Racket’s Year in Review: August 2024-July 2025

Welcome to Racket’s Fourth Annual Report.

Well hot damn, would you look at that? Another year has come and gone, which means it’s once again time for us to crunch the numbers, dig through the data, and bust open the books to bring you, our faithful readers, this Racket Year in Review.

But first, a quick recap as to why we do this. While Racket is largely reader-funded, we’re not a nonprofit, which means we don’t have to file 990s. We’re also very much not a publicly traded entity, so we aren’t obligated to share earnings reports with shareholders. We do, however, value transparency, especially because we’re reader-funded. You trust us with your subscription dollars, and you should get to see where those dollars are going.

Frankly, we also enjoy doing it! When you’re in the trenches day after day, trying to get newsletters out the door on time and make sure the weekly feature gets finished, you don’t always have time to take a thorough, thoughtful look at what’s working and what isn’t. And while we love the trenches—ours are very fun and rewarding trenches—it’s nice to have a yearly reason to really reflect on our wins and losses, interrogate our successes and failures, and appreciate what we’ve accomplished while thinking about what comes next.

So yes, while the annual report is where we lay out our financial situation (you’re about to learn how much money our four staffers took home, isn’t that fun?), it’s also where we share stats about the most-read stories of the year, discuss new projects and goals, and lay out the internal tweaks we’ve been making to improve Racket, possibly in ways that are imperceptible to the average reader. 

If you’re new here, welcome. This recap will follow the same format of our prior annual reports. Some of the basics (and some of the specifics) will be paraphrased (or taken directly) from those reports, which you can find here if you’re a real numbers freak.

On to those numbers…

Financial Summary

Breaking Down the Numbers

Defying the odds, our ragtag group of business-ignorant writers and editors has once again managed to bring in record-breaking earnings in year four. Suck it, Joseph Wharton, founder of the world's first collegiate business school!

When we compiled our first annual report in 2022, Racket’s total incoming revenue was just $177,000; that year, our four co-founders took home a not-exactly-bill-paying $23,000 each. After white-knuckling it through those early months, the numbers have gone up year over year every year since, and in year four, each of Racket’s four full-timers earned $56,500. 

Perhaps even more rewarding: Our contributors took home more this year than in any year prior, with $31,400 going to local writers, photographers, and illustrators. I cannot overstate how happy and proud this makes us—giving people their first or earliest bylines is an honor, and publishing work by folks who aren’t full-time journos is, if you ask us, a crucial component of any robust local media ecosystem. This year we paid talented writers to report on book bans, gutted federal grants, and missing persons cases, but also Paul Bunyan, hot chicken challenges, and glass block windows. 

So, how did we do it? 

Well, the biggest and most important factor is that the number of folks with a Racket subscription continues to climb. I’m happy to report that we have 4,878 active subscribers as of July 30, 2025, up from 4,061 in July of 2024. Of those, 4,103 are at the Lookout subscriber tier ($5 a month, $50 a year); 783 are at the Accomplice tier ($10 a month, $100 a year); and seven generous benefactors 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 1.34% this year, which seems good! CustomerGague, whose opinion we can surely trust because theirs was the first Google result, says that a “healthy churn rate” for subscriptions is under 5% monthly and that 3% or less is “ideal for scaling businesses.” Thanks to those who are stickin’ with us, and thanks to those who joined up for the first time over the last 12 months. To those who bailed? Shameful! (But please come back, we miss you dearly.)

Most of those new subscribers have signed on during our sales. Racket’s Three for $3 sale, which we held in January, helped us add around 200 new folks, and our Spring Member Drive, reliably the biggest subscription push of the year, added close to 500. Folks just love filling up a cartoon thermometer; it’s a financial imperative. Do they even teach cartoon thermometer economics at The Wharton School? I doubt it!!

Roughly 78% of year-four revenue came from reader subscriptions, which is up slightly from 75% in year three. That means our members are still the driving force behind Racket’s success. We say it all the time, but we literally, actually could not do this without the support of readers like you. 

The remaining 22% of year-four revenue came from website and newsletter sponsorships, which were coordinated thanks to Vasiliki Papanikolopoulos. (Very recently we realized we’ve been referring to poor Vasiliki only as our “ad person,” a title that surely does not encompass the hard work she puts in reaching out to potential advertisers, assembling proposals, and fielding inquiries from the Racket-curious. We appreciate you, Vasiliki!)

