Racket’s Year in Review: August 2023-July 2024

What do you know? We live to fight another year.

8:25 AM CDT on July 31, 2024

Lucy Hawthorne |

Unpaid Racket staffers scrambling to crunch the numbers.

Welcome to Racket’s third annual report.

I don’t know about y’all, but didn’t that last year seem really fast? It feels like we just gathered in July of 2023 to talk about our year two facts and figures and favorite stories. And yet here we are again, busting open the books to show you where every dollar went at our humble little local news organization over the last 12 months.

It’s funny to recall a time when we thought we might not assemble one of these reports annually, because this recap has become one of our favorite features to write each year, and from what we hear it’s pretty popular with readers as well. We're not a nonprofit that must file 990s; we're (clearly) not a publicly traded firm that's required to share data with investors. We're simply oversharing because, as a reader-funded entity, we value transparency.

And digging through the financial data and the pageviews isn’t just enlightening—it’s also fun. Looking at the highs and lows, the stories that really took off, the effectiveness of various sales and marketing initiatives… it’s a good benchmark for how far we’ve come and a reminder that the day-to-day work of compiling event listings and tracking down reluctant sources and sitting through huckster AI conferences is worth it.

If you’re new here, howdy! This recap follows the same format of our prior annual reports. Some of the basics, and frankly some of the specifics, will be paraphrased from those reports, which you can find here.

Let’s look at the numbers!

Financial Summary

*Figures are approximate and stylized for this report

Breaking Down the Numbers

When people ask me, “How are things at Racket?” I’ll typically tell them about some of the recent stories I’m proud of, or the cool stuff we have freelancers working on, or the latest piece that got a ton of pageviews. I almost always find myself concluding with some variation on, “And, you know, the numbers keep going in the right direction.”

I’m not trying to be flip! It’s the truth, and it’s the quickest way to assure folks that thanks to some incredible alchemy of hard work, luck, generous subscribers, and algorithmic whims, our publication is only growing more successful year over year.

Now that we’ve got three years of data to look back on, here’s a graph that shows total incoming annual revenue since we launched in August of 2021:

And another plotting the money we paid out to ourselves and our contributors annually:

Like I said: right direction! The more money we’re able to bring in via ad sales and subscriptions, the more we can spend on ourselves and our 100+ talented contributors and our website in general. That gets us in front of more people, bringing in more sponsorship and subscription dollars. It turns out you actually do gotta spend money to make money? Science should look into this.

Now, we don’t necessarily expect that those figures will just continue their slow and steady climb indefinitely—eventually it seems likely that they’ll stagnate, or even recede. In fact, we’ve dealt with periods of stagnation over the last year.

In early 2024, we were sitting at 3,641 subscribers, a figure that was… not all that many more than we had at the writing of our second annual report. One thing we’ve noticed since switching off of the Pico membership management platform in our second year is that the number of new subscriptions dwindled. Whereas we had been steadily adding 100-200 new Racket members in the Pico days, the move to Alley Lede’s proprietary CRM system dropped that figure down closer to 30 or 40.

So, in May, we held the Spring Membership Drive—the biggest member drive of its kind since we launched in 2021—with a goal of finally cresting the 4,000 subscriber mark. It seemed like a long shot, but thanks to an outpouring of support from current subscribers (more on that at the end of this review) and prize donations galore from local businesses including Relish Minneapolis, Broders' Cucina Italiana, Bench Pressed Letterpress, Move Minnesota, and First Avenue, we handily crossed the 4K threshold.

I’m happy to report that we have 4,061 active subscribers as of July 25, 2024. Of those, 3,433 are at the Lookout subscriber tier ($5 a month, $50 a year); 619 are at the Accomplice tier ($10 a month, $100 a year); and nine are Racketeers ($99 a month, $999 a year). Our churn rate—the proportion of subscribers who once held a subscription, but no longer do—is at 1.5% this year, which seems good! Recurly Research, whoever they are, says a 4% churn is “a good benchmark.” Thanks to those who are stickin’ with us.

Roughly 75% of our year-three revenue came from reader subscriptions, down just slightly from 80% in year two. That means our members are still the driving force making Racket successful. If a writer blogs about license plates that say PEE and no one is around to pay for it, does the website on which it appears even exist?

The remaining 25% of year three revenue came from website and newsletter sponsorships. Speaking of which: We parted ways with Arts Ink, the company that had been selling website and newsletter space for Racket since roughly the time of our launch in 2021, this January. It was amicable: Arts Ink’s focus is really on communications and brand strategy for area arts organizations, and we were ready to pursue new sponsors.

We’ve done just that—a lot of it!—thanks to our new dedicated salesperson, Vasiliki Papanikolopoulos. She’s helped us connect with a whole bunch of new sponsors since joining us in February: The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University, Greenway Glow, The Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild, Twin Cities Vegan Fest, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Minnesota Antiquarian Book Fair, and The Aliveness Project.

