Today, Pittsburgh Sports Now turns two years old.
Our first year we had 4,328,100 page views. Which, let’s be honest, is a pretty incredible number for a site that operated without a single full-time member.
When Mike started the site, it was a side project.
But then it kept growing… and growing.
The numbers blew me away. 139,000 the first month, 339,000 the second. By the time January rolled around, only two months in, the site was crashing from traffic almost every day. It seems the people of Pittsburgh were starved for Pitt coverage, in particular Pitt recruiting.
Thank you, market inefficiencies!
By the end of January we knew that we had something big. So we started expanding. We decided we’d cover Pitt football. We were incredibly lucky that Alan Saunders was a free agent at the time. So we snatched him up. We hired David Hague to shoot the games. We brought the original Pitt guru, Harry Psaros on board. We secured the services of Dan Kingerski for our podcast. We added Duquesne basketball, Pitt basketball, WPIAL sports.
We were successful enough by year two that Mike was able to commit to the site full time.
Yada, yada, yada. It’s been a great two years and we’re not going anywhere. In fact, we’re growing. We extensively covered Beaver County Football thanks to some amazing sponsors and we recently added Western PA wrestling authority Stephen Patrick as our Pitt wrestling insider.
This year we had 6,016,247 page views and we doubled our number of unique visits over year one. Are we bragging? Yes, a bit.
We’ve got lots of exciting things we’re working on for this year. More videos, more coverage, maybe even some VIP features. All will be revealed soon.
In the meantime, we’d be remiss in not mentioning all of our sponsors that have supported us throughout the site’s history. Without them, we couldn’t pay the bills.
They are (current and former): Pro Tapes, Duquesne University, Archie’s, The Law Office of Mark A. Smith, Bairel Automotive, Brusters, Eagle Property Management, Deanna Mara of Howard Hannah, Leon’s Billiards & More, Blush, Rohrich, Dunkin’ Donuts, The Scoring Factory, Vocelli’s, Martin Lawn Services, State Representative Rob Matzie, Moon Gulf Club, CJ Landscaping, Pack N’ Ship, The Printing Press, Orlandini Family Chiropractic, Maximum Hoops.
And of course a big thank you to our readers.
Also, thanks to all the sites out there who have linked to us (even if it’s just from your forums): Pitt Blather, Bleacher Report, The Duquesne Dukes Fan Forum, Scout, Cardiac Hill, Panther-Lair, Pitt POV, The Lions’ Pride, Pitt Nation Sports, and the many various recruiting websites out there.
Thanks to all of the Pittsburgh Sports Now staff and contributors: Mike Vukovcan, Alan Saunders, Harry Psaros, David Hague, Scott Elliott, Francis Guarnieri, Stephen Patrick, John Steigerwald, Dan Kingerski.
And our former contributors: Rich Donahue, Nick Gordon, Matt Popchock, Tim Benz, WPIAL Insider.
Anyway, we’re doing a bunch of giveaways on Twitter, so follow @pghsportsnow.
Keep reading, sharing, tweeting, interacting and even bad mouthing us anonymously — because in the end it all helps — as we enter another exciting year of existence.
