Racket’s Year in Review: August 2025-July 2026

Let’s dig into the facts and figures from Racket’s fifth year of operation.

8:46 AM CDT on August 5, 2026

“Are we in the red or in the black? I’m colorblind!” — Sprocket

|Em Cassel

Racket is five years old!

OK, for you fact checkers out there, Racket will be five years old… on August 18. On that date in 2021, our little online alt-weekly launched to moderate fanfare with just under 1,000 paying members and a smattering of stories about how Tesla drivers think they’re special and what it’s like to spend 24 hours in Uptown.

How has it already been five years? Sometimes I think I’ll come to one day in a hospital bed because a reckless driver took me out on my bike and they’ll be like “What’s your name and occupation?" and I’ll be like “Em Cassel, I co-own and edit an online news and culture publication called Racket” and they'll be like “Ha ha no, it’s 2021 and you’re still unemployed. Also now you have a head injury.”

Anyway! That probably won’t happen. And my rambling is keeping us from the business at hand: Racket’s annual report.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, a quick reminder of why we do this. Racket is largely reader-funded, but we’re not a nonprofit, which means we don’t have to file 990s to keep us accountable. We’re also not a publicly traded entity, so we aren’t obligated to share earnings reports with shareholders. We do, however, value transparency—you trust us with your money, and you should get to see how we’re spending it.

Selfishly, I’ll add that the annual report has become one of my favorite features to compile each year. It’s fun for the four of us to dig through the data and see how much we spent on hotel rooms and State Fair food and printing up novelty T-shirts, and it helps that the numbers keep going in the right direction. But this isn’t just about the money; the annual report is also where we look at popular stories from the last year and assess our successes and failures, taking a meaningful accounting of what’s working, what isn’t, and what we should tweak for the future.

If you’re new here, thanks for joining us. This review will follow the same format of our prior annual reports, which I will periodically cite throughout. 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.

Let’s get into it…

Financial Summary

*Figures are approximate and stylized for this report.

Breaking Down the Numbers

Once again, your fearless but not exactly business-genius Racket editors defied the naysayers (we know you’re out there) and brought in record-breaking earnings in year five.

If you return to our first annual report, published in 2022, you’ll see that Racket’s total earnings were just $177,000. We scraped by during that first year, confident in our concept but in no way certain that this thing would actually work. And we’ve watched those figures climb year over year…

I'm no financial expert, but that block getting taller sure seems good.

…culminating in this year’s revenue total of $440,500, up about 15% from last year. We’re coming for ya, half mil!

(I agree that the bar graph above looks almost suspiciously consistent, but those are in fact the actual figures taken from each annual report.)

So, how’d we do it?

Well, the total number of folks with a Racket subscription continues to climb. As of July 31, 2026, there were 5,442 Racket members, up from 4,878 on that date in 2025. Of those, 4,530 are at the Lookout subscriber tier ($5 a month, $50 a year); 905 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 1.13% this year, which is really low. 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.” Ayyy, we’re scalin’ here! Thanks to those who are sticking with us, and thanks to those who joined up for the first time over the last 12 months. To those who bailed? Good riddance! (But please come back, we miss you dearly.)

Roughly 74% of year five revenue came from reader subscriptions, down slightly from 78% in year four. We say it every damn year, but members are the driving force behind Racket’s continued success. We are tremendously, endlessly grateful for the support of readers like you.

Racket’s four staffers each took home $71,500 this year, which is just… amazing. (Did you know we each made just $23,000 each in year one?) And we paid $30,800 to Racket contributors in year five, which is surprisingly close to the $31,400 we paid them in year four, given that our approach to freelance work basically boils down to “enthusiastically greenlight the stories we want to read and politely decline the ones we don’t.” We are exceedingly lucky to have contributors who know what our readers love to see on the site, including but not limited to: satirical radio show podcasts, Art Sled Rally photos, shady PACs, competitive puzzling, bowling alley mechanics, and 24-hour shawarma shops. (Read on for more of our favorite freelance stories from the last year.)