You’ll notice that local festivals, arts orgs, and nonprofits continue to be the biggest financial supporters of Racket (outside of subscribers), and the sponsors listed above join longtime, continuing supporters including the Dakota, Live Nation, and the Minnesota Orchestra. A special thank you to the Walker Art Center, which began sponsoring all of Racket’s film coverage this year.

We continued our collaboration with The Twin Cities Media Group, a joint media organization made up of Racket, Southwest Voices, Heavy Table, New Prensa, North News, and KRSM. Sponsorships sold through the TCMG over the last 12 months netted us about $2,800 in the org’s second year, up from $1,200 in year one, and we just might have more exciting news on that front on the way.

The Website

The bulk of our expenses (not including compensation for Racket staffers and contributors) once again went to the operation of the website itself. We’re still collaborating with the New York City-based independent publishing platform Alley Lede, who were instrumental in launching Racket in '21, although that arrangement looked a liiiiittle different here in year three.

In prior years, we gave Alley Lede a percentage of our revenue in exchange for their building and maintaining the technical side of the website. That seemed like the right arrangement in our early days, but precisely because the numbers keep going in the right direction, it started to feel like an untenable amount. So, last fall, we transitioned to a flat annual rate rather than continuing with our revenue share agreement.

When our initial three-year contract term ended at the end of 2023, we also switched to a new year-to-year contract. Overall, between the tail end of our rev share arrangement and the debut of our new fixed rate, we paid Alley Lede about $11,000 this year, down from $18,000 in year two. It was generous of them to hear us out and work with us on establishing an arrangement that works, and we’ve continued to operate on their proprietary platform, using additional web services including Coral for commenting and SendGrid for newsletters. We also pay for a handful of other third-party platforms including Google Workspace, QuickBooks, etc.

We still collect subscriber payments through Stripe—it’s more or less the only game in town and they know it, taking 2.9% + 30 cents of every single transaction, which is why our “tech and processing fees” figures are so high. But hey, at least you don’t have to pay for your membership by check?

How Racket Works

It’s pretty straightforward: We're registered as an LLC (Goof Responsibly, LLC, to be exact). All four co-owners—Jessica Armbruster, Jay Boller, Em Cassel, and Keith Harris—own a 25% stake in the company. There are no titles, and we all pull the exact same salary. We have received no capital from outside investors; we each put up $1,000 of our own money in 2021 to cover the initial expenses involved in getting Racket off the ground.

Additional Operating Expense Details

As for our other expenses? Still pretty low! Racket’s four full-time staffers handle everything from customer service to merch processing to accounting in-house; if you’ve ever emailed us about a technical issue or a question about your subscription, you know it’s one of us who gets back to you. We don’t have an office space, opting instead to work from our south Minneapolis homes or “in the field” (journalism term), with periodic meetings at local restaurants and bars. It’s important to us that as much subscription money as possible goes directly to local writers, editors, designers, and photographers.

Media liability insurance is still kind of pricey—we paid $3,700 for that over the last 12 months. We have again periodically relied on the counsel of lawyer-for-cool-locals Blake Iverson at Eastlake Legal, who helped us finalize our operating agreement, reviews contracts, and provides his insight on stories that might come under legal scrutiny.

In last year’s report, we explained that we’d stopped experimenting with paid advertising on Facebook and Google Ads, neither of which seemed particularly impactful and both of which made us feel somewhat like we’d taken small fistfuls of money, doused them in gasoline, and lit a match, and that continues to be true. (Silicon Valley going full, mask-off libertarian freakazoid made our decision even easier.) Though we have shelled out some money on marketing ourselves—more on that in a sec.

The Traffic

We published 931 stories in year three, bringing the grand total to 2,894. That’s a lotta content! And it brought a lotta eyeballs to the site.

We’ve had 30+ stories with more than 10,000 views since last August, more than have crossed that threshold in any prior year. In total, we had just shy of 3.1 million pageviews this year, up from 2.7 million pageviews in year two.

Popular stories remain the No. 1 thing that promotes subscriber growth. Typically, these are stories that Racket has an exclusive on, whether that’s because we’re first with the news (lots of people wanted to buy Jeremy Messersmith’s tiny house, it turns out), or because it’s something ~~really dumb~~ with a unique Racket perspective (no one but us dared venture to Zorbaz after it appeared in the New York Times; no one but our own Keith Harris could have written so insightfully about the Replacements).

Interestingly, two “travelogues” cracked the top 10 this year: Keith captured the hearts and imaginations of readers with his journey to Chicago via Amtrak’s new Borealis train, and freelancer Ian Ringgenberg recaptured the magic of his 2022 visit to Winnipeg with a new report that asked, bravely, “What’s the deal with St. Paul?” And two of the top 10 fall into the “ladies who suck” category. Perhaps we should profile more ladies who suck.

