WASHINGTON, Pa. -- Small businesses everywhere have struggled through the ongoing pandemic, and ours certainly hasn't been an exception.
In particular, our programmatic advertising -- the random Google-type ads that can be found in articles on our app and site -- has completely cratered. We're still receiving barely a fraction of what we'd get as recently as a year ago. Most of the rest has held firm, but that one's really hurt.
Again, though, our story's hardly unique.
That tough-looking hombre up there atop this piece is Erich Cushey, the owner/operator of Curtis Pharmacy in the heart of Washington County. He's warm, wonderful, passionately committed to his business and, as he's proven in countless ways these past few months, committed to his community. While big-chain pharmacies were forcing seniors to find rides or other commutes to their stores to get vaccines, the Cusheys and everyone else at Curtis were taking the vaccines right to the seniors. They'd go right into the homes, the high-rises, remote locations, whatever it took.
Total vaccinations to date: 6,000.
Amount he'll need to administer just to break even on the costs accrued: 10,000.
Well, here's hoping he makes out with a whole stash of cash out of this, even if it isn't his motivation. People like Erich and his wife Tina have it coming. They matter. They make a difference.
I drove down there this week for my own first shot of the Moderna vaccine. I'm legit 1A status, so I could've gone a ton of places much closer to Downtown, but this just felt right. And it was great to see Erich, as well as the refurbished, relocated store, now on much higher ground than the previous spot that was regularly underwater.
Erich says they're doing fine now, ideally getting ready to take off with the world returning to normal.
What's this have to do with us?
Well, everything.
Erich and Curtis Pharmacy have been with us from the very beginning. They're among our smallest clients, but I'm here to tell you, they're valued every bit as much as Point Park University, our title sponsor, and we don't hide it. In fact, we're proud of it. We love being able to share with prospective business clients how long we've been associated with great people at Point Park University, Moon Golf Club, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the many other current ones who've been with us for a while, as well. We'd like to think it sends a message about what we offer in return, as well as the caliber of their own brands.
We'd love to build that bond with your business, too.
I'm going to be blunt here: I put out a call a couple weeks ago for sponsorship of our newly expanded -- and expensive -- baseball coverage. We had one ad exec reach out, which was appreciated, but nothing else happened. And that's deeply disappointing. It really is. Not so much from the woe-is-us standpoint, but more from the standpoint that it still feels like we have to prove we're not some charity case.
We aren't that. We'll work our tails off to help your business grow, every bit as much as you'll help ours.
Email me personally if you're even marginally interested, and we can at least discuss what we offer: DK@DKPittsburghSports.com
I'll be delighted to hear from you.
WEEKLY APP TIPS
Sharing ways to make your app experience even better:
• We can add images into comments now!
Just find an existing photo or GIF anywhere on the Internet, including this site, copy the image's URL -- that's the web address assigned to that photo -- and paste it into your comment. Boom.
We can't yet add videos, the way we could on the old site, but we'll get there.
Our previous two tips:
• Check out the TODAY button on the app. It's out front on the horizontal blue stripe. Once you tap it, you'll see a schedule unfurl. That's updated every day, complete with links, and it lays out our coverage plan, as well as details of our covered teams' plans for the day. And under that, you'll find the just-mentioned What's Brewing feature that poses a weekly survey for our community, welcomes new users and, of course, includes our staff map.
• Try our new standings, statistics and schedules offered on our Penguins page, on the blue horizontal stripe near the top. These are packages we designed ourselves, with our usage preferences in mind, as we hope you'll experience when you search for information. Also, within the schedules, you can find boxscores current and past. The aim is to have these function live as the game's progressing, though we aren't there yet. We also aim to have Major League Baseball updated by opening day.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 490,478, down 8.2% from the previous week. Our most-read original piece was my column on JuJu Smith-Schuster's signing, at 10,624. Broken down by team, articles on the Steelers brought 27.8% of our traffic, the Penguins 25.6%, the Pirates 11.6%.
• Our new subscribers for the past week were at 54, down 27 from the previous week.
• Our new app downloads for the past week were 63 for Apple, down 17 from the previous week, and 129 for Android, up 97 from the previous week. (We just began a paid boosting program on the latter.)
• Our podcast downloads for the past week were 83,733, up less than 1% from the previous week but still yet another single-week record. That also included a record day of 17,173 on Thursday, our first time over 17K.
• We're at 40,086 (+156) followers on Twitter, we're at 37,115 (+12) followers on Facebook, we're at 14,446 (+2) followers on Instagram, and we're at 1,151 (+17) followers on YouTube. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
• More fun: Name the U.S. state where we had our fewest app users this past week. One hint: Alaska had only 75 users, and this state had one less than that.
