What's the point? The Technical Area, February 2024
This month at SCOUTED, we talk finances and brains going bad.
Hey folks,
Before we get started, I’m going to do something absolutely shameless.
This week I launched a publication on Substack for my personal work. I doubt there’s a huge overlap between SCOUTED’s audience and those interested in the things I’ll be talking about (art, fiction, the craft of writing, all that pretentious stuff) but I thought it might be worth plugging to those that enjoy this blog. You can check it out here:
Right, that made me feel dirty, but whatever, it’s my newsletter. On with the show.
Last month I wrote about the deaths of Sports Illustrated and Pitchfork at the hands of their corporate overlords. Guess what!? This month another institution fell: Vice. I know that Vice’s brand of counterculture crossed into cringe a little too often for the tastes of many, but if you have been on the internet this century your life has certainly been affected by the publication, even if just in passing. Vice’s cultural footprint can’t be overstated. Now it’s just… gone.
Why? Who better to tell the full story than Defector, the progenitor of reader-funded independent media. This is the tale of how a revolving suite of coked-up executive nobheads ruined a perfectly good and important website while paying themselves millions. I say the story, but I guess we’ve heard this one before.
I wanted to highlight the following passage in particular:
“Meanwhile, the solutions for sustainable digital media are out there, even amid all the carnage and panic of the collapse of the advertising economy. 404 Media, the excellent worker-owned tech publication birthed from the ashes of Motherboard, once a jewel in Vice Media's portfolio, needed less than a year of operation to achieve profitability, and thus stability*. It is entirely possible for journalists to earn enough from the sale of their work to make a living and to continue in their vocation; it just may no longer be possible for the sale of that work to also fund the extravagant ambitions of swirly-eyed, would-be moguls and grifting MBA-havers and entire constellations of make-work consultants. But those are the people in charge, and they are simply never going to fire themselves.”
(As I write, news breaks that Warner Bros. has killed Rooster Teeth, a pioneer in online media for 21 years. They cite ‘challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behaviour and monetisation.’ Lol.)
Anyway.
Welcome to The Technical Area, your monthly one-way conversation with me, the editor of a tiny independent football publication. This month, we try not to go broke and/or clinically insane. Did I succeed? To find out, please insert coins into the below paywall. It’s how I buy groceries and avoid selling this website to coked-up executive nobheads. Please. I’m hiding in a wardrobe rn. Don’t let them find me.
Just before I ask for your card details, here’s an update for free: in February, for the first time, we passed 500 paid subscribers. In last month’s blog I highlighted that to pay our small team a fair wage and become sustainable, we only need a few thousand people to pay for Notebook. We’re like, a quarter of the way there now. Thank you so much. Below, I’ll go a little deeper into our financial situation and how your money directly contributes to keeping our small, niche, but hopefully valuable and entertaining publication alive, independent and free of ads, and the steps we still need to take to get where we want to go. I’m also going to get entirely too vulnerable, because if you’ve given me money I consider you a friend. Is that healthy? Let’s find out.
Right. To read that, you gotta whip that card out and pay us. Please.
Wow, you’re still here! Thanks so much. You are truly a champion of journalism. That sounds extremely condescending now I read it back, but I mean it genuinely. If more people put money on the line to support the football media they wanted to read, our industry would be better. People would be screaming less on YouTube, probably.
Speaking of money, let’s talk finances. I’m not going to be too explicit, but I want to give you a general overview of how SCOUTED operates as a business, and where we need to get to if we want to survive.
Some dude who spends 50 hours a week operating a CMS is about to scream at me for the following segment, so here’s your disclaimer: the following definitions are not industry standard. I made them up. I have no idea if this is even accurate or valuable. It’s just the way I like to conceptualise things in my little brain.
So. In my mind, online publications have three general buckets of readers: core readers, commercial readers and transactional readers. Some readers might spill between buckets or live somewhere in-between. Smart marketing people could break these buckets down further into actual models of behaviour and customer profiles and make fancy calculated business decisions that make sense and stuff. I don’t do that. Because I made them up.
Companies like Vice or Pitchfork might lean most heavily on the first bucket, core readers: people who read the publication primarily as recreation. That is not to say these readers do not take immense value from the publication or read it just as fluff - but core readers are those who actually read the work, enjoy it, and connect with it. If you do your job right, core readers will develop an affinity with your publication, as one might a favourite author. I believe in the real world they call this ‘B2C’. It’s a business selling its main product to the consumers who value it.
Commercial readers are those who see value in your work for their business. Of course, trade publications will have entirely commercial readerships, save for a few fringe weirdos who are really into credit swaps or whatever. This is B2B, if you want to get all corporate about it.
And transactional readers are those who come to your publication for a specific piece of information, leave, and never think about you again. In the online SEO-powered world, these readers have rocketed to prominence.
Our model for SCOUTED currently tries to reach all three buckets of readership, in places specifically built for what those readers are looking for.
Our core readers are based here, on Notebook. Our audience is small, niche, but relatively engaged (at least by football’s standards). We’re incredibly lucky that of almost 10,000 email subscribers, 500 of you pay each month to read our work. Substack says anywhere between 2-5% is the expected conversion, so we’re at the upper limits of that. Because you guys rock.
I chose to move SCOUTED to Substack because I strongly believe the written word is a product that people will pay for if it’s good. Here we can write however we like (no SEO-mandated rules) and present it beautifully (no ads plastered over every word). Other than their unhinged reticence on the Nazi problem, Substack really is the best place to build a product for our core readers - at least right now. Last month, our core readers made up roughly 25% of our income.