Here’s a look at these and other top-performing stories from the last year:

Remembering the Time the Twin Cities' Streetcar System Was Destroyed by the Minneapolis Mob (13,125 views)
Let's Judge the Current Minnesota State Flag Finalists (13,673 views)
The Best, Worst, and Most Middling New Foods of the 2023 Minnesota State Fair (13,683 views)
Review: New Dinkytown McDonald's Is the Ugly, Black Heart of a Dying Empire (15,232 views)
We Tried MN's Zorbaz, Alleged Top 15 Worldwide Pizza Destination (16,810 views)
Wanna Buy a $370K South Minneapolis House With an Indoor Basketball Court? (17,497)
Two Dudes Casually Offered $20 Naz Reid Tattoos. Hundreds Have Claimed the Deal. (18,172 views)
I Rode Amtrak's New Borealis Line to Chicago So You Don't Have to (But You Still Should) (20,706 views)
The Wall Street Journal Wants to Know What's up With Downtown Minneapolis (20,800 views)
Why Do We Still Pretend That the Replacements Should Have Become Rock Stars? (22,730 views)
The 30 Goofiest New MN State Flag Design Submissions (22,928 views)
Liz Collin's High School Classmate Reviews Her Stupid New Book (25,033 views) [Editor's note: This story was published in 2022, but Liz's stupid new pro-cop, revisionist history documentary on the murder of George Floyd renewed Google interest.]
What's the Deal With St. Paul? (29,075 views)
Wanna Buy Jeremy Messersmith's Tiny House, Arguably the Tiniest One in Minneapolis? (34,654 views)
With Duluth's Park Point, Kathy Cargill Crossed the Billionaire PR Precipice (92,024 views)

Now, as always, I want to emphasize that high-traffic stories are not necessarily the ones we’re proudest of, the ones that are most important, or even the ones that generate the most new subscriptions. Often, it feels like there’s an almost inverse correlation. Those state flag blogs took my colleague Jay and I basically no time to throw together, and yet both were among our most-read stories of the year—Minnesota simply had state flag fever! And if you can believe it, after all this time, our most read story is still our 2021 ranking of grocery store rotisserie chickens.

With that in mind, here are some of the year two stories we’re quite proud of that didn’t crack the top 15:

I’d also like to highlight some of the tremendous work done by Racket freelancers in year three. We’ve collaborated with more than 40 new contributors since last August and continued to work with many of the 80+ freelancers who contributed to our website in prior years.

Stories written by freelancers that generated a large number of pageviews or reader discussion (or that we just really liked!) during the past year include:

And let’s not forget the wonderful contributions of Makenzi Johnson, Racket’s first-ever intern!

Johnson joined us last September, during her final semester at Bethel University in St. Paul, bringing her passion for fashion and some crucially youthful energy to our cohort of millennial and Gen X staffers. Her great work with us includes:

Other Stuff From Year Three

We’re still working on brand awareness, because while we’re no longer using Google or Facebook ads to reach new readers, we are, of course, still trying to reach new readers, just on more of a local level. The only advertising we paid for this year was with the community newspaper Southside Pride.

This branding effort has involved increasingly creative, some might say zany ideas including sponsoring the bleachers at a live taping of YouTube fishing/cooking show Shorelunch With Nate P. in February. One thing Racket endorses is the What the Hell? approach to marketing, especially if a given scheme can be pulled off for about 204 U.S. dollars. Oh, and we bought a billboard in collaboration with our buds at the Twin Cities Media Group. Same approach.

We ran our first fiction contest last October, thinking maybe five or 10 folks would enter their spooky stories set in the Twin Cities skyways. Instead, 30 people submitted original works. You can read the winning submissions here—we were really blown away by the quality of the writing. You guys’ll do anything to win THC edibles!

We introduced a fun new recurring feature, Better Know a Twin Cities Suburb, which familiarizes readers with from Hastings to Monticello to Champlin, and continued adding to our popular Best Budget Bites series. Nissa Mitchell remains, for my money, the best beer columnist in the Twin Cities. She might be the only beer columnist in the Twin Cities? But the point stands.

Some behind-the-scenes changes that probably went unnoticed to the average Racket reader have made a pretty tremendous difference for us. For one, we switched banks, and now we can pay freelancers by direct deposit, which has been a time-saving and frankly life-changing reduction in hassle for us and them.

We switched up the way we do The Flyover, our popular daily news roundup, earlier this year—whereas before, we’d been splitting up blurb writing between the staff every single day, now each Racket staffer claims a day each week. This freed up a big amount of daily brainspace for us, and, in my humble opinion, made The Flyover a lot more fun to do! It feels like less of a chore now, and more like your fun little individual project once a week. I hope that shows in the writing.

