Hey folks. It’s been a little over seven months since we had the very exciting pleasure of becoming an independent outlet focused on covering your Philadelphia Flyers. After a few bumps and bruises at the start, we’ve since launched with a new look, a new plan, and a full desire to make this dang thing work.
We have a staff of really enthusiastic folks — talented, enthusiastic folks — who are here for one reason: they love this community and they love the Flyers. Our one and only goal for this website is to be able to earn enough revenue to pay these wonderful people a nice little chunk of money for their efforts and to keep the lights on. Right now, some of us are working for free. Most of us are working for not much money at all. Like I said, we do this thing because we love it; no one expected to get rich writing pithy articles about a mid-at-best NHL hockey team. We can’t all be Charlie!! (Hi Charlie, luv u)
Our original goal was to rely on the support of you, our dear readers, to reach that goal. And we’ve gotten a lot of support, it’s been amazing. From the time we were kicked by the jerks at the corporate media outlet that used to own us, to now, half way through our first season, the generosity of this community has been more than we could have imagined. Really cannot describe how thankful we are for all of You People. As our costs increase and we work towards our goal of paying our contributors a fair wage for their work, we are finding that we are coming up a bit short.
And believe us, we get it. Everyone is asking you to pay for content right now. Every single link you click on, every story you try to read, everything you want to learn is hidden behind a paywall. And it sucks. But it is the reality of media right now, particularly sports media. The only way any of the content you enjoy is going to get made is if you are willing to support it. So when your favorite Flyers website, which had been free forever, starts asking you for $5 a month (about $0.16 American dollars per day, for the math nerds), I can completely understand why you’d say something along the lines of “fuck this, I’m not paying for another thing.” The pay fatigue is real for all of us.
But like we said, we’re trying to make this thing work. And we need to supplement things a little in order to make that happen.
Therefore, as you may have noticed already, we needed to put some small advertisements on the site to financially support us further and make sure that we continue to bring you the best Flyers content possible. It’s not ideal. It’s not something we wanted to do. And if, in the future, we can do away with it, we absolutely will.
Advertisements suck, especially when they appear where they weren’t before. We wanted to give you the option to avoid them at all costs for as little money as possible, so we’ve restructured our subscription tiers a little bit.
- The Danny Syvret — $3/month — an ad-free subscription, but no additional content.
- The Meat (Matt) Read — $5/month — an ad-free subscription and you get the vast majority of the paid content available. Everything from deep player analysis, thoughtful speculation, creative posts, and game takeaways.
- The Eric Lindros — $10/month — everything above, but also access to an exclusive BSH Discord to chat with all the coolest Flyers fans, and you get one absolutely killer article once a week. Something very good written by a rotation of our top contributors once a week, that will be more than worth your extra contribution to BSH.
If you are currently a subscriber, thank you and we love you! But also, you do not have to do anything. You will still be charged your same amount ($5 or $10) and now you get even more. Previously the $5 level was only getting game coverage, but now they have access to all but the weekly special article and access to the exclusive Discord server. And for the $10-tier folks, you’re now guaranteed a top-tier quality article once a week, and to get to talk Flyers with the smartest and coolest people around. More bang for your buck is never a bad thing! And we think you’ll be really, really happy with this moving forward. We will be sending you an invite to the Discord server via email.
With this new plan, we hope to provide you all with even more things to read and listen to. Broad Street Hockey can ideally grow from here and be even better than we are right now.
We had to do this to stay alive and we hope that you understand. We appreciate everyone that reads our silly, little website about this silly, little hockey team. We’ve said it a million times and it’s true: this isn’t just a website, this is a community. Our friends with whom we talk about our favorite thing that we hate and love in equal measure, the Flyers. At the end of the day, we aren’t really trying to keep a website alive. We are trying to keep this community alive. It’s the best. It won’t ever be duplicated by anyone. We hope you’ll choose to support us if you are able to, and if you can’t, we hope you’ll continue to visit the site every day and enjoy this space with your fellow fans. We want everyone to be a part of this.
It is a work in progress, so if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment down below or email us at kelly.hinkle@broadstreethockey.com!
