What to expect from Extra Points this football season

Good evening, and thanks again for supporting Extra Points.

Back when Extra Points first launched, back in 2020, I used to give reports about every quarter or so to my readership. I'd explain how the business was doing, what was going well, what our challenges were, and what goals we wanted to hit.

The formatting and frequency of those reports has changed a bit, but I still want to be as transparent as possible with my readership, even as Extra Points has evolved from a one-man operation into a part of the D1.ticker family of publications.

As we're about to really get into this college football season, let me take a step back to let you know how Extra Points is doing.

Big picture, Extra Points is growing well

As of August 31, Extra Points has over 10,600 total subscribers, and over 1,000 paid subscribers. Total revenue (subscriptions + ad revenue) in August 2022 was our highest revenue month ever, and July 2022 was in our top five.

A major reason for that has been the early success of D1.classroom, which bundles discounted Extra Points subscriptions, classroom discussion questions and Collegiate Sports Connect access for college classes. As of today, we have more than a dozen colleges currently participating in the program, with more on their way shortly. I am really excited about D1.classroom, and will be spending a significant amount of time working to grow and support it this year.

Even with a huge influx of new student and professor readers, the bread and butter of Extra Points remains a mix of industry professionals, fellow reporters, and just regular ol' die-hard fans.

Last year, we saw massive subscriber growth from September-November, and hope to see similar excitement during this football season. If you've been considering upgrading to a paid Extra Points subscription this season, let me gently try to nudge you along. You can get 25% off your subscription by using this link right here.

What hasn't gone as well?

If I'm being honest, I hoped that our ad sale growth would be stronger at this point. Subscription growth has been great, but I'm picky about ad partnerships and ad units, and finding the rights fits every week has been a challenge.

I'm trying to carve out a little more time this season to develop this, but since I don't run programmatic advertising and don't have an ad sales background, that part of the business is still slow developing. Finding possible ad partners, cold-calling, haggling...it just takes a lot of time.

If you're interested in potentially advertising with Extra Points, I'd love to talk to you. I'm at Matt@ExtraPointsMB.com.

What are some of my goals, big projects, etc. for the rest of this year?

One of the great advantages of now having a team to help support Extra Points is that it's easier to do some traveling. Subscription and ad revenue also makes it WAY easier for me to justify flights, hotels and conference registration fees. I am very hopeful that I'll be able to make a particularly ambitious college football reporting trip later this season, and we have plans to attend a few different conferences with on-the-ground coverage. I'll probably be on the road at least one week a month this season.

I'm also working on a few more quality-of-life tweaks to the Extra Points website experience, from commenting system upgrades, new features, improved article tagging, FOIA Directory quality-of-life improvements, etc. I'm lucky that Ghost keeps rolling out new updates on a regular basis! I will also continue to look at other tech or editorial investments to make EP a better and more sustainable product.

I am likely to continue the four-days-a-week EP publishing schedule this season, as opposed to the five-days-a-week cycle I kept for most of 2022. Four days a week gives me time to make that extra reporting call, as well as spend time working on product, sales, classroom support, and everything else that goes into this business. For super newsy weeks though, stay tuned, there might be a bonus EP.

Speaking of bonus EPs...this is a little bit of a secret, but my Big Dumb Crazy Idea is to start real work on Book #2. I wrote a book on College Football What If questions back in 2017, and am now starting very early work on a book explaining high level topics on the business of college athletics for fans. It's not a textbook... I'm thinking more along the lines of a giant EP newsletter, meant to help a fan better understand a few of the major issues I write about all the time, like NIL, Media Rights, Realignment, Athletic Department Budgets, etc.

Is this thing gonna be done in five months? No, because writing 80,000 words on TOP of 8,000 a week for Extra Points would put me in the hospital. It's possible it doesn't get done at all! But I am doing research on it, building outlines, organizing  materials...and may share parts of my draft process right here on EP. Unfinished chapters could easily become future newsletters. We'll figure it all out together. Could be fun!

As always, I also want to hear from you.

If you have an idea for something I ought to write about, please reach out to me! There are SO many colleges out there, so many stories, so many angles, that I can't possibly reach them all by myself. If there is something unique happening in your neck of the woods, I'd love to hear all about it.

I'm an easy guy to get ahold of. I'm @MattBrownEP on Twitter and Matt@ExtraPointsMB.com on email.

I am so deeply thankful for your support, your encouragement, and your readership. I've been writing Extra Points for two and a half years, and I think this will be my 11th college football season as a working journalist...and I'm still pinching myself, in disbelief that this is actually my job, and this audacious plan is actually working. I'm going to do my absolute best to keep giving you something unique to read this season, and I hope I can continue to earn your support.

Thanks for sticking with me. Let's have some fun this fall, eh?

-Matt

PS

In case you missed it, that 25% off discount code is here.