We welcomed tons of new sponsors this year, from Meet Minneapolis to MinnPost to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. (And that’s just the Ms!) As is true every year, local festivals, arts organizations, nonprofits, and cultural groups (shoutout Northrop) are our biggest financial supporters. The Walker Cinema continues to sponsor Racket’s film coverage, while the Dakota is our most consistent newsletter sponsor, as regular readers of The Flyover already know.

And speaking of advertising: One place where we have made an additional investment this year ($2,985) is in Facebook marketing. I know, I know. We don’t like it anymore than you do. It started with this widely shared survey of national media execs and publishers, in which Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said, “What is one main way The Atlantic and other serious publications drive subscriptions? They buy ads on Facebook.” To which we, a very serious publication indeed, said, “Alright, we’ll give it one more try.” (I promise, this is the only way in which we’re trying to be more like The Atlantic.)

But Thompson’s insight paid off: Since January, one Facebook ad has driven about 10,000 people to our website, and we’ve watched the number of newsletter signups spike tremendously alongside that figure. Are those folks ever converting to paid subscriptions? Will this prove to be worth it in the long run? Those are things we’ll sit down and discuss at the end of 2025—but getting new folks into the Racket “funnel” is hugely important for the continued success of the publication, and this has been a significant funnel filler. 

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. Real catch-22, eh? We’re still collaborating with the independent publishing platform Alley Lede, which was instrumental in launching Racket in '21 and which continues to develop the wonderful new features you use on the website today: dark mode, gift links, etc. 

We continue to operate on Lede’s proprietary system, using additional web services including ​​Coral for commenting and SendGrid for newsletters. We also pay for a handful of other third-party providers including Google Workspace, Fotor, Otter.ai (for transcription services we fact check, don’t worry), and QuickBooks.

And then there’s Stripe, which continues to be an evil necessity; the online payment giant scraped away $16,000 in processing fees from subscription payments over the last year. 

Introducing: RacketCast

For years now, we’ve talked about launching a podcast. I think it was… all the way back in 2022? that Jay purchased $1,574.80 in fancy equipment—mics, dashboard, software—to get us in the podcasting arena, and then we promptly sat on the whole setup for several years. 

In September I sent Jay an email: “Hi could we do a podcast this week?” I had been listening to the latest episode from our friends at 404 Media and was struck by the fact that it was just two smart folks riffin’ on timely topics in an entertaining way. Certainly we could do that too? So we did. And then we just kept doing it, opting for a biweekly Friday publishing schedule that we thought would minimally disrupt our writing. 

Less than a year later, we’ve had a sitting U.S. senator (Tina Smith, ep. 30) and a sitting U.S. rep (Ilhan Omar, ep. 28) on the pod. My personal favorite episode was this chat about how to start a writer-owned online publication, but I also really enjoyed our Twins preview with Aaron Gleeman and our year-end movie episode with super-commenter Taco Mike. Local radio legends like Cathy Wurzer and Dave Ryan have made appearances, as have athletes (Chris Kluwe), brewers (David Berg of Schell’s), comedians (Lizz Winstead), and musicians (Heiruspecs). Kind of an amazing run of guests for our upstart venture, right? “Enjoyed” feels like the wrong word, given the subject matter, but I also highly recommend our conversation with Davis Moturi, the south Minneapolis man who was terrorized and eventually shot by his racist neighbor. 

Is the (considerable, turns out) effort of booking guests, scheduling interview sessions, conducting those interviews, gathering for intro records, self-producing audio, and writing show notes worth it? According to our recent subscriber survey (more on that in a bit), about 60% of members have never listened to RacketCast—not ideal! But, optimistically, that means lots of room for growth. Plus, the pod has opened new ad revenue streams and, perhaps most importantly, we really like doing it. It’s getting better each week. Longwinded way of saying: Like and subscribe, please! Otherwise maybe we’ll kill it next year :-/ 

So What Else is New?

In February, Jay sent me an email with the subject line “small cheap office.” (I cannot emphasize enough how much gets done around here thanks to random bursts of energy and out-of-the-blue emails.) For a few months, he’d been casually browsing the internet for a space that could serve as Racket’s home base—somewhere to store our merch bins, which for years have lived in a closet at his house, and where we could meet up and talk shop without spending $100 on lunch. 

