2019 Pittsburgh Sports Now Year End Retrospective

The calendar year may have flipped over to 2020, but in the sports world–particularly in college sports–it’s a pretty arbitrary date.

There are no more football games for the Panthers and much of Division I, but the college football season never ends. Recruiting season is merely in a brief hibernation before it ramps back up for the second signing day in February.

With non-conference games off the docket, now comes the good stuff. The rivalries and intense battles of the ACC and A-10. For Pitt and Duquesne, this is where things get interesting, even though we’re almost halfway through the season.

There’s also wrestling, of which we’re currently in the middle of a season which has the Panthers ranked 10th in the nation, swimming and diving, WPIAL basketball and others.

In other words, our season here at Pittsburgh Sports Now never really ends.

But we’re also very cognizant of the fact that people love end of year stuff. So there’s no better time than to give all of our readers and rival publications a little taste of how our 2019 was.

First off, 2019 was our best year ever. According to our Google Analytics, we saw gains in “the big two”, page views and total unique visitors over 2018 and 2017.

Total uniques varied significantly from our WordPress.com numbers which has us at 1.4 million visitors, which was slightly up over 2018’s 1.3 million… but who’s counting?

We also an increase in sessions, 3.68 million versus 3.46 in 2018 and average session duration, 2:01 up from 1:53.

In 2019 we published 2,291 articles compared with 2,050 in 2018. The site received 1,936 comments last year, a nice increase from the 1,535 we had in 2018.

Our Pitt Die-Hards membership had it’s first full year and effectively doubled sales from 723 to 1561. As of today, we have 516 subscribers, 356 of which are yearly members.

Site revenues… are private. But we can tell you we paid out over $25,000 to our talented team of freelancers in 2019. Of whom we’d be remiss in not acknowledging the great work of Zac Weiss, Nate Bell, David Hague, Mitchell Northam, Steve Brenner, Chris Mueller, Parker Hurley, Cody Nespor, Cale Berger, Doug Biega, Noah Hiles, Mike Darnay and everyone else who contributed.

And of course the engines that drive the site, Mike Vukovcan and Alan Saunders and can’t forget the guru, Harry Psaros, who we’re honored to have with us for another year.

We’re also proud that our shared YouTube channel, Pittsburgh Sports Live gained 1.9k subsribers and had 738,607 views in its first full year.

A special shout out to all the websites who sent traffic our way, including our top 7 referrers: the Panther-lair forums, 247 Sports, PennLive.com, the Duquesne Fans Message Board, Duke Basketball Report, Virginia Sportswar and the Tar Heel Times. We also appreciate the support/traffic from PittPOV.com. But no thanks to Cardiac Hill, Post-Gazette or the Tribune Review.

And that’s it. That’s the year. We’ll try to do better in 2020.

Thanks for reading.