A Recap of Pistols Firing in 2017

As a new year dawns, it’s always fun to look back to where we were and look ahead to where we’re going. I try not to do this very often (especially publicly) because I think it necessarily precludes me from focusing on what I need to focus on — that is, building a better website — but sometimes it’s fun to take a peek at the numbers.

First off, I have to say thank you to the people working on PFB. They do great work (Gundy would say they give great effort) and have built at least part of their lives around making sure the website is always ticking, and hopefully at a high level. I’m continuously floored by both the quality of work and dedication everybody contributing to this site displays. Yes, they are paid, but nobody is doing this as a full-time job, and yet many often treat it as if it is. I try to always be grateful for that because it’s no small thing.

Last year, 14 different people wrote, took photos, created artwork, edited podcasts, made videos, interviewed coaches and players, edited posts and generally ran the site. And that doesn’t even include contributors and interns. A friend recently asked me what I was most proud of in 2017, and I think that’s probably my answer. That this site was able to pay other people to help feed it. That’s never a place I thought it would get to, but I’m pretty glad for it.

It was a big year for us on a #content level, too. We hired our first beat writer, Hayden Barber, who then got a job at the Wichita Eagle at the end of the year. His presence in Stillwater gave us a cachet we lacked before. It was huge (yuuuuge) for us, as well, to be credentialed last year. I thanked OSU’s media relations for that at the end of the football season because it has transformed the way we do things, and I think often for the better.

I don’t think there’s anybody covering OSU football and basketball more completely than we are right now. I don’t say that out of arrogance. I say it because it has been our goal, and it continues to be our goal. To make a site that is both entertaining and informative while also being excellent. We haven’t fully arrived, and there are innumerable areas where we can be better … but we’re getting there.

One of the many things that bounced around my head in 2017 was how to maintain a sort of edginess and humor that I think we’ve always been known for without stepping over the line. It’s certainly harder when you have to sit down across from Glenn Spencer or Marcell Ateman knowing that the joke you made about Spencer’s defense or Ateman’s blocking may or may not have been read by them. But that’s a good thing for us, and I think we walked the line pretty well in 2017.

Hayden provided great on-the-ground coverage, and he’s going to be tough to replace. Kyle Boone continued to cover recruiting really well with more original reporting on players, more frequent updates on commits and targets and even his own podcast. Just as recruiting is the lifeblood of any good college football program, recruiting coverage has become the lifeblood of our site, and Boone continues to nail it.

Kyle Cox has become invaluable as an editor, writer and thinker. I’ve told him this, but his writing has become top-notch, and I always enjoy editing him and hearing his ideas.

Phillip Slavin and Seth Duckworth were new additions for us last year, and they have both been terrific. Slavin has floated around from football to hoops and always brings good ideas to the table. Duckworth has covered wrestling really well in a way that we haven’t done in the past. That was one of my goals for 2017, and we got it cranking.

Steven Mandeville continues to pump out the Bullets every day (a lot of people still think I’m doing them!), and he has been great. I have told my wife this often, but the Bullets have actually gotten better since I stepped away from doing them (probably because I’d been doing them for five years).

Thomas Fleming continues to be the best in the business when it comes to breaking down Xs and Os, and he’s gotten some assists from Adam Lunt. Both have been really helpful to the rest of us who are mostly illiterate (and mostly me) when it comes to football knowledge.

It’s been a joy to produce podcasts and videos with Carson Cunningham on a weekly basis. He’s really good at his job and makes me think better and more clearly and keeps our stuff moving along. I’m #thankful for his work as well as his friendship.

We hired a developer who has helped me sleep better at night knowing that whoever is typing “Mike Gundy shirtless” at 2 a.m. is actually getting a website back and not an error. Boone said it’s the smartest thing I did this year. Not sure what it says about me that making my site not crash is “the smartest thing I did.”

Justin Southwell helped out with social media and was generally the funniest person in the digital room most of the time. Our photographer, Jackson Lavarnway, got the ultimate compliment recently. My mom said, “Your photographer is really good!” Mom has taken somewhere between 1.5M and 1.6M photos in her lifetime, so that’s high praise. And of course Chris Knox churned out a ton of great visuals for our uniform posts as well as the artwork for our t-shirts.

Speaking of t-shirts, one of my other goals for 2017 was to diversify our revenue streams. As many of you know, the future of ads online is about as stable as Joel Embiid’s legs, and for us to exist into the future, we had to (and have to) diversify. So we created a real online store run by Chris’ University Spirit.

This seemed like a better idea than me packing and shipping from my bedroom (which is how I was doing it a few years ago) since, you know, they do this for a living. It’s been great, too. We’ve had 229 orders which equates to around 300-350 shirts, and the most popular one is (obviously) the orange Gundy mullet shirt.

Additionally, we launched our contributor program which brought in 340 people to support us financially. They received some bonus goodies for signing up — ad-free browsing and store credit to nab those shirts — and even though 20 folks dropped off before the end of the year, it has become clear that this is going to be a stream that is vital to our success in the future.

Of course our primary revenue continues to be ads on the site, but now we have four streams. On-site ads, podcast, video and Bullets ads, merchandise and contributors. That’s a big deal to me as we head into 2018 and has helped transform a blog into a business.

In terms of on-site numbers, 2017 blew away anything we’ve ever done. We wrote 3,770 posts in 2017 (or 10.3 a day). The most we had ever done before was 2,791 last year.

We also nearly hit 15 million pageviews for the year. That’s roughly 39,000 a day. To put that in perspective, for those of you who have been here since the beginning, the day I posted the uniforms in 2011, we barely cleared 39,000 pageviews. And that was our best day for, like, the first three years!

The other part is how engaged you guys were. Last year, we received (by far) the most comments we’ve ever gotten on the site. That’s important to me. Gundy might like people who never say a word, but I like people who have something to say. That means what we write made you feel something, good or bad.

PFB is going to be seven years old in a couple of weeks. It’s out of diapers and its teenage years are around the corner. I know it’s not the greatest college team site ever, but I’m proud of what it has become.

We have big things planned for 2018 and a lot of great people on the bus to help get them done. There is more gear to roll out, better reporting to be done, additional sports to cover (like we’ve done with wrestling) and a potential website refresh in the works.

As always, we are welcome to hear your thoughts and ideas for our future, and we will put our our annual survey a little later in the year to hear them.

People sometimes ask me about writing a book. I think a lot about books and read a ton of them, but to me this is our book. We get to update it in real time on a daily basis and you enjoy the fruits of that almost immediately. I read this post often and think about how it relates to our writers and you, our readers. It’s incredibly fun to collaboratively put our book together on a daily basis.

There is plenty more to say, but I’ll stop now. I don’t mean for this post to be self-indulging but rather a celebration of this site that we have all built together.

I have no idea what the future of the sports media world, and specifically the sports blog world, holds. But I feel energized about covering OSU athletics. As long as you guys keep showing up in droves and supporting the site both with your time and with your money, we’re going to keep improving the product.

Thank you, as always, for following along.