Our semi-regular sales continue to generate the biggest bumps in membership each year. The Sept-member Sale, which gave new subscribers a month to try Racket for $1, helped us add 150 subscribers during a two-week span last fall, and our annual Spring Member Drive during the final two weeks of May brought in more than 300 new subscribers.

With the exception of a few-thousand dollars from selling those aforementioned novelty T-shirts, the remaining 26% of year five revenue came from website and newsletter sponsorships, which were coordinated by our ad rep, the wonderful Vasiliki Papanikolopoulos. We are thankful for the continued support of local arts organizations like the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Minnesota Opera, all of whom have made substantial contributions to our work over the last year. We like to think they wouldn't be spending that money if they weren't sure we could help them reach smart, savvy, civically engaged readers. The Walker Cinema continues to sponsor Racket’s film coverage, while the Dakota is our most consistent newsletter sponsor, as regular readers of ICYMI already know.

The Website

Outside of compensation for Racket staffers and contributors, the bulk of our expenses once again went to the operation of the website itself. You have to spend money to make money—that’s just a little turn of phrase we coined.

We’re still collaborating with the independent publishing platform Lede, which was instrumental in launching Racket in 2021 and which continues to develop the nifty new features you use on the website today. Don’t forget to use those gift links, people.

We continue to operate on Lede’s proprietary system, using additional web services including Coral for commenting. We pay for a handful of other third-party providers including Google Workspace (email, documents), Fotor (photo editing, graphic design), Otter.ai (for transcription services—we fact check, don’t worry), and QuickBooks (which now costs $85 a dang month).

We shelled out for an Unsplash premium subscription this year ($84 annually), which gives us access to some Getty images and illustrations like the adorable paperwork-surfing guy who accompanied this story on taxes and mutual aid. (The lowest-tier Getty subscription would cost us $167 a month!) We also started paying Later $25 a month for its Link In Bio tool, which makes it easy for people to click through to our stories from Racket’s Instagram.

And then there’s Stripe, which continues to be an evil necessity; the online payment giant scraped away $18,000 (!) in processing fees from subscription payments over the last year.

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.

RacketCast Year 2

Our podcast, RacketCast, is no longer recorded on a roving basis, with Jay frantically toting the audio gear from one dining room table to another. These days we’ve got a homebase in St. Louis Park, where our tiny 175-square-foot office serves as a nice recording studio, complete with DIY audio dampening doohickeys lining the walls. After 57 episodes we’d like to think we’re getting better at speaking into the mics, too, as well as editing the sounds produced—all self-taught by clueless print journalists, baby!

While our listenership numbers don’t rival Call Her Daddy, we’re calling RacketCast a success. Each ep receives around 800 downloads, and every other week we’re pulling top-notch guests—John freaking Waters came on the pod! And so did election demystifier Naomi Kritzer, beloved DJ Mary Lucia, comedy great Fancy Ray, anti-data center activists, a fire behavior analyst, and fellow journalists up the wazoo.

RacketCast began attracting sponsorships over the past year, and we’re happy to report a permanent sponsor is in the works. (Ad reads? They’re kinda fun.) You can help by smashing that subscribe button on your podcast app of choice.

So What Else is New?

Literally since day one of Racket’s existence we have struggled to find a newsletter platform that doesn’t suck. We started off with Mailchimp, which was mostly fine but also made it weirdly difficult to, like, add photos or block quotes or section headers—all things that should ideally not make you want to break your laptop in two when you’re sending out multiple daily and weekly e-newsletters. Then, for a while, we used Sendgrid, which was: far worse!

Earlier this year, we made the shift to Beehiiv, which we should have done five years ago. I cannot emphasize enough how straightforward it is to use. To be able to basically copy a story, images and quotes and all, and paste it into the email editor without having to make 100 tiny formatting changes? What a goddamn dream. The analytics and post performance data are just virtual icing on the digital news cake.