Our commercial readers are here too, because they also value the quality of our work. I occasionally use the line ‘when SCOUTED speak, football listens’, which is a bit pretentious, but it gets across the point that a ton of industry professionals read our work. They range from analysts all the way up to the guys making the big calls at the world’s biggest clubs (if you’re reading this, sirs and madams, wassup). In this way, SCOUTED has always walked an odd line between being a trade publication and one intended for mass circulation. We run into this problem when deciding how to present our work - should we write seriously, in a way the industry might find proper and professional, or should we stuff our writing full of personality so a larger audience might connect? I lean heavily towards the latter; I believe if what we say is smart and valuable, most professionals will appreciate it regardless. Plus, they’re just people, and people rarely want to be spoken to by robots.
Learning how to best monetise our commercial audience has been a focus of mine this year. As you know, we recently signed a partnership with SkillCorner, as our work is a perfect way to demonstrate why their product is valuable in the hands of skilled craftsmen. We have worked with many other brands, clubs and leagues in a similar capacity and hope to continue to (email me, wink wink). Last month, our commercial partnerships made up roughly 27% of our income.
Finally, we have the transactional readers. Whoo boy. This is the stuff I don’t deal with. As a reader of Notebook or longtime follower of ours on Twitter, you might not realise but neither of those platforms are our most visible. Most people interact with SCOUTED via scoutedftbl.com, by far. That website is built from the ground up to generate clicks, chase algorithmic trends and generate ad revenue. Yes, it’s plastered in the things. The writing and content is still excellent - Steve and Llew work really hard on maintaining it - but the reading experience is a shadow of what you get here. Gamers whip out their phones after getting thumped on FC24, google ‘best wonderkids fc24,’ and there we are. They click, take what they need, and leave. Turning this transaction into a moment of realisation - ‘wait, this publication is really cool, I’d love to see what other stuff they do - oh!’ is an eternal struggle. Google is a fickle master, and tweaking the site at all can lead to a catastrophic fuckup. And right now, we still rely on the ad revenue heavily - last month, it made up 48% of our income.
So, that’s how we make money. Three buckets, each of which we are trying to grow. Well, I am a purist - ideally I’d want to shut scoutedftbl.com down and have the hundreds of thousands of people who use it come to Notebook instead, but that’s some way off yet. Let a man dream.
Before I let you go - and now I’ve made sure only the true maniacs are still reading - I wanna get real for a moment, if you’ll permit it.
In my first draft for this blog, I went on a long tangent here about the impersonality of football media and how most of the stories we tell about our sport must conform to a shape we find acceptable to consume. Emotional honesty may only exist when that story allows it - you may struggle with your feelings but only if you play the pantomime villain, you may celebrate but only when we say you can, etc. This is not an industry that generally accepts true stories, the kind that reflect the messiness of being human, because they’re uncomfortable and football is escapism - escapism built on decades of masculine ideals that are so deep-rooted they’ve become invisible. The tangent is becoming long again so I’ll just leave you with the conclusion: SCOUTED is just a group of guys trying to make a living in a bizarro industry. And I’m trying, bit by bit, to carve out a small corner of football that’s more honest, more human and less beholden to the shape of stories others have deemed acceptable. What’s the point? I dunno man. It’s just what I want to do. I think I’m interested in how football reveals the truth in people more than the game itself.
Truth, that’s the thing. So here’s mine: February kinda fucking killed me.
As a kid, I thought I knew the kind of life I wanted: working for myself, working from home, with lots of time alone with my words. So that’s the life I tried to build. For now, I have achieved that and I am very grateful. Here’s the thing though: if you’re not smart about it, working alone for long stretches can leave you trapped in your own head and lead to bad stuff. You know what I mean.
At this point I feel obliged to point out the ‘first world problem’ element to all this. To be honest just typing these words feels difficult - not the vulnerability, but because I feel immensely guilty about struggling at all. People have real problems and mine is that sometimes working alone is hard? Jesus christ man. I think the guilt is the biggest killer. And now I feel guilty for saying I’m guilty and not just getting on with it.
Anyway, last month I dropped the ball. I wasn’t paying enough attention and before I knew it six weeks had passed since the New Year and I’d spent most of it in the same room, alone. Thinking about it that way, it’s no wonder I hit a wall. And I did. Again, I’ll spare you the details.
I know that many reading this will have much harder jobs than I (low bar) but I also know many others now work from home, like me. So I just want to say: like football, our working lives are covered in a sheen of impersonality. But beneath that sheen is the messiness of being a person. This is your reminder, whether you’re dedicated to a solitary pursuit or not, to check in on yourself. Some people don’t find it hard. And some people don’t think they find it hard until they do. Then it all comes crashing down. So go for a walk. Call your mum. Shit I dunno, do whatever, I’m not your therapist. But apparently you’re now mine. And you’re the ones paying! Man, I’d better get outta here before I make things worse.
Thank you for being here. We have a small audience who like what we do and that always makes it easier to get back up. That, and knowing Stephen is losing his shit at me somewhere in Australia.
I hope you’re all well. I’ll see you next month.
Warmly,
Having been forced to work from home alone through Covid for nearly two years (absent about two-three weeks around the middle of it all), I can relate to what you say about living inside your head too much being detrimental. Same when I suffered a weird virus November-January and had to stay home a lot. I'm susceptible to depression as it is, but trying to learn some mechanisms to employ when things get hard like that is a way forward IMHO.
I don't want to be unkind or unwelcome in writing something that's 'here's what you should do', but these are merely mechanisms that have generally served their purpose as a barrier to what you descrive.
Does it help doing work on your laptop in a public setting like a café once in a while?
Get your friends and family to be more proactive in 'booking you' (as horrible as that word sounds) at regular intervals through weeks, so you get 'forced' to go outside. That's one way to break the spiral of staying in/rejoicing in appointments outside the house being cancelled (speaking of feeling guilty!).