How the coronavirus has affected TigerNet

by Tony Crumpton - Assoc. Editor - Friday, April 24, 2020, 4:58 PM

Dear TigerNet family,

First of all, TigerNet is so fortunate to be able to run a business covering sports for our 25th year. Crump, B-Meist, and I are Clemson alumni, and it has been a pleasure to do this as a hobby to a part-time situation to full-time since the website started way back in 1995.

David Hood, Nikki Hood, and Brandon Rink are talented writers that bring such a passion to our website. They all work to provide reliable and entertaining content, even though the hours can be long in a daily news cycle.

Regardless, we are all fortunate to do what we love.

We thought you guys deserved to know how TigerNet has been doing on the business side, considering many of you care deeply about the community that has been established through the years.

You need to know what is happening behind the scenes because you are the most important aspect of our site.

Honestly, we have been significantly impacted the last few months as this pandemic has postponed nearly all sports. There likely won't be any letup as COVID-19 will affect us for months to come. Regardless of the lack of sports, we will push through and provide content for our users.

However, it has been tough as our hits are down roughly 50% in April, and revenue has dropped even more.

Some people don't understand how a website makes money, so I'll try to help with a quick overview. TigerNet and most sites rely almost entirely on ad revenue to pay for their employees, tech stuff, etc.

Since March because of COVID-19, many companies have stopped nearly all of their ad campaigns. It all just vanished quickly and won't come back for a while. Therefore the ad space demands went way down, and consequently, the value of each individual ad has dropped tremendously.

The pandemic is hurting us like most small businesses around the country. We know we have it a lot better than most. We just wanted you to know the situation, but we aren't going anywhere and will continue providing content for all the Clemson fans everywhere.

Here are a few things you can do today to make a difference for our site during this challenging time:

1. Keep doing what you are doing. Read our stories and engage with each other on the boards. Thank you to everyone that discusses sports on TigerBoard. If you haven't signed up for a free account, here is the link.

2. People don't sometimes realize how important it is to share our content on Facebook and Twitter. The more times an article is shared, the more it shows up more on people's newsfeed. We appreciate it and keep it up. If you aren't following us on Facebook or Twitter, we would be honored.

3. Turn off your adblocker, or at least whitelist TigerNet. The ads that show on the site keep the site running and pays the bills.

4. We would love if you want to be a first-time premium member or renew your premium membership to our website. One of the cooler parts of Orange level is that you don't see ads on the site.

5. Take care of yourself and one another. Our hearts go out to those who are suffering, the frontline workers, and our thoughts are with each of you as we all work through this unprecedented time.

We really do appreciate every single person that takes the time to visit our site. If I could thank each one of you personally, I would, but that would take a while. Maybe one day, once this is all behind us, we can throw a massive social as we did in the early days of TigerNet.

Once again, we appreciate you and are so fortunate to have all of you on our website. We will all get through this challenging time, and as Coach Swinney said, have an even greater appreciation of sports and each other.

Best wishes,

TigerNet