Whoops I totally forgot: Extra Points just turned five

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I’ve got a lot to talk about this morning, but first, I want to share a message from our sponsor,

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If I was the sort of person who was deeply organized, I would be the sort of person who would remember major professional anniversaries or milestones, and perhaps plan some sort of coherent content and marketing plans around those dates. 

But I’m not that person. So I completely forgot that April 17th marked the FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF EXTRA POINTS. This newsletter became my full-time job on April 17, 2020, when I got laid off from Vox Media. It’s also the one-year anniversary of us spinning Extra Points off the D1.ticker family and back to independence.

We’ve come a long way in those five years. What began as a desperation heave to try to pay my mortgage during the Covid-19 pandemic has now grown into an operation with a full-time sales manager, full-time marketing director, a part-time assistant, a part-time social media and graphics specialist, and plenty of freelance voices. We’ve made a computer game, made a college athletes data project, sponsored a bowl game, served as a sports management textbook, and broken stories on everything from video game development to conference realignment. 

Before I do anything else here, I want to take a minute and express my gratitude. I did not do this alone. This company exists because of my wife, my teammates, and the support and trust of readers just like you. I made a bet that you can make a good living and produce good work without having to worry about scale. You’ve made sure it paid off. 

This year is also off to a very good start, thanks to all of you. We’re up about 120% in revenue this year compared to last year, and we’ve juuuuust starting to hit our stride in selling (and delivering) sponsorship campaigns with companies that want to reach out audience of college sports industry professionals. Those are very good things!

But I don’t want today to just be a chance to belatedly pat everyone on the back for managing to pay our bills for another year. I also want to check back in on the status update we shared in December, and let you know about where we want, and need, to go the rest of this year.

(and yes, there will be a subscription discount in this newsletter. Stick with me here)

We can’t afford to just be a newsletter anymore

This isn’t because my editorial and creative interests extend beyond writing newsletters, although they do. In 2025, I believe this has simply become a business reality. Social media algorithmic changes to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in 2024 have been disastrous for independent publishers like Extra Points. Finding and maintaining new readers is becoming more expensive, and the newsletter advertising and readership growth tools have not grown enough to support publications like ours. 

We’ll continue to experiment to find more efficient ways to grow our audience, provide a product that you think is worth nine bucks a month, and monetize our free readership. But I am coming around to the idea that we won’t be able to get to where we need to go via newsletter subscriptions and advertisements alone. 

That makes Extra Points Library, our data tool, a major priority. I have spent a lot of my time supporting this product, as have my colleagues. As of today, we have over 7,000 total documents in the library, from budget reports of D-II schools, to myriad vendor contracts across all college athletics, to football feasibility studies, GM contracts, conference realignment agreements, and more. I am adding to this library just about every day.

I want this to be a useful resource not just for athletic directors, but for academics, lawyers, newsrooms, sports agents, startups, lawmakers, and more. We’re spending more resources on improving the product’s technical capabilities and document library. You can find out more updates specific to what we’re working on via our sister publication, The Library Card. That one is free.

One thing I haven’t mentioned enough is that Library gets better with your help. If you have documents you’re willing to share with the Library, I’m more than happy to give discounted, or even free, access to the tool. Anybody can search what stuff we have in the Library for free, but if you’re the type of person that has FRS reports, coach contracts, conference bylaws, historical records, etc lying around your inbox…drop me a line at Matt @ ExtraPointsMB dot com. 

But we also want to be more than just a newsletter and a data tool

In December, I wrote about our attempts to do just that. We spent a lot of time looking at various ways we could get into making videos this year, as well as partnering with other organizations to host events. I’m not totally closing the door on either of those options, but nothing we’ve looked at so far makes financial or logistical sense yet. That could always change with the right partners.

But we’re always looking at other ideas. That could, hypothetically, mean we start other newsletters (or buy them), building EP into a larger media company that covers more than just college sports business. It could mean that we turn ADS4000 into a true stand-alone computer game…or perhaps make another game entirely. It could mean that we produce other resources (white papers, classes, ebooks, etc) meant to go way deeper on specific college sports business topics. 

We’re open to talking about these partnerships (again, Matt @ ExtraPointsMB dot com). I will share specifics once we have stuff really nailed down. 

And we want to hire more people

I’m not ready to put out the job description and throw on the WE’RE HIRING sign yet, but I hope to do that soon. 

I think we are highly likely to look to bring on more editorially-focused help in 2025. That could include writers, editors, researchers, or some combination thereof. I think it’s clear that we’ve just about hit the cap on the volume of stuff I can produce in a week, especially if I’m also working on Library, doing sports radio, speaking to classes, skeeting on Bluesky, and doing everything else. 

Which means now is the time I ask you for money

I think Extra Points needs to grow in order to continue to become a mature, sustainable and useful business. 

That takes resources. Even as Library has grown, and our advertising business has improved, the significant majority of our operating revenue comes from newsletter subscriptions. This is money we used to pay our vendors, our FOIA fees, our freelance writers, our employees, our airfare, and my crippling energy drink addiction. 

This week, you can join our Premium Subscriber Community for 25% off. That means you can grab an annual subscription for just $63 bucks. With that subscription, you’ll get, 

• A limited edition 2024 Extra Points Bowl patch, just like the one on our sick bowl jackets. 

• Limited edition Extra Points stickers

• FOUR newsletters a week, AND access to our entire archives. That’s like, five books worth of Extra Points newsletters. 

• Access to Athletic Director Simulator 4000, our computer game where YOU get to be an athletic director

• A free ebook version of my book, What If?

• The warm feeling in your heart that comes from supporting independent media 

Again, that discount link is right here.

If you are on an existing monthly plan and want to upgrade to an annual subscription at the discounted rate, just shoot me an email at Matt @ ExtraPointsMB.com. Beehiiv makes us do this manually for some reason, but I’m happy to do it. 

To all those industry executives who I know read this newsletter on your personal email addresses…now is the time to kick in those $60 bucks to help keep this thing going :) 

As always, we offer bulk discounts for institutional or conference-wide subscription packages, or to those who purchase Extra Points Library.

TL;DR, I’m not settling for just being a nice little independent media success story. By God, I’m gonna do my very best to make EP more than that

You guys gave me the permission to dream big…about a world where I’d never have to write an SEO How-To-Watch-The-Super-Bowl post ever again, or make a slideshow, or do gambling odds analysis. You gave me the permission to spend a lot of time and energy reporting on the Big Sky, WAC and Horizon League. And it’s worked. 

Now, I want to help make that work for more people. I want to make new projects that will inform, educate and entertain. I want to do more than just survive in an industry littered with broken and abandoned media outlets. I want to thrive. 

Thanks for helping make that dream possible. I can’t wait to see what we’ll figure out how to do next year.

Maybe then I’ll even remember our actual birthday.