DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript
Dirt racing news, results, discussion, analytics. Sprint cars, late models, modifieds, you name it. From national series, to top local shows. Brought to you five days a week. Email the show at info@dirtrackr.com.
What a year. Thank you. | Daily 12-30-2022
It's the last show of the year, so let's talk about what we did in 2022, shall we? Let's go.
It's Friday, December 30th, I'm Justin Fiedler. This is DIRTRACKR Daily.
I've got a few racing things for you on this final Daily show of 2022, and then we'll talk some DIRTRACKR numbers. So first...
If you're keeping an eye on Tulsa, we are already off and running with Shootout action today inside the expo. We've got some alphabet soup today for stock non-wing plus Bs and Cs for junior sprints. There is also a full slate of qualifiers for outlaw non-wing, stock non-wing, winged outlaw, and A-class. If you want to watch through Saturday night, FloRacing is the spot. Make sure to follow Walkapedia on Twitter and the Tulsa Shootout for updates. Also, hoping for a speedy recovery for flag man Terry Mattox. He got hit yesterday right at the end of a heat race and was transported to a local hospital to get checked out. Sounds like nothing broken, but he did need some stitches for his leg, and he was back in the building later yesterday afternoon to help out with other official duties. If you aren't aware, Terry has been the flag man for the Shootout and Chili Bowl for a long time, and is also the owner of the ASCS now. The Shootout wraps up on Saturday with a full slate of racing, culminating in the features for all divisions.
If you're curious about some sprint car results this week from down under, Justin Sanders was a winner at Eastern Creek over Ian Madsen, Marcus Dumesny, Carson Macedo, and Ryan Newton. Cory Eliason pulled off a last lap pass to score the win the other night at Perth Motorplex. He topped Matt Egel and Tyler Courtney. And James McFadden picked up a speed week win at Avalon Raceway, beating Jock Goodyer, Jamie Veal, Lachlan McHugh, and Luke Dillon. There is still plenty more racing to come from Australia and New Zealand in the coming weeks.
Since it's the final show of the year, I figured I'd share a little bit about the growth and some numbers for DIRTRACKR in 2022. RA asked about it in the comment section the other day, and I'm sure others are curious as well. I did do a small tweet thread right before Christmas too, if you missed that on my personal account. These numbers are all technically as of yesterday, because the YouTube and podcast numbers are a day behind, so these will grow just a tick before midnight hits on Saturday. But here you go. For 2022, the YouTube channel will be right at about 2 million views total. That brings us to about 2.4 million for the life of the show, if that gives you an idea about the growth. We've done 141,000 watch hours for the year. That's almost 5900 days, or 16 years worth of watch time. That's crazy to think about. From January 1 until the time I am writing this script, we've added 8661 subscribers to the channel. We started the year at about 4200, and are closing at nearly 13,000. It's still nuts to me though that over the life of the channel, 76% of my video views have come from people who do not subscribe. So if that's you, hit that button. It will make sure you don't miss future episodes. Do that if you listen to the podcast as well. Subscribe and follow where you listen. Reviews are welcome also. If we segment out the podcast, we've had an additional 280,000 downloads of it, on top of the 2 million YouTube views. Combined, this month of December has been the best ever for DIRTRACKR, with more than 430,000 combined plays of the show. We'll end up near an average of about 15,000 a day. I didn't do 15,000 in a month until almost a year into this. We did 252 daily shows in 2022, with an additional 10 conversations episodes, three live streams, and two other random videos. That's an insane amount of content. DIRTRACKR.com did 45,000 website visitors for the year, which was up nearly 200% over 2021. Site visits were up 145% and page views were up 71%. The website started out as the main thing for this project, and has turned into a really kickass tool for both me and others, which includes the analytics section and the DIRTRACKR Plus subscription service for dirt racing stats. I started selling some merch this year, starting out with stickers and eventually expanding into hats and shirts as well. Between the original sticker ordering process and now shop.dirtrackr.com, I've had about 200 individual orders and sold 327 items. I really appreciate everyone who has grabbed something along the way. It's really satisfying to pack and ship orders of merch that people have spent their money to buy. I won't get into super specifics about money, but I will say the project is profitable and generated in the low five figures in revenue for the year. My problem is that I've invested 80% of the money I've generated over the life of the project back into it, so if you take my profits and divide them by the hours I've spent working on the website and the shows, I'm making less than a dollar an hour. I should probably try and get that bumped up a little bit. This is not my full time job, but maybe if the growth continues, we could do that in the future. I do want to thank Dan McCarron and MSP Mounts for getting involved with the show late in the year. It's been fun to help spread the word for him. Also thanks to Rotor Ron for their sponsorship way back at the beginning of 2022. If you or someone you know wants to reach 100 or 150K dirt racing fans a month, I'd love to talk about partnering up for 2023. Give me a shout via email or DM and we can chat about it. I do also want to give a special thanks to our channel members who signed up this year to go just that little bit further in supporting the show. Ty, Ben, Jason, Barry, Benny, Ed, Tim, Nick, Joseph, Tom, Dustin, Thomas, Jeff, Rick, Matthew, Kevin, Chris, Charles, Greg, and Reyne. You guys are awesome. You can check out that program by clicking the membership tab on the YouTube channel, or by going to youtube.com/dirtrackr/join. So there you go, a brief run through for the year that was DIRTRACKR. Going forward, if you guys keep tuning in, I'll keep cranking out shows and pushing to make things better. Thanks for continuing to come along for the ride.
Before we close it out today, I do have a few more shop photos for you. The first few are courtesy of Tucker Drums on Twitter. These are from Chub Frank's shop, and Tucker said they are getting some work done on Boom Briggs' cars there. Nice setup they have, and looks like plenty of Busch lattes are in stock. Also doing a little bit of watching of the Tulsa Shootout. The other shop I have to share is from Laike Imm, and their Imm Racing team that fields micros in Kansas. He says they have three cars, with one at the Shootout right now. They run with the Jayhusker Series and some NOW600 races through the year. Shout out to his little sister Josie for all her help with the team. If you want to send me your shop photos to be shared on the show, you can DM them to me on social media, or email them to info@dirtrackr.com.
Looking at the streaming schedule through the weekend, you've got the Tulsa Shootout on FloRacing plus Flo 24/7. Clay-Per-View has several shows from down under, including sprint cars at Premier, Bunbury, and Perth. There is also DIRTVision Now. To see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.
Alright, that's it for the show today. Have a good weekend. Be safe out there celebrating the new year. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We'll be back here Monday for more DIRTRACKR Daily.