Site Stuff: What a (half) year it's been!

What a year this is shaping up to be.

And I can state that in complete confidence since it's already been a wonderful half of a year.

Yesterday closed out the first six months of 2022, and it's safe to say we've never before shown across-the-board growth at DK Pittsburgh Sports in so many categories and to such a degree. I very rarely discuss revenue in terms of dollars -- no company does that -- but I'm certainly comfortable sharing the percentage increase we've experienced in comparing this Jan. 1-June 30 vs. Jan. 1-June 30 of 2021:

• Subscription revenue: +9.5%
• Podcast revenue: +155%
• Video revenue: +342%
• Sponsorship revenue: +22%

And that's to say nothing of new revenues being generated by the new Downtown HQ/shop, our online sales of some of that same merchandise and other smaller elements. In fact, the only area of any decline at all was the -2.1% in programmatic advertising, and that was done deliberately because we needed to shut down for a spell to kill a malicious ad.

All of which has us on pace for record full-year revenues by a margin of 20% or even more.

It's been a long time coming, my friends, but this is what it's like to be running a business the way one's supposed to run a business. We've never once missed a payroll or payment to anyone, but there were times, believe me, that we had to dig deep, even into personal finances, to pull it off. And there were a lot of sleepless nights. But over the past couple years, particularly with the podcasts bursting into our world, we've finally been able to find wholly solid footing.

This is why we've been able to hire the people we have this summer, why we've been able to bolster all three big-league beats, why we've been able to commit to colleges like never before, why we've been able to ... you know, breathe. At the same time, anyone who knows our collective personality, meaning Dali and me, knows we aren't about to settle. We've got plans for further growth, one of which we hope to announce as soon as next Saturday.

Thanks so much to all of you for making this happen. We never forget around here that it's a front-end process. Everything starts with you.

UPDATED TV AD

We've updated our TV ad to reflect more prominent roles in the company for Taylor Haase and Alex Stumpf, in addition to featuring Ramon Foster. The rest's unchanged, but for a few tweaks:

Our thanks, as ever, to the great Thad Christian of Mount Washington-based Phenomenon Post.

We utilize the ad mostly on social media, but we're discussing buys on old media -- meaning TV -- for this fall and winter. I'm not sure if those will happen, if only because, the more I've been involved in all forms of old and new media, the more I've learned about how great the misperception is about the difference between the two.

Let's put it this way: We get very good -- and verifiable -- data on all our programming here. We know what our numbers are. In TV and radio, where they still rely on the archaic Nielsen method of tracking a handful of households in each market, it's borderline fiction. In TV, for example, if someone leaves their sets on while falling asleep through a Sunday night football game, everything else that airs gets counted. For real.

Gradually, advertisers are realizing that and gravitating toward online video and podcasting. And never more than in the past two years.

We'll see. It'd have to be a good deal.

INSIDE THE WORKS

• Taylor Haase and I will fly up to Montreal at mid-week to double-cover the NHL Draft. Danny Shirey will write a daily -- yes, daily -- Drive to the Net until we've got all the draft picks detailed.

• Lots of in-depth stuff planned and being executed. Chris Halicke and Eddie Provident have the first such assignment.

• Open up our menu on the site or app, tap on 'Our staff,' and you'll now find all our smiling faces. New head shots, too, taken at the HQ/shop last week. More to come on this front.

• Dale Lolley will be on vacation July 8-18, back in plenty of time for the opening of the Steelers' training camp in Latrobe a week later. Chris will track any news, and Matt Williamson will be more involved in Dale's absence, as well.

• All-new features on Duquesne and Robert Morris, including one-on-one interviews with the programs' respective head coaches, are up on those schools' respective team pages, thanks to Andrew Mundy and Jarrod Prugar.

• Anyone in favor of having that day's Live Qs at 5 featured higher up on the home page?

• How about a return to the old feature I did forever ago on my favorite things about the city?

BACK TO BUSINESS

• Our page views for the past week were 361,247. Our most-read original piece was -- I swear -- last week's Site Stuff, at 6,023. Broken down by team traffic, articles on the Pirates brought 21.8% of our readership, the Penguins 15.9%, the Steelers 12.4%, Penn State 2.2%, Pitt 1.4%. 

• Our podcast downloads for the past week again were out of whack, due to a strange spike about a month ago. They're getting closer to normal. Once they're back down to the level we feel is more accurate, I'll share again.

• Our YouTube video views for the past week were 81,341.

• Our company social media accounts are at 45,605 followers on Twitter, 37,706 on Facebook, 14,539 on Instagram, 14,640 on YouTube.

• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com

• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com