. Interview sessions, practices, games, radio/TV hits, everything. This idea was brazenly stolen from, of all places, the Dallas Cowboys' official app, which was among my favorites in researching this. (I won't admit that the Baltimore Ravens' app was another.)
• Sideways stats: We've still got work to do on our statistical packages, but one thing you can try already is, when checking our team stats, thumb across to see everything that's there. It's funny, but when I was going over this with our developers a few months ago, they asked which stats we'd prefer. To which my natural reply was, 'Um, all of them?' So this was how we arranged it. You'll see tons of detail.
• Hyper-local colleges: We can't cover everything, obviously, much as we'd like. But we can be a portal for the stuff we can't cover. If you open up our menu, the one that comes out from the side, find the tabs for 'Minor Leagues' and 'Other Colleges,' and you'll see connections to every minor-league franchise within an hour or so of Pittsburgh, as well as every college with an athletic program inside Allegheny County. Everything from the Youngstown Phantoms to Point Park University right here in Downtown.
There's a lot more there, too. Best advice I can give: Poke around. Try things. See what's there.
Any questions on any of this, I'll be in comments. If you're having actual issues, email Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
PAGE VIEWS BACK!
As you'll see below from the return of our familiar tracker of page views, we're reconnected to Google Analytics. (And doing really well ... maybe.)
Additionally, because many readers spoke of missing those little markers on all our articles showing page views and comment count, those will be back soon on the home and team pages. Same place they were before, embedded onto the top right corner of the photo thumbnails.
ON PENN STATE, DUQUESNE
We're resuming full coverage of both Penn State football and Duquesne basketball in 2020, Jarrod Prugar on the former and Noah Hiles on the latter, and the objective is to do these right. Which, of course, costs money.
Continuing our perpetual policy of transparency with this stuff, we can't afford to cover either without the proper support. So that'll involve our subscribers coming through, primarily through reading and sharing but also, ultimately, buying gift subscriptions we'll soon be offering attached to each school. From there, it'll involve getting support from a sponsor for each one.
Could that be your business?
We've updated our Media Kit, but you also can just reach out directly to She Who Is Boss: Dali@DKPittsburghSports.com
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our daily page views, averaged out over the past week, were 141,897 ... maybe. We're honestly not sure at the moment, since we've only just and it's probably best to let this play out a while before getting too pumped. Our goal forever has been to average 100,000, and now suddenly we're way over that. We'll see.
• Our most-read original article was Dave Molinari's coverage of the Patric Hornqvist trade, at 23,924. Broken down by team, we had 281,145 views for Penguins, 179,124 for Steelers, 143,678 for Pirates, 10,403 for Pitt.
• Our podcast downloads for DK Sports Radio original content were 47,369. That included another day over 10,000. Our immediate goal is to top 50,000 per week, and we've achieved that now twice in four weeks.
• We're at 37,272 (+94) followers on Twitter, we're at 36,786 (+15) followers on Facebook, we're at 14,756 (+24) followers on Instagram. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
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