The 2024 State of Extra Points

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Back when I first made Extra Points my full-time gig in April of 2020, I started publishing regular business updates. I figured if I was going to ask people for their money and attention, I ought to let them know if this enterprise was going to go under or not. I guess I was trying to do the whole Build In Public ethos that is now very popular with some of the most insufferable people on LinkedIn?

I can’t be quite as candid now as I was back in the early days, because I don’t own 100% of the business anymore, and it turns out that non-journalist investors don’t always like it when you suggest we publish our P&L statements. But that’s fine! They’re right!

But in that spirit of disclosure, before I fly off to Utah for a few days of family vacation and holiday memories, let me tell you a little bit about how this last year went for Extra Points. I’ll include the good, the less good, and where we’re gonna try to go next year.

So here’s the topline data I think I can share without my coworkers getting really mad at me

As we close out 2024, Extra Points has 27,000ish total subscribers, with a little over 2,000 of those set up as paid subscribers. Newsletter open rates typically sit in the 42-45% range.

While I can’t share exact figures, I can say that subscription revenue is still the overwhelming majority of revenue for Extra Points, although this is slowly starting to change. The entire enterprise grew over 30% from last year, and is financially healthy.

What went well this year?

This was a pretty big year. A few of the major highlights:

• This feels like a million years ago because the internet and this beat has ruined my brain’s sense of time, but earlier in 2024, Extra Points left the D1.ticker family and went back to being independent. I partnered with Dennis Alshuler, a former Princeton athlete and current media and tech entrepreneur, to recapitalize EP and help me run this thing. I loved working with D1.ticker and have nothing but positive things to say about that crew, but I’m also quite pleased with this arrangement.
• Extra Points was the title sponsor for a D-III game, the Extra Points Bowl. Did this game make a gazillion dollars and catapult us into the event management business? No. But it was one of the highlights of my career, and we learned a LOT.
• We launched Extra Points Library, a new and VERY improved version of the ol’ FOIA Directory. EPL is meant to be an affordable solution for anybody looking to access thousands of coach contracts, game contracts, vendor contracts, itemized budgets, and other important PDFs. This was a LOT of work, and continues to be a lot of work, but even though the product is in its early stages, I am proud of it! I think this is a tool that could be very valuable to newsrooms, law schools, sports business departments, athletic departments, sports agencies, and many other groups that need access to contract data in order to make the best decisions.
• We hired Hector Diaz, my former Vox colleague, to help us with social media, video and graphic design work. He’s the reason we have shortform video, the reason our Instagram looks so much better, and a valuable second brain in our operation.
• We also just hired Steven Toroni as a FT member of our team, helping with outside sales, which has been a heee-uge help so far.
• Finally, we also wrote a few newsletters I’m proud of. I spent about a week in Provo, talking to fans and staffers about building bridges to their beer-drinking fanbase, which I promise exists. That also ended up being an unexpectedly emotional trip for me. I was very nervous about writing any of this stuff, but felt like I owed it to my audience to be honest, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
• I also did a week in Hawaii, embedding with the athletic department and football team…and then reporting about what I saw and heard after their AD was shockingly terminated. I actually have some other reporting from that trip that I haven’t shared yet, but will in early 2025.
• And we did other writing that I thought turned out well, from the Colorado/NIL/Saudi adventures, to learning why it took so long for Wisconsin to sell beer at football games.
• I think it’s fair to say that we were the leading authority on the development of EA Sports College Football 25. We regularly broke stories on licensing agreements, school-based assets, NIL, and played the game early at the EA Sports studios in Florida. I’m even in the credits!

What didn’t go so well this year?

