Last Week at Twins Daily: Excitement and Connection

Stories

Cody Christie and Ted Schwerzler topped our contributing writers, tallying up almost 14,000 views on their stories this week. Steve Lein, Matt Braun, Jeremy Nygaard and Miller1234 also made the top 10 list, along with Tom, Seth, John, and Nick.

Seth’s minor league report on Tuesday, featuring another scoreless outing by Fort Myers Miracle Randy Dobnak, was the most read story of the week. Nick’s week in review was the second most read and John’s game recap on Tuesday was the third most read story. Of course, several of Tom Froemming’s stories were well represented.

The top story for contributing writers was Cody Christie examining the impact Craig Kimbrel might have on the Twins bullpen. His minor league report was the second most read story. And I should also mention that Jeremy Nygaard returned to writing at Twins Daily and we had RandBall Stu’s usual Friday contribution, which was both funny and increasingly sad as the weekend progressed.

Forums

• Registrations – 14 (we had 6 the same week in 2018)
  
• Topics – 71 (up 48% from same week in 2018)
  
• Posts - 2493 (down 23% from same week in 2018)
  

There is some seemingly contradictory data here. We had more people join, and more topics, but less comments. I wonder if that isn’t driven by cutting down on game threads?

One of the most gratifying things about Twins Daily for me personally is seeing people connect to each other. It looks like there is a lot of that going on in the forums. If you would like to register and comment, you can do so here (and we would love to meet you).

The top ten commenters last week were: Mike Sixel, TheLeviathan, Mr. Brooks, ashbury, h2oface, bighat, nicksaviking, Hosken Bombo Disco, milldaddy35 and spycake. People who started at least two new topics (and who are not writing) are gunnarthor (3), sampleSizeOfOne, stringerbell and ashbury. Thanks you everyone for contributing, and thank you to our moderators for encouraging civil and thoughtful discussion.

Blogs

I count four new blog posts this week, and they each show some of the features of starting your own Twins blog on Twins Daily:

• Thieres Rabelo defended Jason Castro’s role on the Twins, and that story was eventually promoted to Twins Daily’s front page. Thieres is a newer writer to Twins Daily, and we’re excited to see what else he can share with us.
  
• Ted Schwerzler, on the other hand, has been one of Twins Daily’s most prolific writers over the last couple of years. He wrote about Eddie Rosario’s great start. If you click over, you’ll see he included a link to his own Twins blog, which we absolutely encourage. We want people to find you if you’re writing about the Twins. This story has not been promoted to the front page, but a lot of Ted’s are, and they all include links to his site, which is great.
  
• We have a relatively new writer named ajcondon who has been publishing blog posts that include game recaps, or in this case, a recap of the Houston Astros series. We love it when new writers take the personal risk of sharing their work with the community. He got some feedback in the comments and it was great to see him reply to those comments. I suspect you’ll see his work on the front page, soon.
  
• Friday, Brandon Warne wrote about addressing the Twins bullpen woes, taking an excerpt from a story he published over at Zone Coverage. Like Ted’s work, if you have an existing blog or web site, and want to do that, that’s fine. The only difference is that we’ll never promote a partial story to our front page because we don’t think it’s fair to make people click over midway through a story. But if it gets more attention to your work, have at it. Again, we want people to find you.
  

Overall Traffic

• Users – 24,199 (up 34% from 2018)
  
• Sessions - 60,982 (up 29% from 2018)
  
• Page Views – 185,193 (up 9% rom 2018)
  

The easy way to explain the increase in basic metrics across the board is that the Twins are actually good this year, and fun to watch, and so we’re busier. I also like to think we’re a pretty inclusive bunch, so members reach out to connect with more Twins fans, and I think that is something the community feels, too. There is some evidence to support the latter theory in the Forums section above, too.

Let’s have another great week at Twins Daily. If there is other news you would like to see, or questions you have about the site, or feedback you want to give, we have this great comment section below. I’d love to hear what you have to say.