I have no clue if this shift has been perceptible to the average Racket reader, but it has made our lives so much easier and saved us so much time and frustration. I just searched our chat history from the last few months and found messages like “god i love beehiiv so much” and “Beehiiv just made this waaaaay easier” and “thank u, beehiiv.” Beehiiv, if you’re reading this, we love you.

In year four, we started to experiment with paid advertising on sites like Facebook to bring in additional eyeballs to the site. And we continued to do so, icky as it often feels, in year five, paying a total of $10,500 between Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram.

Elsewhere on the website, we’ve made small tweaks like adding a Reader Comment of the Day and including an “add Racket to Google” button that makes the site one of your preferred sources. Are there features you’d like to see that we don’t currently offer? Tell us so we can tell the computer-understanders at Lede.

Additional Operating Expense Details

As for our other expenses? Still pretty low! Racket’s four full-time staffers continue to handle everything in-house, from customer service to merch processing to accounting; 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?)

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.

Do you ever wonder what kinds of things count as “miscellaneous reporting and business expenses” in an operation like ours? Well, let’s take a pull from the ol’ Capital One statements, shall we? We spent $134.87 on bowls at Baba’s Hummus House to bring you this ranking, and $147.20 to rank all of the sandwiches at Paperboy. I spent $1.84 on Etsy for a loon pattern so I could make a Racketeer this MPLS > ICE cross stitch. (Yes, a custom cross stitch is a perk of Racketeer-level membership.) Jay just spent $6.46 to review Kwik Trip’s new SPAM sandwiches that look pretty bad, if we’re being honest—he sent a photo to the work chat.

Your subscription dollars directly fund all of that. Jay’s hotel room at the Beacon Pointe Resort in Duluth, his home base while reporting on Google’s proposed Hermantown data center, wasn’t free! (It was $158.22.) And those stories bring more eyeballs to our little website, which helps the whole machine chug along year after year.

The Traffic

We published 802 stories in year five, bringing the grand total to 4,749. That’s a lotta content! We had 3.32 million pageviews this year, which is up ever so slightly from 3.12 million in year four. Not bad, considering Google's intrusive AI tech has nuked search traffic for news outlets.

Aside from our 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:

MN ICE Watch Jan. 12-16: Daily Updates on Trump's Invading Troops (13,564 views)
Goodbye to Palmer’s: A Requiem for Minneapolis’s Weirdest and Wonderfullest Bar (13,972 views)
Amy Klobuchar’s Record on Trump Is Shameful (14,115 views)
With the Twin Cities Under Siege, Restaurants Become Hubs of Solidarity (15,046 views)
Some New Twin Cities Restaurants I Really Liked in 2025 (15,119 views)
Wanna Buy a Usonian Masterpiece on 11 Acres of Twin Cities Parkland? (20,166 views)
The Best, Worst, and Most Middling New Foods of the 2025 Minnesota State Fair (27,835 views)
What I Saw at This Weekend’s Minnesota MAHA Fest Scared the Hell out of Me (22,401 views)
A New Yorker's Top 5 Pizzas by the Slice in the Twin Cities (28,846 views)
Yes, That Mancini’s: How a Legendary St. Paul Steakhouse Raised $35K for the Resistance (64,331 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, it’s simply much more fun to highlight original reporting here.)

A requiem for a beloved dive bar, a report from a MAHA convention in outstate Minnesota, a few reminders of the chaos and community strength we saw during Operation Metro Surge—our most-read stories from year five really run the gamut, and that rules. I love that Racket is not confined to any one thing and appreciate that our readers’ tastes are as varied and eccentric as our own.

Of course, clicks do not necessarily correlate with the stories that are our best, or that took the most time and effort, or that we’re proudest of. Case in point: Another year has passed, and our 2021 ranking of local grocery store rotisserie chickens remains our most-read story of all time.

