It’s been a long month – month and a half maybe? Who knows time is fake – of waiting and wondering about what our future will look like once we have split from SB Nation and Vox Media. While we have been waiting we have been overwhelmed by the support we have received from all of you and honestly, we’ll never be able to thank you enough.
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Broad Street Hockey needs your help
Against all odds, the wait was worth it. The news is good.
Vox will be giving us the Broad Street Hockey IP and, beginning April 1st (what a day for this huh? Lmao) we will be an independent outlet. What this means for you is that Broad Street Hockey can stay right where it is in your bookmarks and your favorites. The URL and the brand won’t change. I want to say that we will still be what you’ve come to expect from BSH but I am not sure that’s true. Because I want us to be better. While the site will remain, there will be some changes, though. There have to be.
Because here’s the thing: running a site like this isn’t free. And in this business you have two choices: advertisements or subscriptions. We don’t want to be the kind of site that relies on clickbait to drive a bunch of traffic to boring, useless articles in order to inflate our ad revenue. We don’t want to clog up your experience on our site with a bunch of invasive ads and pop-ups. Essentially, we don’t want to sell YOU to make the money needed to run this site. As a wise man once said, “the ethical choice is always to get your money from your customers, not third parties.” If something you use is free, then you, dear reader, are the product being sold. We aren’t doing that here.
This means that, at some point, Broad Street Hockey will be transitioning to a subscription-based model. Some articles will remain free for everyone to read. Commenting on those articles will be free too – after all, for us community is the most important part of this entire thing and we intend to continue to foster that. But some things will be going behind a paywall, and while I wish we could find a way to maintain quality while keeping it all entirely free, we just can’t.
And that’s where we aim to exceed those expectations I mentioned above. Over the last few years the staff here – all of us, me included – haven’t been as good as we can be. The team is bad, so bad, and that makes it hard to come up with interesting content that people want to read. On top of that, our budget was repeatedly cut, and it’s really hard to ask people making so little money to actually work hard. Particularly when that work is for a crappy corporation that, over and over again, made it clear that they didn’t give a shit about hockey or the work we were doing for them.
But we are working for US now. We are working FOR YOU. And with that has come a new energy and commitment to making this the best Flyers community there is. To build this into something amazing. So you can expect that the new Broad Street Hockey will feature more in-depth content, more locker room coverage, and more of the fun and interesting articles that brought you all here in the first place. If we are asking you for your dollars, we are damn well going to earn them.
That said, we need your help as we transition. If you haven’t yet, please consider taking our short survey. It’s been really helpful in letting us know who you all are and what you want from us. Or, if you have the means, we have an active fundraiser to help us transition. If you have some feedback or ideas you’d like to share, please comment below, I will be keeping a very close eye on this. And finally, if you’re in web development and would like to help us literally build the new BSH, I’d love to talk!
