Site Stuff: All stocked up!

Nov 25, 2023 • 1:54 am

2.2K

There's Black Friday, there's Small Business Saturday and there's Cyber Monday. We're hardly some big-box, mall-bland retailer, but we definitely qualify for those latter two.

Our Downtown shop at 224 Fifth Avenue originally comprised no more than 10% of our projected budget entering 2023, but we're on a comfortable pace to clear that projection by the end of this month, never mind having December still ahead. That's because we'll almost -- though not quite -- double our shop revenues from a year ago, blowing through six figures on that front.

That's ... really uplifting, and in so many ways:

• The place has really become a labor of love for Dali, which I honestly hadn't seen coming. The plan all along was to hire help and kind of let it go autopilot, but she's taken possession, ramped up our stock both in quality and quantity -- anyone who's been here lately can attest to both -- and conducted and constructed everything around it. (Including the new, mega-monitor added to our display wall to show our TV commercial around the clock to customers and passersby! Just yesterday! See pic above!)

• Our event traffic's up, as we've become more of a known destination for fans coming to games of the Steelers, Penguins and Pirates. If they're from out of town or even out of the country, they've heard of us and made us a stop on their tour, particularly when staying at Downtown hotels, which are all the way back to 2019 norms for occupancy. A lot of that's due to the videos and podcasts introducing our brand to tons of new eyes and ears from all over. We've reached the point where more people bring up the multimedia than the written stuff. (Not really sure how I feel about that, but it's hardly up to me.)

• The single biggest reason for our uptick is that Downtown itself has regained more population, more vibrancy with thousands of workers returning to the offices. As a result, our quiet days from 2022 are now a lot noisier, in the best possible sense. More workers visit, more of our own 8,000-plus Downtown residents visit, and we're expecting to benefit from the new bus line directly linking all our major universities (Pitt, Duquesne, CMU, Carlow, etc.) to an end-point station that's a half-block away from us.

Between this and the opportunity we've had to meet so, so, so many of you in person ... it's been one of the most positive experiences we've had within this venture.

As for Cyber Monday ... I mean, this spot where you're reading this is still what we do, still what accounts for roughly half our revenue. So we'll be making an offer on the app/site front Monday.

But for this weekend, mostly just because it's fun, we're going to enjoy the mom-and-pop-shop angle! Come see us, dammit!

INSIDE THE WORKS

• It occurs to me that I might've never shared with anyone how our color-coding works on the Feeds. If that's true -- and I don't recall doing so -- the Feed entries marked with a vertical blue bar on the left will take you to our full articles, the ones marked with a red represent live coverage of a game or practice or other event, and the ones in yellow are just regular self-contained entries. Sorry about that!

• Before anyone asks, yes, Cory Giger will be traveling to wherever Penn State football plays a bowl game. Just as we've always done for both Pitt and Penn State in the past.

• As I've mentioned in a couple different comment forums, but putting it here, as well: All of our college basketball content will come in the forms of features, other articles and all four college Feeds. We will write stories. We will go to games. We will keep up. But we won't be treating hoops the way we do football. In the specific case of Pitt, there's just no gain to it for anyone. We traveled to all games last year, the locker room stayed closed, one or two players were (sometimes) brought out, videos of all such sessions were sent back to Pittsburgh so that the non-travel outlets would have them, too ... yeah, that was a nonsensical five-figure expense. My feeling is that very few here will notice the difference. And for what it's worth, Corey Crisan's very much behind this. He was the one to bring it up, actually. We'll be at the Pete when we can.

• Those little cartoon emojis of our full-time staff are now available only to the full-time staff. When you see one attached to your comment, consider it a sign that we've seen/liked/respected what you had to say.

• Can't say this often enough: The Feeds were only the first of a two-step process. The other is comments, and that hasn't even begun. They'll be a massive upgrade over what we have now. Soon enough.

• It's been more than a month now of being blissfully ad-free for subscribers. 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 1,024,295, with 41,922 unique users over the most recent full seven-day span. Our most-read original piece was my column from the Steelers' loss in Cleveland, at 37,754. Our 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 117,704, and our YouTube video views for the past week were 192,219.

• Our company social media accounts are at 51,555 followers on X, 40,230 on Facebook, 26,314 on YouTube, 14,942 on Instagram ... and already 3,045 on the new Threads!