Editor’s Note: the Pirates Breakdown app will be going away for awhile.
Here at Pirates Breakdown, we have prided ourselves on bootstrapping everything you’ve seen on these pages to date.
Since our launch on December 7, 2015, we have built PBD up brick by brick into a reputable destination for smart Pittsburgh Pirates analysis. By and large, we’ve done that. And continuing to do it thrills us day in and day out. Our readership numbers have never been stronger, and our voice continues to grow in the Pittsburgh baseball landscape.
And that’s why we aren’t all that much worried that we will be shuttering our Pirates Breakdown mobile app. The idea of a mobile app was always a dream when we first launched, and to actualize it in November of 2016 was a dream come true for us. Unfortunately, the numbers returned from the app in terms of readership did not justify the cost of the app itself.
In the interest of full transparency, we will now take you through some numbers that factored into this decision.
Although 5,882 of you have the app downloaded on your mobile devices, only 2,569 of you have push notifications enabled. Initially, we had intended the app as another means to get our analysis to you, and quickly. We would always see an initial surge through the app when we published a new piece of content, though the surges never translated to consistent, daily traffic.
The 1,879,191 unique pageviews gleaned through the app over 2017 to date pales in comparison to our other mobile traffic through twitter and facebook. Through good SEO and embrace of the AMP mobile page format, our twitter/facebook traffic nearly triples the amount seen through the app.
Put simply, the people have spoken.
There were some other factors as well. The type of analysis we like to provide here at Pirates Breakdown is often augmented by visual aides and graphics. Due to formatting limitations, these were often sacrificed for the sake of the app. We would like this to not be the case, and this plus the factors listed above made closing the app a sound decision.
There are also some other changes for PBD on the horizon, BIG changes…but at the risk of being one of those guys who constantly throws out teases, I must stay tight lipped on that front, for now. But we are awfully excited. And who knows, we might bring the app back. If we do, it will be much more full featured, without sacrificing any presentation.
I want to take a moment to thank you, sincerely, for not only checking out the PBD app but for your readership. This has been such a thrilling ride, and we’re incredibly excited for the future.
Thank you!
-Jason Rollison-
Pirates Breakdown Founder
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