Week 1 status report

One thing I’d like to do with this site is be as open as I can. I don’t think I’m likely to get rich off of it — I’m going to be operating at a loss for a little while no matter what I do — but I think of this as a collaborative effort, because any success I might have depends as much on the people reading (and subscribing) as it does on me writing.

With that in mind, each week (for now; as things stabilize I’ll reduce it to just periodically) I want to give updates on how things are going and what I see coming next.

The site went live Tuesday of last week, 24 hours removed from me getting laid off at Pro Football Focus. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing as far as marketing goes, so it’s amounted to little more than tweeting and Facebooking links and begging people with wider followings than me to send people my direction. That’s actually worked really well — several very nice and following-y friends shared the initial announcement, Shea Serrano tossed me a quote-tweet a few days in, Rob Neyer has hit me with a quote-tweet and a retweet — although I wouldn’t say it has translated to huge patronage so far. I have no idea what would be considered a massive success or a crushing failure at this point, but I’m sitting at seven patrons and $49 in monthly promises right now:

  • Matthew Trueblood, a baseball-first guy who doesn’t care about my fantasy football content at all but is ridiculously supportive;

  • Chris Towers, one of the big names at CBS Fantasy, who really could have just hired me there like eight months ago and made this moot, but hired the (yes, more qualified and probably better) Ben Gretch instead;

  • Nate Tepp, longtime Twitter follower;

  • Joseph Sannicandro, who I don’t know at all (hi Joseph!);

  • John Fuller, a web developer who has already told me the title of the site stinks (it probably does) but has offered his skills if I want to do more with it;

  • Patrick Kremer, a former PFF subscriber who didn’t like what they did but does like me and my work (and I’ll be upping my XFL game this week, I promise);

  • My mom (Thanks mom!)

Like I said, I have no idea if that should be considered a success or a failure right now. I do now that I’m going to get $44 a month (once you take out Patreon’s cut) for this, and that’s neat. On the other hand, after a few hundred pageviews Tuesday and Wednesday, and then almost 550 Thursday (thanks for the tweet, Shea), attention took a nosedive over the weekend. Weekends are weekends (which is why I didn’t publish any new material Sunday at all), but I would have liked pageviews to stay higher for more than three days.

Heading into the second week on the site, we’re changing the name. (There, John Fuller, happy now?) I’ve made the point about it being The Most Important Website In The World, and the about page still calls it that, but going forward, this will be known as The Kelley Black Book.

No matter what, I’m doing this for at least a little while — especially since my quest for a new job has thus far come up empty. I’d like it to go from “here’s a tiny bit of money every little while” to “here’s some actual, real dollars,” and maybe it will. I’m open to suggestions, recommendations, and “dude you suck at this” criticisms. I’m figuring this out as I go, and I think in the long run it’ll at least be decent. But Week 1? Week 1 was a slow start.

Hey, a slow start is still a start.

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