That search became slightly more urgent after we launched the podcast, as both Jay and I are the owners of large, very handsome, and not perfectly trained dogs. I’m paraphrasing here, but at one point we had a conversation that went something like, “We have to do a video interview with Mary Moriarty, right? I can’t have my insane dog leaping on the Hennepin County attorney.”

We furnished the ridiculously cheap ($200/month!) St. Louis Park office with Facebook Marketplace finds, and while our adventures in soundproofing are ongoing, we’ve turned it into a small but effective podcasting studio. The office also serves as our merch distro center, mailing address, and a place for Keith to hang out and eat Indian food when he wants to beat the traffic before or after a screening at West End Cinema. 

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, grants, loans, or dark money; 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 continue to 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 did get back to you, right? It’s a lot!)

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. Blake is so cool he sometimes pops up as a funny, wise, and unexpected source in Racket stories.

Do you ever wonder what kinds of things count as “miscellaneous reporting and business expenses” in an operation like ours? Well, one of the year’s most expensive-to-report stories was Keith’s attempt to eat 30+ dumplings over the course of two days in what some are calling the Dumpling Passport Challenge. Ol’ Iron Guts Harris charged $395.17 to the company card in one weekend as he sought out every gyoza, pierogi, momo, sambusa, and empanada in St. Paul, and it was worth it—the gut-busting endeavor landed him a spot on MPR’s All Things Considered. (We also hear the St. Paul tourism board is mailing him a free pair of Dumpling Passport socks.)

This is the kind of feature that would have been impossible to report in our early years. We just didn’t have the money. Your subscription dollars directly fund this brand of fun and offbeat original enterprise reporting, the kinds of pieces that make us go, “Yep, that’s a real Racket story.” Jay’s hotel room at the Grand Rapids Bigfoot convention wasn’t free! (It was $232.78.) And those stories bring more eyeballs to our little website, which helps the whole machine chug along year after year. 

The Traffic

We published 923 stories in year four, bringing the grand total to 3,817. That’s a lotta content! We had just shy of 3.12 million pageviews this year, almost identical to our total from year three.

Aside from the annual sales, popular stories are the biggest promoter of subscriber growth. Typically, these are stories that Racket has an exclusive on, often because it’s something with a unique Racket perspective. 

Here’s a look at the 10 top-performing stories from the last year:

• Why Do So Many of Minneapolis’s Best Sandwiches Come From Liquor Stores? (10,433 views)
• Democrats Ran Away From Walz’s Vision and Accomplishments. It Cost Them. (10,502 views)
• Mary J. Blige Demands We Take Her as She Is at the Xcel (11,215 views)
• Mad? Sad? Motivated? 60+ MN Orgs Working to Make the Next 4 Years (and Then Some) Suck Less. (12,565 views)
• Your Neighborhood Textile Stores: Where To Go Now That JOANN Is Gone (13,027 views)
• RIP Phil Lesh: Enjoy 30 Crowd Shots From Outside of the Grateful Dead’s 1988 Show at Met Center (14,055 views)
• The Best, Worst, and Most Middling New Foods of the 2024 Minnesota State Fair (16,848 views)
• Wanna Buy Karl-Anthony Towns’s Absolutely Massive MN Mansion? (20,080 views)
• The Temporary Demise of Uptown (21,770 views)
• Amy Adams: ‘I Would Not Be Where I Am’ Without Chanhassen Dinner Theatres’ Michael Brindisi (34,205 views)

(We removed The Flyover from these results; while our daily news roundup tends to do well traffic-wise, thanks to its SEO-friendly format, we want to highlight original reporting here.)

That’s a nice mix of stuff, isn’t it? Celebs, Uptown takes, liquor store sandwiches—what a top 10. But 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 the ones we worked hardest on. Often, it feels like there’s an almost inverse correlation. Another year passes, and our most read story is still our 2021 ranking of grocery store rotisserie chickens—100K+ views, the dragon we continue to chase! 

