A Uni Watch Milestone and a Big ‘Thank You’ to My Subscribers!
Reflections on my first year at Substack.
Hello! Today I want to talk to you about an important Uni Watch milestone — one that wouldn’t be possible without all of you.
It was exactly one year ago — on Oct. 14, 2022 — that I published my first piece here on Substack, which was the 2022 Uni Watch NBA Season Preview. I’d spent the previous year-plus writing feature-length Uni Watch articles for Facebook’s Bulletin platform, but Facebook unexpectedly pulled the plug on that project, so I moved the weekly features over to Substack. (Happily, I was able to bring my Bulletin archive over to Substack as well.)
The year that’s gone by since then has been a very good one. While the daily Uni Watch blog is an ideal platform for covering breaking news and sharing smaller stories, Substack has been a great venue for long-form Uni Watch articles — interviews, season previews, deep dives, rankings, “Ask Me Anything,” and more. I used to do these longer articles for ESPN, and then briefly for Sports Illustrated, and then for InsideHook, but I’m so much happier doing them on Substack. Why? Here are some of the reasons:
Some of my editors over the years weren’t all that uni-savvy, and it was frustrating having to explain things to them and fix errors that they inadvertently introduced into my text. Now I don’t have to worry about that!
I get to be my own photo editor and art director, which is a lot of work but gives me much better control over the finished product and therefore lets me tell these visually driven stories more effectively.
If I need to fix a typo or update a text passage, I can just go in and do it myself instead of bugging an editor to do it for me.
It’s so great to have these long pieces appearing in a clean, ad-free setting, with nothing to compete with the content or disrupt the transition from one paragraph to another.
I get to have direct contact with you, my readers. And I know you’re all here because you chose to be, not because of an algorithm or a random link.
In short, I’m really happy with how this branch of the Uni Watch tree has evolved, and I hope you are too.
One interesting thing that’s happened since I started charging a subscription fee for these longer, feature-length articles last year is that sales of Uni Watch merchandise and membership cards have flatlined — and I’m fine with that. The same people who used to support Uni Watch by purchasing merch are instead doing so by subscribing, and that makes me really happy. Merch projects can be fun creative outlets, but I’m first and foremost a writer, so I’d rather have people support my work by purchasing it directly instead of by, you know, buying more stuff.
You may be wondering just how many people pay to subscribe to these articles. Here’s a current screen shot of my Substack dashboard, with a colored graphic showing how the paid subscriber ranks have grown over the past year:
As you can see, we’ve had nice, steady growth over the past 12 months, with a big bump when I published the annual MLB Season Preview and another bump for the NFL Season Preview.
As you can also see, the non-paying subscribers currently outnumber paying subscribers by a ratio of about 4.5 to 1. (The non-paying subscribers get to read the first few paragraphs of each feature article before the paywall kicks in, plus they get the occasional non-paywalled article, like this one.) That paid-to-unpaid ratio is pretty good by Substack standards! And while my Substack subscription revenue wouldn’t be enough for me to live on by itself, the combination of the Substack bucks and the ad revenue from the daily Uni Watch blog is enough to keep me afloat, even though I’m no longer writing for ESPN or any of those other places. Thank you so much for making this possible — at a time when journalism is an increasingly difficult industry in which to make a living, I’m still able to get by while pursuing the work I love. I’m truly grateful for that support.
And just to be clear, I appreciate all of you who subscribe, even if you don’t pay. I realize some of you may not have the means, and I also realize that we all make decisions every day about what is or isn’t worth our money, how much value a given product or service has for us, and so on. Believe me, I get it!
That said, I’d love to see those subscription numbers continue to rise as we move into Uni Watch’s second year on Substack. If you’re a free subscriber, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you purchased an annual subscription a year ago when I made my Substack debut, I hope you’ll re-up for another year. And if you’d like to help spread the gospel of athletics aesthetics, please consider getting them a gift subscription for someone who’d enjoy what goes on here.
Looking ahead, I’m currently putting the finishing touches on this year’s NBA Season Preview, which will be published on Thursday, and I have lots of other fun stuff in the hopper. Thanks again for your support as we move ahead into Uni Watch’s second year on Substack.
Paul Lukas has been writing about uniforms for over 20 years. If you like his Substack articles, you’ll probably like his daily Uni Watch Blog, plus you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook and check out his Uni Watch merchandise. Have a question for Paul? Contact him here.
I would pay double… just saying.
Congratulations Paul. Been a long time supporter. You’re the best.