Your CB Year in Review

There are curmudgeon old-timey reporters everywhere, but Les, who’s halfway decent at his job, takes the cake. He never misses a chance to rumble with a colleague, whine about lack of access, criticize his audience, complain about blogs, or bark at a player. He’s basically a caricature of ink-stained scriptuals everywhere.

Media Outlet of the Year: NJ.com

One of the few mainstream outlets that truly gets and writes for an online audience. I can’t tell you how many times I went to post something and got silently pissed that NJ.com beat us to it. Maybe that’s because Eliot works weekends. But even with the online focus, Eliot Shorr-Parks, Matt Lombardo, Jordan Raanan, Randy Miller (…), Mark Eckel, Joe Giglio, Rob Edwards and others do original reporting, with stories that often wind up as part of the national conversation. They’re not perfect – there’s an element of click-me hashtag content at times – but they’re the best among the mainstream outlets at understanding what online audiences want.

Most Embarrassing Run-In with The Law: Claude Giroux

Bobby Hoying Award for Fooling You Into Believing: Mark Sanchez

Runner-up: Me, for grammatically blowing the guy

Athlete of the Year: Jakub Voracek

Dude’s got 82 points in 79 regular season games this calendar year and currently leads the league in scoring. That Jeff Carter trade isn’t looking so bad.

Biggest Dick-Punch of the Year: Jeff Carter in the playoffs

God dammit.

Exec of the Year: Ruben Amaro

Haha. Just kidding.

Interview of the Year: Mike Missanelli and Lenny Dykstra

Most overblown story of the year: Claude Giroux’s status for a random regular season game against the Rangers

Coach of the Year: Jay Wright

His team went 29-4 in the calendar year and lost only to Creighton (twice), Seton Hall and National Champion Connecticut. \\//

Twitter Athlete of the Year: Roy Halladay

I struggle writing this due to the privacy of a man of integrity and the definition of a baseball player. In the video room in the stadium you will find a row of heart and hustle trophies with Chase’s name. Not because somebody chose to display them but rather a junk drawer of sorts for a man who although appreciates the honor and plays the game for all the right reasons! Not to be seen or heard or for attention. No look at me see how or any of the me-first mentality taking over all parts of baseball, sports, etc. One of my greatest honors was putting my heart and hustle trophy alongside the definition of the award. There must be one on every team. I’ve seen two in my life: Scott Rolen, and most of all, Chase Utley! The award has lost meaning. It’s normally given to the guy having the best year. But if you could somehow measure that in a man, Chase is run away from the pack! What’s really sad is some are busy patting themselves on the back and missing what a true baseball player is! I kid you not when he talked to me on the field I got goosebumps every time! Please encourage your friends, family, most of all your kids to be like chase! #26&chooch!

Philanderer of the Year: Michael Del Zotto

Final stats

I call this section: Throw comically large bags of cash at me, investors.

These are the total numbers, according to our embedded Google Analytics:

14.7 million page views

9.4 million visits

3 million unique visitors

All of those are substantial increases YoY. Page views were up 24%, visits were up 23%, and unique visitors were up 21%.

In December, the site celebrated five years of existence. Here’s the site’s growth in terms of impressions in the five full calendar years since launch:

Wordpress provides a year in review of sorts. It’s not as detailed (or as accurate), but interesting for at least the commenter data.

But to me what’s most telling is not the overall page views and post data – because some stuff (like #AskNeal) goes viral and isn’t a true representation of our normal readership – rather it’s the home page views. In 2014, there were 7.1 million views on the home page compared to 5.9 million in 2013, a 21% increase. And there were 4.9 million entrances to the site – times people typed in “crossingbroad.com” or Googled “Crossing Broad” – on the home page compared to 4.1 million in 2013, a 17% increase.

Other highlights

I hired Jim, so that helped. There were 2,205 posts in 2014 compared to 1,650 in 2013. The additional posts led to a nearly 100% increase in visits to “page 2”– people clicking to read more posts after getting to the bottom of the home page.

We partnered with the likes of Tony Bruno, John Barchard, Bleeding Green Nation, The Philly Voice, Eytan Shander and others in forming LibertyBroadcast.co, the first sports-focused podcast network of its kind, which we totally envision selling for $10 million in 2017.

Philly Mag wrote a profile.

For visits, the most popular country of origin, besides the US and Canada, was the UK (28k visits), Germany (15k visits) and Australia (10k visits). We had one visit from the South Sudan and I thank my world-traveling brother-in-law, or an armed rebel, for it.

The most popular browser is Chrome, then Safari (which includes iOS), IE and Firefox. More than half of all visits came from a mobile device running iOS or Android.

My favorite network referrals? The 694 visits from the Central Intelligence Agency. The 104 visits from the New York Times. The 1,065 visits from the United States Senate. The 2,198 from the Flyers Skate Zone in Voorhees. The 268 visits from the Department of Homeland Security. The 40 visits from Koch Industries. The 35 visits from Apollo Global Management. The 138 visits from the Royal Bank of Canada. And the 46 visits from the Executive Office of the President, which is the West Wing (hello, Mr. Biden!), an increase of 40% YoY from them.

Let’s get huge, 2015.

Your CB Year in Review

Some awards

Top ten most-viewed posts of the year

Final stats

Other highlights