Well, we've been doing this for 13 months now! That seems impossible but it's true. As always, I try to be as transparent as possible so let's look at some of the numbers.

Overall, we're doing pretty great. We're still a fraction of the size of Twins Daily but given how long that site has been around and how it was formed, it would have been pure insanity to expect competition on that level.

Year over year, we've seen a 92% increase in users visiting the site... that's great, but that's not really the entire goal. The goal is to bring this community back to its heyday of several years ago. And I'm happy to report that we're making significant strides in that regard, though the road is long and we have more work to do.

The best (ie. easiest) way to bring in new users is search engine optimization. If we can place highly on various Google searches, it's essentially "free users"! Most of those users view one or two pages and leave. That's okay. A few create accounts. That's great! A few of those post a comment. That's the goal!

So you need a really big funnel working for a really long time to create inertia. We're moving in that direction, thankfully. Organic search results (fancy for "people who clicked from Google/Bing to the site) is up 130% year over year.

Another facet of a big switch-over like this is retaining the users we have, which has mostly been the case as well. That is monitored by direct traffic (ie. people who just come directly to the site). Year over year, that's up 73%.

But how does that compare to previous years? Let's take a look at the 30 day period of March 19 through April 17. Obviously, there's a ton of noise here because, as we all know, 2020 was the COVID year. 2022 was the lockout year, which hampered traffic a little but mostly from January through March.

User Direct Visits 3/19-4/17
2023: 10,093
2022: 5,831
2021: 5,479
2020: 3,511 (COVID)
2019: 16,117 (wow!)
2018: 8,058
2017: 6,241

As you can see, the brass ring is the 2019 season when everybody was pumped about the Brewers. And we're building our way back to that, one user at a time. I think we'll get there in time.

As always, thank you all so much for sticking with us through the first year and helping us sort out the bugs. And, as always, my door is always open. If you see something that bothers you, please speak up and let me know about it, either here in the comments or via private message.

Go Crew!