With that in mind, here are some of the year four stories we’re quite proud of that didn’t crack the top 10:

• ‘It’s the New Meat Raffle’: Inside the Growing World of MN Gun Bingo
• Life After HUGE: How the Twin Cities Improv Scene Is Evolving (and Even Expanding) Following HUGE Improv Theater’s Closure
• How Alive or Dead is Dinkytown in 2025? Depends on Who You Ask.
• How Did Minneapolis Metal Band Powermad End up in David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’?
• Meet Minnesota’s Rocketman: Inside the Incomparable Life of Ky Michaelson
• ‘Oh Yeah, He’s Real’: My Wild Day at the MN Bigfoot Conference
• After George Floyd’s Murder, MN Companies Pledged Millions. We Asked 14 How Much They’ve Given.
• A 25th(ish) Anniversary Oral History of Mitch Hedberg’s Never-Released Movie
• ‘America’s Electronic Soapbox’: Minneapolis Public Access Television at 40
• The Disabled Babes of Burlesque
• Minnesota’s Mighty Maker Spaces
• A Guide to Minneapolis Art Galleries for Beginners
• How the Twin Cities’ Volunteer-Run Spaces Make it Work
• Red Dragon Memories From My Aunt, a 14-Year Bartender/Server, Plus 10 Other Readers
• Weed Weview Wewards 2025
• Recreational Marijuana Is Already Here at Island Peži
•  ‘An All-You-Can-Eat Buffet of Humanity’: How the Eagles #34 Mixes Punk, Pulltabs, and Social Club Tradition
• ‘Reagan’ Is the Movie Ronald Reagan Would Have Made About His Life
• Paul Simon May Be Old But He’s Not Dead
• ‘A Complete Unknown’ Lives Up to Its Title
• 36 Ways to Make Friends in the Twin Cities

I’d also like to highlight some of the tremendous work done by Racket freelancers in year four. We’ve collaborated with 49 new contributors since last August and continued to work with many of the 120+ 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:

• A Guide to the International Grocers of the Twin Cities
• More Bare Transsexual Tits Than at Any Other Gig in Town: How Doll Brawl Fuses Hardcore and Activism
• ‘I Can’t Let It Go’: Inside the 74-Year Search for the Klein Brothers, MN’s Oldest Missing Persons Cold Case
• It Happened to Me: Goldy Gopher Came to My Gay Wedding (*this is also by far our most popular Instagram post of all time)
• I Tried the MN State Fair Oysters in 94-Degree Heat So You Don’t Have to
• How One MN School District Killed Its Right-Wing Book Ban
• What’s the Deal With Paul Bunyan?
• A Brief History of Alternative Pride in the Twin Cities
• I’m (Nearly) Broke and I’m Hungry. Can I Be a Vegetarian?
• Raising the Sausage Curtain: How Art-A-Whirl Helped Turn NE Minneapolis Into an Arts District
• Flying V Is Where the Hardcore Bands Go to Rage
• Can a 1-Day City of Minneapolis ‘Emergency Prep’ Course Turn Me Into a Prepper?

The (Newly Discovered) Reader Demographics, Habits

Well, technically member demographics. Earlier this month, for the first time in years, we conducted a comprehensive survey of our subscriber base. The survey went out via an email blast to all 5,000ish members, and we heard back from 513. We’ll omit the reader-specific commentary on what they like, what they don’t like, and how badly everyone wants Money Journal to return. Instead, enjoy these factoids about who reads Racket and what they consume. 

• 23.6% percent of members discovered Racket from friends and/or family. The surprising runner up? Twitter, at 21.3 percent; it's easy to forget Elon's hellish app wasn't always teeming with white nationalists, sports-betting bots, crypto freaks, and unavoidable pornography. Google (10.9%) came in third. 
• Racket members have joined the party (and stuck around) at roughly equivalent rates over time—our subs who’ve been on board since the beginning (19%) rival those who’ve signed up under a year ago (22.2%). 
• Overwhelmingly (54.4%), readers find Racket stories through newsletters. (A reminder: Visit the "My Account" section of the website to make sure you're getting 'em.) The quaint concept of homepage visitors came in second (22.2%), with social media (13.8%) coming in third. 
• The Flyover, our (mostly) aggregated daily news roundup and newsletter, scored highest marks for appointment reading, and, remarkably, no respondents reported "Never" when asked whether they read feature-length and/or quickie articles. Event listings proved fairly popular; the podcast... well, most people have never even tried it! 
• Unsurprisingly, Twitter is no longer a popular way to find Racket stories. Folks have drifted over to Bluesky (51.9%), Instagram (34.6%), and Facebook (18.3%). Many respondents provided a variation of "fuck social media," and ya know? They're not wrong. 
• 38.5% of Racket members are 36-46 years old; 21.5% are a decade older, while 20.3% are a decade younger. The 57+ selection (18.8%) dismayed at least one 57-year-old respondent who'd never suffered the indignity of selecting the oldest-possible box on a survey—we're sorry, we're amateur pollsters here! Exactly five folks who are too young to rent cars give us money, per the polling.  
• Chicken or egg? With great regularity, St. Paul residents tell us we ignore that Twin City, yet 56.9% of readers hail from Minneapolis. (We'll do better, St. Paulites, who are tied with first-ring suburbanites in our poll at 14%.) Outer-ring suburbanites (7%) mostly don't subscribe to Racket; Greater Minnesotans barely do (1.8%). Honestly, we get it—this publication relentlessly strives to be relevant to Twin Citians. 
• In terms of overall satisfaction, Racket scored 4.72 out of a possible 5 stars. Two individuals cruelly doled out 1-star reviews. 

