Twins Daily In June: A Record-Setting Month

Jul 15 2019 05:07 PM | John Bonnes in About Twins Daily

It’s important to occasionally reflect on the community that we’re building here, so we can make it better and acknowledge all the great work that so many people are doing. Doing so weekly turned out to be a little aggressive, but a monthly review seems about right. Also, it gives me an excuse to use a cheesy stock photo. So let’s look back at June and find out what Twins Daily’s community was up to.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. This was basically Seth Stohs' reaction every time he looked at Google Analytics in June.

Overall Traffic For June
Users – 147,859 (up 106% from 2018
Sessions – 462,668 (up 80% from 2018)
Page Views – 1,328,465 (up 60% from 2018)

Congratulations everyone – you set a record in June! June is usually a big month for Twins Daily, since it’s both the middle of the baseball season and we get very busy during the MLB Draft, which happens the first week of June. But as impressive as the 1.3M page views are, it’s even more gratifying that almost 150,000 unique readers stopped by to check out our writers. I distinctly remember when I started blogging and that number was 15. Increasing that by a factor of 10,000 is … I don’t even know what. I have goosebumps. It’s crazy to me.

Stories
Our top writer for the month was Andrew Thares, who of course led our MLB Draft coverage. Cody Christie was on his heels, and has grown his readership four times what it was the same month last year. Editor Tom Froemming and founders Nick Nelson and Seth Stohs are of course in the top 10, and so are Ted Schwerzler, Andrew Gebo, Matt Braun, AJ Condon and Steve Lein. Andrew, Matt and AJ are all brand new this year, and each cleared 10,000 reads in their stories last month. That’s fantastic.

The most read story is our ongoing 2019 MLB Draft Signing Tracker. The Day 2 and Day 3 threads ranked second and third. The top traditional story was Tom’s article explaining why we need not freak out over the Twins trading prospects.

Finally, we paid our writers at the end of the month, since it was the end of a quarter. On a quarterly basis we pay our contributing writers the ad revenue that their stories directly generate. For the second quarter of 2019, that was about $4 per 1000 reads. We’ll continue to work to increase that rate and find a way to better compensate them for their invaluable contributions. We recognize that isn’t enough for their excellent work, but it’s what we get, and we feel strongly that it should belong to them.

Forums
Registrations – 78 (we had 80 in 2018)
Topics –346 (up from 197 in 2018)
Posts – 16,462 (up from 11,333 in 2018)

We would love to have you join us and talk Twins. This seems like a great year to get involved. Just register and tell us your thoughts.
The top posters in June (not including moderators or writers) were:

Aggies7
Blake
operation mindcrime
MNT1996
70charger
Mike Sixel
LaBombo
sampleSizeOfOne
spycake
Nine of twelve

That’s quantity and that’s great, but you can also reward quality on our forums. On each comment on our forums, you can choose to give it a “like”. The most liked comment from our community was from mlhouse, who attended a Fort Myers Miracle game and added his observations to that day’s minor league report. I’m especially fond of this one, as it really added to the story and discussion.

As for the members with the most likes in June, we should start with our excellent moderators, who always deserve our thanks. A few of them were at the top of the list: USAChief topped it, falling just one short of reaching 2000 likes. Ashbury and Brock were second and third, but LaBombo took the top spot amongst non-moderators. He’s been active in the game threads, such as this one, praising Rocco Baldelli and the Twins newfound penchant for hitting the snot out of the ball. If you would like to join the game threads, they’re always pinned to the top of the Minnesota Twins Talk forum.

Thank you to everyone for sharing your thoughts and keeping the Twins Daily forums a civil, entertaining and informative place

Blogs
I’m going to need to find a better way to feature all the blogs that are being created for these monthly reports. I count at least 10 active blogs from June 6^th through the 30th. If you like discovering that next underground band that is going to break through, stop by and check them out, urge them to keep writing, and respond to their thoughts. The blogs are right here and they’re always a link at the top of the Twins Daily menu.

Thank you for checking in with us. If you have any ideas for Twins Daily, or feedback that you want to share, please don’t hesitate to give it, good or bad, in the comments below. I promise to read your thought and respond when appropriate.