September At Twins Daily: Part 1, Stories & Traffic

Stories and Authors

You are hearing from more and more writers at Twins Daily, as we pointed out in last month’s report, and we find that thrilling. But since September was the last month of the third quarter, I got another thrill: I got to pay them, some for the first time. We sent out over $4500 to the contributing writers that are responsible for the stories you read on the front page.

“Thrill” might sound strange, but that was literally the whole point of Twins Daily, and really the goal when we first created the Offseason Handbook (which proceeded Twins Daily) eleven years ago. Seth, Nick, Parker and I had all blogged about the Twins for years without making a cent. We wanted to find a better way for bloggers to get something for their work, because we wanted to continue to read independent voices.

So Twins Daily pays all our contributing writers the income the site makes directly from their stories from ads. If someone views a story that has been promoted to the front page, we count those page views and send revenue the site to the writer.

In September, that was good news in two ways. First, we had record traffic, which I’ll get to soon. And second, our ad provider provided a better return on those ad spaces, averaging close to $6 per 1000 page views.

This doesn’t slay the blogging dragon by any means: on a per story basis, I’m still legitimately embarrassed that we can’t pay our writers more for their insights. We recognize we are paying less than their work is worth, but we pass along what we make. We believe they should have it.

Here are a couple of other story highlights from the month:

• 21 different writers had at least 2000 views of their stories in September.
  
• The most read writer was Cody Christie.
  
• The most read story was whether or not the Twins could hold off the Yankees for the home run record. (Spoiler alert: they did.)
  
• Other very popular stories included Nick Nelson’s review of Kyle Gibson’s Twins’ career and Cody’s preview of Luis Arraez’ Twins’ career.
  

Traffic

It might surprise you to find out that September has traditionally been a pretty slow month at Twins Daily, or at least it might surprise you if you don’t realize we launched in 2012, right when the Twins took a downturn. Since then, the Twins have only had three Septembers that weren’t playing out the string: 2015 when they made a too-little-too-late charge at the Wild Card, 2017 when they won the second AL Wild Card and this year when they were Central division champions. The most page views we’ve ever had in September was that 2017 season, when we had 734K page views with 62,000 users visiting.

This September blew those away:

• Readers – 156,976 (up 225% from 2018)
  
• Sessions – 397,237 (up 138% from 2018)
  
• Page Views – 1,032,480,367 (up 114% from 2018)
  

Turns out a pennant race is good for traffic. Who knew?

This offseason should be interesting for Twins Daily. We’ll continue to provide daily coverage of the Twins throughout the offseason, and a lot of community-building and discussion takes place over the next four months. I would love to see those 156K visitors from September drop in occasionally. Traffic for October suggests they are.

So if you find a story or discussion that you like, please share it with your friends or followers via email, Facebook or Twitter. The Twins get an offseason, but Twins Daily doesn’t. We just keep analyzing and discussing, which brings us to or forums. We’ll discuss that tomorrow.

If you have any questions, concerns or thoughts, I'd love to discuss them in the comments section. Have at it gang.