Twins Daily’s State of the Union - 2019

Stories and Authors

Our front page is filled with names you would not have recognized a year ago. The number of writers, and the quantity, diversity, and quality of stories increased dramatically in 2019. The passion and skill of editor Tom Froemming and two dozen active authors has been remarkable - even during the offseason. This site has published 300 stories since the Twins were eliminated from the ALDS. That’s 100 stories per month in an offseason that has largely been devoid of good news. Perhaps the breadth and depth of that content is the good news.

Revenues

Those writers have also been paid better. Programmatic ad revenue rates increased considerably, and since those are passed directly to the writers, writers saw a threefold increase in pay. This also gives us hope that we can fund a redesign of our site because…

Traffic

Traffic went nuts. Yes, there is a market for in-depth, independent, community-driven coverage:

• Unique Readers – 1,141,165 (up 94% from 2018)
  
• Sessions – 4,493,194 (up 57% from 2018)
  
• Page Views – 11,605,698 (up 34% from 2018)
  

The craziest fact about those numbers? On June 1st, those numbers were actually down compared to 2018. So take all those percentages and double them, and that’s what we saw over the second half of 2019. Plus, they’re increasing even more during the offseason.

We have an incredibly welcoming community and an ever-increasing reach. Twins Daily is not your dirty little secret any more. (So it’s OK to share it.)

Forums

As a result of that welcoming community, we continue to see strong interaction in our forums, and this year we welcomed several new moderators to our ranks. A successful team brought a new set of challenges to the moderation team, as did all the increased traffic. They handled an incredible amount of discussion from the 12,179 registered members of Twins Daily.

• Registrations – +1026 (up 35% from 2018)
  
• Topics –2619 (up 19% from 2018)
  
• Posts – 132,373 (up 24% from 2018)
  

Who comes up with over 2600 baseball topics for a team in a year? (A: You do. Thanks!)

Blogs

Over on our blog page, you’ll find some of our next wave of writers, or just excited fans finding their voice. Beyond the stories on our front page, you found 408 additional blog entries in 2019, along with comments that both challenged, encouraged and congratulated. If you are interested in writing about baseball for a built-in audience, it remains a great place to start. If you’re interested in reading and helping along those people, stop by every day.

I’ll add one other point: if you think your point of view is downplayed or doesn’t receive the recognition it might deserve, show us how it’s done. Start a blog. Write a story. React to the comments. Go first-hand through the process, and take the risk, that writers do every day. With our traffic, you’re going to find an audience – for good or bad.

2020

Our focuses in 2020 are to accommodate, and enable the community growth we’re seeing.

Web Site Redesign – Our increased traffic means increased stresses on our software architecture. We will invest in a rebuild of the site, and we’ll be reaching out for suggestions to make the site better as part of that effort. Stay tuned.

Social Media- More and more Twins fans are finding Twins Daily from social media posts. We have always been a little haphazard on staying on top of that. That’s going to change. (We would love to have you follow us on Facebook, Twitter and email.)

Events – Beyond the Winter Meltdown, this October we hosted 300+ people at the ALDS Game 1 Watch Party at Brothers Bar & Grill. We want to expand to have even more watch parties, growing the “in real life” community as much as the virtual one has.

Partnership with Zone Coverage – Last, but not least, I'm finalizing a partnership with Zone Coverage, another local sports-based web site, to work together on business-side efforts, like local ad sales, systems development, social media and more. Doing so allows me to work half time on both sites instead of trying to find time to squeeze in work on Twins Daily outside my full time job; Twins Daily and Zone Coverage will be my new full time job.

This past year was a breakthrough year for Twins Daily in a number of ways, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. We are really looking forward to seeing if the site (and the team) can keep the momentum going in 2020. You’re a big part of that, so we would love your feedback, questions and comments in the comment section. Thank you all so much from all of us at Twins Daily.