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Five Media Things: Big 12 Tourney, NCAA Golf and Home Page Traffic

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We’re in week 20 of 2018, which feels a little bit unreal. It’s almost #VacationSZN (a distant cousin of #crootinSZN, and I’m excited to get away for a bit, but there are some loops to close on the school year first. Let’s jump in and see what this week has in store.

What I’m Excited About

Softball is over, which means only baseball and golf have their postseasons left to complete. The Big 12 Baseball Tournament starts on Wednesday, and that will be fun.

But I’m heading up to Stillwater and Karsten Creek this weekend to wear a Marcus Mariota jersey and follow Norman Xiong around cover the NCAAs, see if Oklahoma State can win as the No. 1 team in the country on their own course and possibly tape a podcast on Monday at Joe’s with some golf media friends ?. So that’s what I’m excited about this week. College golf is a wildly different world than the one I normally exist in, and it makes for probably better #narratives, even if they’re not always as interesting.

I’m excited to see how it all unfolds. Three good NCAAs follows for you.

As always, you can take a look at the full OSU calendar here.

A Media Thing I Think I Believe

One idea I have thought a lot about as our behind-the-scenes website redesign rolls on is home page traffic. The common trope is that the home page is dead, long live social media (something like that). But our numbers suggest something a bit different.

So far in 2018 nearly 30 percent of PFB traffic comes from people who just go to PFB looking for some good #content. Of this 30 percent, the majority are going straight to the home page.

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I think our direct traffic suggests that we’ve conditioned people to check in on stuff often. That excites me. In an era where I would imagine most publishers align with mainstream outlets like GQ and see 20 percent of their traffic on their home page, we see more than that, which means that you guys are checking our #content regularly to see what’s new. I love it! This also represents an increase from two years ago. This is not the direction things should be headed in our sharing world.

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I had a conversation recently with my pal Andy Johnson (see above) who started his own independent golf site a few years ago. We talked a lot about becoming a part of people’s routines. That’s a really difficult thing to do, and while I’m not sure we’ve done it as well as we could or should have, it’s clear that with nearly 30 percent of our traffic coming from people going directly to our site, there’s a pull there that speaks to that characteristic.

So let me take this opportunity to thank you guys for continuing to make us part of your routine. We don’t take that lightly, and we very much appreciate it. We’re going to continue to work toward building the stuff that will keep you coming back and gathering more and more people into this daily routine bucket as we try and build the best sports media company we possibly can.

What I’m Reading

I am currently reading like eight books. Not good! Might be compulsive! I have no idea if I’m going to finish them all, but here they are:

  • On Writing (Stephen King)
  • Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Mindy Kaling)
  • Four-Hour Body (Tim Ferriss)
  • Moonwalking With Einstein (Josh Foer)

If you have any recommendations — or actually finished one of these and want to offer some advice on whether I should plow forward — feel free to leave it in the comments.

Contribution And Site Updates

We are at 316 contributors. That’s -1 from last week.

Site Growth

Pageviews through May 20, 2018: 5.0M
Pageviews through May 20, 2017: 5.5M
Most popular post of May 2018: Dax Hill tweets on Mother’s Day
Most popular post of May 2017: Baker trolls OSU, says OU owns B12
Most popular post of 2018: Spencer out as DC

Website Refresh Update

No new updates on this front.

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