The TD Box Score - 5/19-5/25

News
We started some partnerships that are leading to new visitors. The most obvious was with the digital arm of KFAN.com, where you can now find our daily recaps. We also started a partnership with a new programmatic ad partner, AdThrive, and to explain why that’s important, I need to talk about something I should talk about more.

Did you know that if you submit a story to your blog on Twins Daily, and we like it enough to edit and promote it to the front page, you get paid all the programmatic ad revenue that your story generates from people reading it? Or that it also works if we ask you to write a story, or a game recap? No? That’s because I’m really crummy at remembering to tell people about it. So here’s how it works:

If you write a story that appears on Twins Daily’s front page, we track the reads it has. At the end of the quarter, we pay you those reads times the average blended rate we get for displaying programmatic ads. That number is way less that our writers deserve, but it’s what we get paid, so we pass it all along to you.

AdThrive seems to be generating better rates for ads than we have had in the past, and that has us pretty excited about being able to give our contributing writers a raise at the end of 2Q. Their creativity and passion is the fuel on which the site runs, and I’ve been trying for several years to generate better results in this area, so I’m very encouraged to see the results.

Ok, let’s get to why we started freaking out….

Overall Traffic Last Week

• Users – 45,589 (up 168% from 2018)
• Sessions – 105,910 (up 100% from 2018)
• Page Views – 285,486 (up 59% rom 2018)

So, yeah, that’s why we were freaking out. And even those numbers probably undersell the new traffic, because a lot of the partnerships didn’t kick into gear until Friday. Friday, by the way, was the second highest number of visitors we have ever received.

(You’re wondering about the highest, right? It was back on July 21^st of 2015, and you’ll never guess what the topic was that drew so much traffic. In fact, I’m going to keep you waiting until the end of this story.)

Stories
There were 32 stories on Twins Daily last week, and one of the reasons we had such big traffic on Friday is we had so many great stories that day:

• Tom wrote about Rocco Baldellig being a coddling millennial.
• The news about Brusdar Graterol being a Target Field break the day before
• Ted Schwerzler dove into Jorge Polanco’s success.
• New writer Andrew Gebo recapped the Twins eight-run explosion.
• Nick explored adding to the Twins bullpen.
• Stu poked fun at Twins fans increased expectations
• Jeremy looked at players the Twins could trade (and got 167 comments)
• Of course Seth recapped the minor league performances.

All of those stories were on the front page at one time this week. When we started Twins Daily, this was the sort of all-encompassing, deep-dive laden, entertaining content we hoped for. There haven’t been many days that I’ve been more proud of what this community can do. Thank you all so much.

Forums

• Registrations – 25 (we had 42 the same week in 2018)
• Topics – 82 (up from 43 the same week in 2018)
• Posts - 3018 (up from 2424 the same week in 2018)

Our forum traffic did not increase like our story traffic. It appears a lot of people visited, read one story and then left. That’s OK for now, but we’ll want to work on enticing them to join the discussion.

As always, we would love to have you join the discussion, too. Just register and tell us your thoughts.

Blogs
A number of new writers wrote in our blog area this week, which is really encouraging. I would love to call them all out, but instead, why not head over there and check them out yourself? You won’t be disappointed.

I do want to call out two for their creativity. When you see as much baseball writing as we do, it’s striking when someone does something a little different, and we had two posts that struck me.

On Thursday, 33mvp, started a series (I hope) that goes through the Twins first round picks of the last 10 years. In the MLB Draft, it’s easy to criticize picks because almost nobody is going to draft the player who turns out the best. So I appreciated 33mvp’s approach of limiting the analysis to the five players taken immediately after the Twins first round pick. It requires research and a little nuance, and it’s a cool enough idea that I plan to steal it someday.

The second blog post wasn’t technically written last week, it was written on Memorial Day, but I liked “Wild Bill Umpires The Game” by mikelink45. I had never heard this story before, and would love some historical links to the facts surrounding it.

Thank you again everyone who tries blogging. I hope you find it rewarding, and if you read them, I hope you’ll let them know what you think. You honor all our writers with your attention and feedback.

So why was so traffic so high in July of 2015?
The Twins were pretty good in 2015. They finished the year with 83 wins, and going into the last weekend of the year, they were one game out of the Wild Card spot. You’ll remember that Miguel Sano was a monster that summer, generating sky-high expectations. On July 21st, the Twins held the second Wild Card spot in the American League, and the trade deadline was coming up and…

Twins Daily writer Jeremy Nygaard broke the news that the Twins were in the “infant stages” of trade talks with the Rockies about Troy Tulowitzki. You can find the story here. A week later, Tulowitzki was traded, but it was to the Toronto Blue Jays, who surged, blew past the Twins in the Wild Card race, and also passed the Yankees to with the AL East.

That’s it for this week. I’ve settled on the name “Twins Daily Box Score” for now, but if you have any other suggestions or feedback about the site, I promise to read then and respond in the comments below.