This year at SCOUTED: The Technical Area, November 2024

This month at SCOUTED, we reflect - and ramble far, far too much.

Dear readers,

Another year has almost passed. I’m in shock, to be honest - this one’s been the fastest yet. I swear seconds are shorter than they used to be. Someone should look into that.

In last year’s festive The Technical Area, I recapped everything: SCOUTED’s entire story to date, wrapped in a navel-gazing memoir of saccharine nostalgia. Don’t worry, I have no desire to submit you to that again.

I am going to reflect, but not for the sake of sentimentality. As we barrel towards yet another new year, I’ve been feeling a little down about the twelve months I’ve left behind. I sat down with Phil Costa recently for a drink and admitted I felt we’d spun our wheels a little this year, that we hadn’t made the progress I’d hoped.

So I’m going to reflect on some of those disappointments and try to unpack them. The prize of failure is learning, of course, and we have a bunch of that to take forward - I’m going to detail that too.

I also have a reader question from last month’s Q&A to answer, some metrics to share on our readership, some news from beloved friends, some thoughts on cool stuff I’ve been reading, and a first look at our new website. (That sounds like a brisk romp, but I find writing these so therapeutic that I’ve gone insanely long again. It’s 19:58 on Thursday evening, this is due tomorrow, my current draft is 2500 words long and I’ve touched on less than half my topics so far - oops. Please feel free to skip the bits you’re not interested in!)

If you’re a free subscriber and can’t read much further, thanks for being here anyway. I appreciate paying for a newsletter isn’t easy or comfortable, especially at this time of year. We appreciate your readership regardless.

Alright - on with the show.

2024

This time last year, I wrote about how bullish I was on our new-ish subscriber-supported model. I felt confident we were on the path to becoming sustainable through a combination of our readership, ad revenue and developing commercial contracts.

It hasn’t happened. There are lots of factors for this. Firstly, after a record-breaking first two months, Google pressed some buttons and destroyed our built-for-SEO website’s traffic. To put in perspective how devastating this was, had it held strong it would’ve accounted for more than 30% of our total revenue this year. The company would be sustainable.

Alas, what could’ve been. I’m trying to see it as a blessing: from that wreckage has grown our new plan, which I’m really happy about and will share more on later. But still. Disappointment number one.