Some Other Stuff From Year Four

Year four was a really good year for us. Things just felt like they were working well, running smoothly, falling into place. In a Donaghian sense, we were Reaganing. With every year that passes we feel simultaneously more confident in what we're doing and better able to experiment and try new things, and this year everything really clicked. 

For example, this summer we worked with a journalism class at Bethel University to publish a whole week of student work. These young people pitched ideas to us, spoke with sources, wrote their stories, and graciously handled several rounds of edits to bring you delightful pieces like this dive into the world of professional matchmaking and this exploration of modern philosophy. A huge thank you to their professor, Scott Winter, and to all of these really impressive students for working with us.

We’ve introduced several new columns over the last 12 months: Weedeater, which teaches ya how to cook with cannabis; Land o’ Lusts, a column about sex and so much more; and Pearl Talk, a comedian-penned advice column that’ll be making its long-awaited return soon. We celebrated Sandwich Week, a product of timing and happenstance and our general love of sandwiches that we’d like to bring back in 2026. 

Hmm, what else? We took home a few more wins at this year’s MN Society of Professional Journalists awards. We continued to be delighted by people rockin’ Racket gear on the news. We sponsored events like Drop Deadlift Gorgeous and Brewing Brighter Futures. Jay judged a smash burger battle; I judged a hot dog eating contest. That last sentence alone makes me feel like people “get” what Racket “is” at this point—its four staffers included. 

What About Year Five?

For many years, our biggest goals in this section were “host more events” and “do something with video and audio.” Hey, it only took us four years, but we’ve now checked them off. 

In general, Racket is starting to feel like… if not a well-oiled machine, at least a not-particularly-clanky one. Our daily and weekly processes make sense and make our lives easy. We’re regularly publishing stories we’re proud of, and we’re getting recognition for that work. When we reach out to people we want to interview or have as a guest on the podcast, they usually know who we are, and that hasn’t always been a given. 

So what now? 

We want to continue adding diverse new contributor perspectives. Queer writers, writers of color, queer writers of color—please pitch us! We would certainly not complain about having health and dental insurance… maybe someday. And eventually we’d like to add more staffers, especially ones who could focus on the longform investigative beat that City Pages maintained up until its demise. We know y’all love our interviews with toilet paper critics and guys who make weird bicycles, but it would be great if Racket could offer a little more meaningful accountability journalism than it currently does. (Although we certainly do what we can.)

And it’s not like weird bikes and good TP aren’t meaningful! They are!

And as for You, Our Faithful Readers…

Of all the data we collected in this month’s reader survey, the piece of information I can’t stop thinking about is this: That close to a quarter of Racket readers said they learned about the publication from friends and family. 

For the most part, we knew what we were getting into when we started this website. But one thing we didn’t expect was the community-building aspect of it. Racket readers are so passionate and so curious and so interested in connecting with us and with each other. You’re so eager to share things you read about here with other people and to share things about yourselves in our weekly Open Thread. 

Also? Y’all are everywhere! Last month I was exiting the ice during a broomball tournament when the ref padded over to me. “Hey, are you Em Cassel from the Racket?” he asked. “I saw your name on the roster and thought it looked familiar, so I googled it.” There at Augsburg Ice Arena, with sweat pouring out of my every orifice, we had a delightful little conversation about how much he likes the website. 

Every time I have one of these interactions my heart grows three sizes, and I’ve been having them more and more often: at the movies, at restaurants, at gravel bike races up on the North Shore. Every time, I’m honored, humbled, and extremely happy that folks love Racket so much they’ll walk up to us on the street to tell us that. We are so lucky to have you all and so grateful for your support. You’re what makes this thing worth doing.