Week 3 status report

The best part about Week 3 of my website is that its end marked the start of a new month, which means I actually see the first set of payments from my Patreon. I only added a single subscriber this week (Hi, former SB Nation boss Fooch), bringing my number of patrons to 10 and my monthly payments to … $56. I mean, that’s not gonna be any great shakes in the long run, but better to make money than not make money, you know?

Audience is a concern, though. I unsurprisingly did pretty well in my first week, with the novelty of a new site, sympathy for the layoff, and plenty of big-audience friends combining to carry some relatively strong pageview numbers. Since then? Those numbers are not exactly doing much. In the two weeks since the debut week, I haven’t even totaled as many pageviews combined as that first week did on its own.

Also, to be fair, I’ve only put two pieces behind the Patreon paywall (a look at my 2020 PPR rankings, and my rookie dynasty rankings). In part, that’s because I don’t really have a good feel for what needs paywalled. Maybe I should just put stuff back there and y’all can figure it out, but I don’t want to bury things that don’t need to be buried … I don’t know, that feels excuse-y.

I’m not saying even a few hundred pageviews a week is awful, I’m … well, yeah, I kind of am. If I’m gonna average only a few dozen pageviews a day, then this might not be as long-term a venture as I had hoped. That does not mean I’m bailing, but I’ll need to see some growth before too long. Because right now, I’m 20 days into the site and this will be the 48th piece I’ve published, and putting out the effort for roughly 2.5 pieces a day for barely enough people to fill out a baseball roster is a pretty poor use of my time. (To be fair, I don’t have a much better use of my time available either.)

I guess what I’m saying is, if you like what I’m doing here (and if you’re reading my status report, I assume you do), help me out with some shares, some hype, maybe some word-of-mouth. I’d really appreciate it.