Leave paper and start paywall site?

I probably fall on the more pessimistic side. I’d be very wary of how much people actually would care to pay to read HS sports. I don’t mean to be a huge ass, but just thinking through my own fears and doubts about such an idea… I do know a few people who do vaguely what you’re suggesting, and manage to pay the bills, so I’m probably too negative, but…

It’s easy to tell ourselves that everyone cares about HS sports when we’re at a game and getting a “glad you’re here” from some thankful mom and a coach, but I’m sure it’s not an accident preps coverage has been slashed so drastically across the country. Maybe the stands are packed but how many of those people will also read a story when they get home? Is going part of the social scene of the town and/or school, or do they really care about that defensive shift in the second half?

The vast majority of the people who care, certainly who care enough to potentially pay, are the players and their families, and that’s an ever-changing group, so you may get someone for football and they could be over it by January, or June. Even if your school has 1500 kids, how many actually participate in sports in a way their families would want to read about it? I’m just afraid you’d be talking about a few hundred potential customers, and you’d be doing well to get half of even that group.

But that’s my experience and my observations. I’d love to see an idea like yours work, and if it could pay the mortgage, we’ll, that could be a damn fine and fun way to live. I wish you the absolute best.

 

This is my biggest red flag. What makes you think you could get to 1,000 people paying for the product?

While I agree with what another poster said about this seeming a bit hasty, it also seems like you've thought out a fair amount of scenarios. My advice would be to go for it. Make the change. Take the risk. But do have realistic expectations - otherwise not only will you not have your finances right, your mental energy and enthusiasm for your new project will be greatly diminished.

 

Unless the stands at the games you cover are packed for every game, or were pre-pandemic, I would think long and hard about this. The most likely subscribers are the players' parents. The players, not so much, especially if mommy and daddy subscribe. What is the average playing career on the senior varsity teams? I'd guess two years in most cases. There would have to be a lot of overall interest in these teams for this to work because if it were my kid I'd subscribe for two years tops and that's only if he/she was a star. Most of your energy could go into sustaining subscribers. I can't tell you how many memos I used to see from my now former publisher on subscriber "churn".

 

Wish you the best if you launch, but I side with the likes of @Pilot. From my very uninformed perspective, it seems recruiting news is about the only high school sports-related content that seems to have a chance to make money.

No one went broke overestimating the vanity of parents of high school athletes (and their willingness to pay for affirmation of Jimmy's platinum-ness), but there's a shelf life for that willingness.

 

The people I know who’ve gone this route and stuck with it for awhile have cast a huge net, like, theoretically covering the entire state and in practice covering 50 or so schools that aren’t covered otherwise … mostly smaller, rural and outside the scope of the few remaining daily papers.

A wider net might make the operation a little less vulnerable to that churn of variety parents coming and going, and a little more likely to get meaningful numbers of subs from coaches, administrators and whatever actual fans of HS sports there are in the state. Some features, plus scores, standings, stats, brackets…

shit I just described 90% of max preps….

 

Thanks for all that. My social media accounts are all personal and predate my employment, so I do get to keep those. Have a little over 3K total, with most being on Twitter.

Luckily there's no hoops to jump through re: credentials in this state. Frankly, they could be a little more stringent.

Great advice re: contributions and something I hadn't considered.

 

Thanks. Yes, getting a PT gig right away is probably a smart move to keep some guaranteed cash flowing. And I know they're desperate for help around here, so I'd have time to research what companies/warehouses suck the least.

 

I'm ashamed to say I hadn't thought of that. Great idea. We used to do regular updates on area grads playing collegiately but that got axed five or so years ago due to space and staff cuts. Great time to do it now, too, as larger high school has had many recent kids go on to play collegiately, including two of the school's all-time greats, who are playing major D-I football and basketball.

 

I appreciate the feedback. I know it'll take time to build subscriber base to that point (when I mentioned in OP this as way to make income early while photography side gets going, I only meant that it would start producing income right away, not that I'd hit 1K subscribers a week after launch).

I think 1K for those two schools is a realistic goal based on page metrics. This is small-city Midwest over 45 minutes away from any real metropolitan area, and high school sports are still king here. I didn't come up with idea in a vacuum, either -- there's a former newspaper writer who runs his own site about 1.5 hours away, and he's gotten several thousand subscribers in his more-populated area.

I'm very experienced at Wordpress and am tech-savvy, so no issues there. It's been the paper's CMS for nearly a decade. I'm eyeing Memberpress as the paywall plugin.

 

Four divisions in this state in most sports. Big city school is a smaller school in the largest division. Smaller private school is in smallest division, but has a high sports participation rate (well over 100 fall sports athletes) and is undercovered.

I have access to metrics and have chosen these two schools to start with strategically. Bigger high school brings in the most page views, and I've developed great relationships there. I believe there's a market re: the small catholic school because they've more or less been ignored in recent years. Didn't used to be that way two decades ago, but cutbacks have caused that. They draw from two counties and three cities all circa 20K residents. Three newspapers in those cities used to cover them more, but as staffs have tightened, that school has lost out on coverage because not only are they small, but each paper only had roughly 1/3 in its actual subscription area. I've fielded many complaints about lack of coverage on them.

 

Three words:

Business plan

Financing

 

I join others in hoping this works but fretting that the demise of local news has sucked away a lot of your potential audience. Twenty-five years ago, I think you could have counted on a lot of people following you to a pay site even after their kids graduated (of course, there was no need for them to pay for a pay site, since they had a local paper that actually covered the prep scene). Now, with the local papers no longer trying, a lot of a potential older base has lost touch with what's going on with the local preps. I can guarantee my Dad, a voracious reader who has lived in the same town for 50+ years and just had a grandson graduate from the town's HS, has little idea how the local teams are doing (grandson didn't play sports, which disappointed Uncle BYH) because the paper is so flimsy he won't subscribe to it. He was definitely more engaged 25 years ago.