• We’re wrapping up the 4th year of Extra Points, and I still haven’t really figured out a way to efficiently sell direct advertising. We have some quasi-programmatic deals with Beehiiv, and we did sell a few larger campaigns ourselves this year, but newsletter ad packages have never been easy for us. We have yet to crack the code on how to fill inventory with ad units that you guys won’t hate, and make enough money for it to be worth it.
• We also experimented with social media advertising to try to better grow the Extra Points audience. For years, I could count on a steady stream of new readers from Twitter, since that’s where our kind of Weirdo Sports Fans hung out. That pipeline does not exist anymore after Twitter product changes, so we invested money in Twitter and FB ads to try to find more new readers. We…are not going to advertise on Twitter again in 2025, and our first forays in Facebook advertising didn’t meet our goals. We have work to do to get better about finding new readers! All of our revenue streams depend on growing the Extra Points audience.
• Being fully transparent, I’m a competitive guy, and I think I got scooped on a few things, especially near the end of the year, that I normally would have gotten if I wasn’t spread so thin doing other stuff. When you don’t have much gas left in the tank, typos get through more often, other reporters beat you to a story, and your fastball just doesn’t have the same zip as it did in May. I need to continue to do better at managing my “pitch count” so I can be at my best all year long. I’ve never been good at this, because my professional impulse is to go 125% at something until I collapse. Good for the newsletter business 10 months out of the year…not so good for the other two (or my long-term health).

What are we going to focus on for 2025?

With the caveat that the industry could completely change in June and we have to throw all this stuff out the window and start again, here are some of the bigger things we’re looking at for next year.

• We plan to hire more staff, including full-time staff. I’m a reasonably smart guy, but I’m only one guy, and I can’t write 200,000+ words a year forever…or at least, I can’t if I want those words to be mostly coherent and spelled correctly. I know we’ll be hiring some PTers to help with some huge FOIA projects next month, but we will look at potentially hiring other writers/researchers, marketing professionals, and/or product staff, over the course of 2025. Stay tuned, I’ll share more info on how and when to apply for our openings after the holidays.
• We want to make an Extra Points subscription even more valuable. Compared to our industry peers, this newsletter does a pretty good job of converting free newsletter subscribers to paid subscribers. But a “pretty good job” still means 90% of our total audience looks at our offerings and decides, “nah, this isn’t worth nine bucks to me.” Are we going to ever convert 50% of our audience to paid subscribers? Nah, probably not. But hiring new staffers, traveling across the country for reporting visits, filing a bazillion FOIAs and everything else we do costs money, so we need to do a better job of making that subscription worth your while. We’re going to spend time looking at ways to make you really feel like you’re getting your money’s worth when you subscribe to Extra Points. That may mean expanding the Office Hours program we’re testing. It might mean that we create new video content. It might mean new community features, special events, detailed reports, expanding Athletic Director Simulator 4000, or maybe stuff we haven’t even thought of yet. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
• On that note, we’re going to look very closely at expanding video offerings, event offerings, and games.

• We want to make Extra Points Library even better. We’re making a big bet on this product, and we’re doing it not just because we think there’s a market need, but because we believe it can be useful to many people. We are going to spend more time and money on adding new functionality to the Library, adding new documents, and making it run faster and smarter. Feedback, even from people who haven’t decided to use Library yet, is critically important for us.

• And finally, we want to continue to look for opportunities to do something very Extra Points Sponsoring a dang bowl game because you want to learn more about how event management works? Probably not something the AP or The Athletic would suggest, but that’s a very Extra Points thing to do, just like writing a silly computer game, or slamming a jello shot outside a BYU football game (note to BYU athletics personnel and various extended family members who might be reading this...that’s a typo, I meant allegedly slamming a jello shot). We want to do offbeat things or chase offbeat stories that fit with our ethos of wanting to better understand college sports.
• ?I can share that our current plan is to do the Extra Points Bowl again in 2025, but beyond that, who knows? Maybe we will launch a merch business. Maybe we do more NIL deals with athletes again. Maybe we will get really into D-III sports. Maybe I will write another computer game. I don’t know, but we’re willing to kick the tires on a LOT of stuff.??

And that’s probably a good Tl;DR summary of this year

Extra Points is a profitable, growing and stable business. We need it to continue to grow, so we can both hire more folks at a competitive wage, and also keep me from completely losing my mind…and that will require us to do different things.?

But even though we’ll be tweaking our FOIA database product, kicking the tires on video, spending more time on marketing than ever before and experimenting with all kinds of new ideas, we’re not changing our core offering.?

Giving you something about college sports that you’ll want to read every morning. I’ve still got enough in the tank to keep providing you that.

Thanks for spending part of your year with Extra Points. I look forward to continuing this journey with you in 2025.

-Matt