ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. -- Soooooooooo much happening this week, and I spent most of it unexpectedly at PNC Park with Alex Stumpf on the 10-day IL, that I'm afraid this week's Site Stuff will simply be a reprise/update of the one from last week.
If you missed that, we launched a drive to get 500 one-year student subscriptions into the hands of the young men and women on the campuses in both Oakland and State College. So the goal will be 1,000 new students between the two schools, and the goal within that will be to make our product more accessible to the next generation of our readership.
So far, the score's a rout: Nittany Lions 74, Panthers 35
Here's how it works:
• If you're a Pitt or Penn State fan, email me directly with which one you are -- unless you're the only person on the planet who's both -- as well as how many $20 student subscriptions you'd like to contribute. As with our military program, both individual and multiple contributions are welcome and appreciated. My email: DK@DKPittsburghSports.com
• We'll keep a running tracker, updated daily, at the bottom of the home page on both the app and desktop. It'll run until both schools hit 500, but the winner, again, will be the one getting there first. And in turn, the leader/winner will have its school displayed above the other on our home page all through the football season.
• As soon as the commitments begin arriving, we'll begin offering codes for free subscriptions to students at both schools. We'll do that, as always, via social media.
This isn't to be taken super-seriously. Our coverage of Pitt, Penn State and other colleges doesn't ride on this. As I've shared in the past, though, it's close to impossible to operate the college beats on any cost-effective basis. If I'm being blunt, we'd be better off financially by just covering Steelers, Penguins and Pirates. But since the readers who do appreciate it have let us know how much they appreciate such coverage, we've occasionally tried stuff like this to keep it from being too much of a sunk cost.
Thanks in advance for all the support! Always!
ANNUAL KICKOFF SALE
We're in the final two days of our monster annual Kickoff sale, leading up to the Steelers-Bills kickoff in Orchard Park, and the only reason I'm mentioning it here is to avoid confusion on this one thing: It'll be entirely for subscribers who are 100% new to the site. So it won't apply to extensions, or returning subscribers who lapsed, or anything like that. Totally new.
Like every business, the biggest challenge is to attract people who've never heard of us. That's where this is being aimed, through a coordinated campaign on social media toward what I always call 'the outside.' Meaning people who don't know who we are as a company, who any of us are as individuals except for Ramon Foster. Meaning, in most cases, Steelers fans, because most fans of our city's football team don't live anywhere near here.
We're hoping to bring a bunch of them aboard -- we already have, actually -- and we're really stoked about this.
BIG, BIG WEEK!
As football approaches, all the numbers go up. Been that way since inception.
Article page views for the week were 628,791, our highest seven-day total since early 2020. We topped 100K on three of those days. Podcasts were at 130,461, an all-time record. Video views were at 93,773. And new subscriptions to the site were 148, though that comes with the huge asterisk of the big sale.
We love football.
WEEKLY APP TIPS
Sharing ways to make your app experience even better:
• Just in time for football, our developers at BoomPress performed two significant upgrades to the commenting platform, one addressing the speed of some of our bigger threads, like the one we'll have for Steelers-Bills, and the other addressing comments disappearing. They'll be welcoming your feedback in the live files on both subjects, beginning with the Pirates-Nationals series this weekend.
• We have NFL data! Also just in time for football, we've activated NFL standings, the Steelers' statistics and the Steelers' schedule, all easily accessed on our team page. We're pretty proud of these packages. They're updated around the clock, they're clean, easy to toggle and sortable.
• Want to find all our videos and podcasts easily? Just use the blue bar! This is the bar that spans the horizontal middle of the app's home page, and it features three other easy-to-access options, our TODAY schedule which includes the latest What's Brewing and staff locator map, plus separate tabs for all our VIDEOS and PODCASTS. And because of the sliding function to the content, it's simple to move through all four options.
THE MILITARY DRIVE: 625
We're striving to connect an unprecedented 2,000 military veterans to their favorite teams with free one-year subscriptions in 2021, and here's where we are after having 4 contributed in the past week!
• Requested by military: 643
• Contributed: 625
Thank you!
Every contribution counts, large and small, and they're all appreciated equally. Plain and simple, we don't reach our goal with just the big ones or just the small ones. All are appreciated. All are needed.
The cost of a single one-year military subscription is always $20. You can contribute one, or as many as you'd like. And the process couldn't be simpler: Email me directly at DK@DKPittsburghSports.com and let me know how many you'd like, and I, in turn, can thank you personally.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 628,791, our biggest total since early 2020 and up 15.8% from last week. Our most-read original piece was Cory Giger's interview with an AP pollster who snubbed Penn State, at 15,434. Broken down by team, articles on the Steelers brought 24.3% of our traffic, the Pirates 13.5%, the Penguins 11.6%, Penn State 7.1%, and Pitt 2.3%.
• Our new subscribers for the past week were at 148, up 53 from a week ago.
• Our new app downloads for the past week were 88 for Apple, up 49 from a week ago, and 75 for Android, down 4 from a week ago.
• Our podcast downloads for the past week were 130,461, up 2.1% from a week ago.
• Our YouTube video views for the past week were 93,773, down 23.4% from a week ago.
• We're at 42,396 (+107) followers on Twitter, we're at 37,151 (+2) followers on Facebook, we're at 14,566 (-1) followers on Instagram, and we're at 7,468 (+211) followers on YouTube. These figures are just for our official company accounts on each of those platforms, not including any of our individual accounts.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Random geographic fun, to be read in an Alex Trebek voice: Halifax, Nova Scotia soared into our top 100 cities for the past week at No. 78 with 4,195 views, no doubt because of the Sidney Crosby news. These were the other six Canadian cities to crack our top 100.