We started posting to Instagram more consistently this year and did our best to make those posts look a little more professional, always emulating but never quite achieving the vibe of the GOAT, @mprnews. If you’re not following us over there already, you should be!

And because this doesn’t really fit neatly into any of the other categories here but does feel significant, I’ll add that we gave away literally thousands of free tickets to dozens of shows at venues including the Parkway Theater, the Varsity Theater, the Dakota, and the Fillmore—way more than we’ve given away in any year prior. Some of these were gifted via Twitter or Instagram, but the vast majority landed directly in the inboxes of Racket subscribers. As Jay always says: In a Milhouseian sense, you can win things by subscribing to Racket.

Oh, and we won some awards from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists! This didn’t make it into last year’s report, but in 2023, Jay got a first place plaque in Arts & Entertainment Reporting for “How Music Streaming Impacts Minnesota Musicians,” beating me out in that category (I placed second with “The Renaissance of Minnesota Drag, and the Right-Wing Groups That Want to Stop It”). Jay also placed second in the Enterprise/In-Depth Reporting category for his story “What the Hell’s Been Going on at MPR?”

At this June’s awards ceremony, we did even better: Jay won a well-deserved Enterprise/In-depth Reporting award for “There’s a Massive, Hidden Lake of Mining Residue Above the North Shore. It Might Grow,” and Keith took the bronze in the Arts & Entertainment Reporting category when he asked, “Is Touring Even Worth It?” Keith also won two first place awards: one in A&E/Culture Criticism/Reviews for “I Saw 30 Concerts in 30 Days,” and one for Best Interview for this talk with his niece Julia about Taylor Swift.

OK, So What About Next Year?

We had two unmet goals in year two that we hoped to tackle this year: “do something with video and audio,” and “host more events.”

On the latter goal, I’m pleased to report that we held delightful Racket Office Hours sessions at Falling Knife Brewing Company (February) and Broken Clock Brewing Cooperative (May). We’ll likely continue to organize those kinds of smaller get togethers at area breweries/coffee shops/restaurants in year four. And we just locked in a date for our third birthday party—mark your calendars for Sunday, August 25, at Fair State Brewing Cooperative in beautiful northeast Minneapolis!

As for the first goal, we still haven’t quite figured out how audio and video fit into the Racket equation. Everyone’s days are filled as it is, and we don’t want to have a podcast just for the sake of having one, but we do think it would be a valuable and/or entertaining thing for our readers. We’re manifesting this in 2025.

Once again, we want to continue adding new voices to Racket’s roster of talented contributors. If you have a story idea you think would be a good fit for us, please email us at pitches@racketmn.com; we have pitching guidelines for hopeful freelancers here. If you’re nervous, don’t be! Alternative weeklies like City Pages often provided young writers with their first bylines, and we’re proud to carry on that tradition of teaching and showcasing budding local talent. Plus, the rates aren’t half bad.

Our number-one goal is once again to add new subscribers. With monthly traffic that hovers in the neighborhood of 200,000 visitors, we know there are many, many yet-to-be-converted Racket readers out there. We’ll get you one of these days!

If You’ve Read This Far…

And even if you haven’t, let me say again how happy we are that you’re here. We literally, actually, seriously couldn’t do this without our readers and supporters—there are no grants or outside investment. The fact that you’ve stuck with us for three years now? Well, if you’d asked me what I hoped Racket would look like in three years at the time of our launch, I think I’d say more or less exactly like this, a job where we get to put glasses on our dogs and pose them in front of laptops. But I couldn’t quite have imagined the scope of the support.

I mentioned earlier that we received a real tremendous boost from current readers during our Spring Member Drive. Let me explain: On May 1, when the drive kicked off, I posted a Twitter thread about the fact that we’d hit a wall and were asking for support, not thinking much of it—I’m hardly even on the increasingly vile Musk-owned platform these days (unless I’m Baja-posting).

Then the shares and quote tweets started rolling in: “please support this wonderful publication”; “It’s such a necessity to have local media like this”; “stories that are truly for us.”

“I joined Racket last year at a discount,” one reader wrote, “and love it so much I’ve stuck around at full price.” “Big fan of the work these girlies (gender neutral) do,” added another.

“Everyone in the Twin Cities should be subscribing to Racket, they do a lot of important journalism and a lot of non-important journalism that’s tremendously fun to read,” wrote one member, really nailing the ethos of what we do here (in-depth reporting b/w stupid bullshit).

That fully unexpected support led to us adding more than 100 subscribers—28% of our little cartoon thermometer—in the first day of our drive alone. And when I think about that, or about the wonderful little online community we’ve built here, especially in our weekly Open Thread comment discussions… anyway, I won’t get any sappier. As the most heavily tattooed member of the Twin Cities’ most ironically detached publication, I have an image to uphold. But thank you for being here, and thank you for helping us live the dream.