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

I’d also like to highlight some of the tremendous work done by Racket freelancers in year five. We’ve collaborated with 39 new contributors since last August, bringing the total number of writers, photographers, and illustrators who have worked with Racket to more than 220.

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:

Some Other Stuff From Year Five

Uhhh… so what else happened last year? Well, our cherished colleague Jay went on paternity leave from October through December of last year, and running Racket as a newsroom of three was a new experience for us. We did OK, I think. And more importantly, Jay’s baby rocks.

We’re thrilled to be working with our second intern, Clare O’Connor, a formidable collegiate talent who’s already written stories about the local juggling community, cheap tacos, accessible democracy, and trains. Safe to say she gets Racket’s whole thing. Clare has a few more stories in the works that we’re really, really excited to share with you over the coming weeks.

We took home eight awards at this year’s MN Society of Professional Journalists awards (entry free: $30 per story). We continued to be delighted by people rockin’ their Racket gear in public and tagging us in selfies of it.

Last year, I wrote that Racket was “starting to feel like… if not a well-oiled machine, at least a not-particularly-clanky one,” and that continues to be true. We all know what to do, how to do it, how to best support each other, how to write and edit stories that we like and are proud of.

There’s no better example of that, to me, than the way we pivoted to cover Operation Metro Surge earlier this year—even as a newsroom of four, we found stories that were going uncovered elsewhere in the local media universe. It’s no coincidence that so many of the pieces we featured in those massive link roundups above were written during ICE’s reign of terror, and it was incredibly flattering and humbling to be the subject of this Coyote Media story about covering our “hometown fascist invasion” as a small alternative publication.

What About Year Six?

Racket is doing really well. Even saying that now has me looking over my shoulder, knocking on wood, spitting, tossing salt over my shoulder—I don’t want to jinx our success or attract the evil eye. But there’s no other way to say it: This year, more than any year before, it really felt like this thing was working.

Part of the reason that feels sort of scary to say is that it seems like there’s nowhere to go from here without making big changes. Is it really time to start thinking about adding another full- or part-time staffer? Are we in a firm enough place to consider getting ourselves health insurance? …maybe!

In the immediate future, I’ll again highlight one of our goals from 2025: We want to continue adding diverse new contributor perspectives. Queer writers, writers of color, queer writers of color, trans writers, writers with disabilities, writers who have experienced homelessness, writers who have any kind of perspective you feel is missing from the media landscape—please pitch us.

And if You’re Still Reading This…

One day last October, Keith published his chilling 3,000-word account from a MAHA convention in Alexandria, Minnesota, which readers called “terrifyingly good,” and I published a 700-word blog post about a Lyn-Lake sex shop’s “Glory Hole Games” (which readers possibly also found terrifying and good).

These are the days that delight me most, the ones that really highlight the full spectrum of what Racket is. It’s serious and in-depth and incisive; it’s silly and stupid and meme-based. It’s kind of all over the place, and I’m eternally grateful that all of you are here for all of it—the weird history stories, the funny blogs, the food rankings, the bike race recaps, the movie and music and weed criticism, the objectively too-high number of stories about outdated technology and physical media.

Every year, when I sit down to write this annual report, I revisit the ones that came before it. And every year, as I put myself through that humiliation ritual of reading things I wrote more than a year ago, I’m struck by the combination of luck and dedication that got us through to where we are today—not just our dedication, but yours as well.

It’s so clear to me as I read each report how much we wanted Racket to work; it’s so clear from your comments that you wanted it to work every bit as much. I don’t know what we did to deserve readers and supporters who care so much about our little publication, but I’m tremendously glad that you’re here. Thank you to those who have supported us since day one and thank you to those who started supporting us just this year, or month, or week. Thank you to every person who’s ever shared a link with a friend or a family member or who’s said to a coworker or classmate, “You should read Racket.”

See ya in the internet’s only good comment section.