Steel Balls

Steel Ball Nation

This entry was posted by copanut2 on Tuesday, 4 March, 2014 at

According to our poll so far, here is what Steel Ball Nation looks like. I have included several national landmarks as a visual aid.

Poll is below the line…

[yop_poll id=”7″]

+5

Category: Nuts Exposed
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10 Responses to “Steel Ball Nation”

1. MWalsh26

   March 4, 2014 at 7:47 pm

   But who’m is from where’m…

   Reply
   • copanut

     March 4, 2014 at 7:51 pm

     The poll is anonymous…

     Reply
     • JAMESH

       March 5, 2014 at 4:19 am

       anonynous…………. that means we all agree, right?

       Reply
       • tobiathan

         March 11, 2014 at 5:50 pm

         That’s You-nanny-moose!

         Reply
2. ChicoSteelersFan

   March 5, 2014 at 11:09 am

   Funnest part of this…….nobody is living in PITTSBURGH!!!!! Lol!!

   Reply
   • copanut

     March 5, 2014 at 11:31 am

     Well yeah, that is interesting isn’t it? So here the P-G is looking for ways to stay relevant in the era of new media, and they cut off their nose to spite their face.

     Newspapers are inherently local. The P-G is lucky in that, unlike most newspapers, it has the potential to reach a national audience thanks to Steelers diaspora. They inadvertently started that process with P-G Plus, and then abruptly threw it away.

     I’m pretty sure P-G Plus was never intended to be something for non-locals, but what is disappointing is that their brilliant marketing department so thoroughly failed to recognize and exploit that aspect of it. They should have recognized that all of those non-local customers (actual and potential) represent new business because none of them are or ever will be subscribers to the local paper. That is incremental business, something rare and unusual for the newspaper industry.

     Instead of marketing to that audience, they offered incentives and promos only for locals, like coupons for local restaurants, and made no attempt to expand their reach. As if being ignored wasn’t bad enough, eventually we non-locals got kicked to the curb entirely.

     It seems to me that with some focused effort, they could have gradually built their reach to thousands of Steelers diaspora. That will never happen for us here on this site, of course, but P-G could have done it because they are a default “destination” site as the major media source in Western PA, and the most credible journalistic source for Steelers news, and so could naturally build the base readership over time.

     Instead, they decided to stick with the tried and true process of slow newspaper death by attrition.

     Dopes.

     [Edit: We just got our first hit from Western PA – Slippery Rock. For those who don’t know the Rock, it’s in northwest Butler County. Still no hits from Allegheny…]

     Reply
     • tobiathan

       March 12, 2014 at 12:05 pm

       You’re absolutely right.

       However, i hold Bouchette and Dulac and thye rest of the P-G staff involved w/PG+ a bit responsible too.

       They had a foot-in-the-door, ground-floor, center-of-the-Steelers-Universe chance to completely dominate tens of thousands of die-hard fans like us- and our old + ranks grew every week- and to paraphrase what copanut says the “cut off their [Steel] Balls to spite thier face in destroying a perfectly suited place for us to get Steelers news, chat about it and even get actual feedback from a HOF voter and well-credentialed writer like Bouchette. Not many fan-bases our size had so great a wealth of rsources available at a fair price.

       And then they went and tried to charge me(a ‘Burgher) $10/month for LESS Steelers content while simultaneously banishing you guys from our happy little chat-shop.

       If this was an American Gothic novel it’d be called “Death of a Newspaper”. With it’s heavily Liberal Democrat leanings in regards to non-sports content it is quickly becoming a non-factor in the Pittsburgh area.

       Reply
   • tobiathan

     March 11, 2014 at 5:52 pm

     That is now officially not a fact and I wanted yinz ta knows it.

     Reply
     • copanut

       March 12, 2014 at 10:41 am

       A real live yinzer! I’m gettin’ goosies!

       Reply
3. tobiathan

   March 12, 2014 at 2:17 pm

   It’s kinda interesting that our current numerical stronghold of Steel-Ballers is in Baltimore….

   Reply