Now chat boards seem very sleepy. At Harnessdriver.com, for example, someone can post a story on the Premier of Ontario, and even that fails to trigger much discussion. When I visit Raceday360, there seem to be many links (they are good links mind you) to ESPN stories, or what have you, but the blog feed too is snoozy.
Where is everyone?
There seems to be fewer people engaged in the sport from both a betting and fan perspective; those willing to write, or select, or to share their opinion anyway. The "passion quotient" has fallen considerably, as I see it.
Conversely, I was doing a little research this past week and came across the numbers for NHL.com, which usually has a dearth of traffic in November.
- This year, there was never a dry period. The traffic dipped in July and August and then shot right back up. The category saw a 53% month-over-month (MoM) increase in traffic—one of the fast moving categories of the month.
The passion quotient seems to be growing in those sports and games. They trend on twitter and you can't walk across your office without hearing something about fantasy hockey or football.
I'm not privy to the numbers, but maybe everyone has left chat boards and blogging and headed for the DRF. Or the Paulick Report. Or twitter or facebook. Maybe.
But it sure doesn't feel like it.
It just feels blah.
3 comments:
By trying to get a larger piece of a shrinking pie, the three evils of horse racing (Horsemen groups, the Stronach Group and CDI) have made it nearly impossible to be a horse racing enthusiast or serious horseplayer anymore. The only thing they've managed to do successfully, is shrink the pie. Who should I play this weekend? Josh Gordon or Antonio Brown?
I thought I'd do something novel, like to respond to your post where future readers can see the comments in context :)
Just checked the outgoing links at R360 (thanks for the link, btw) and despite the preponderance of links to commentary at trades and the big outlets (ESPN, etc) the indies still get the majority of the outgoing links. No lack of demand for independent thoroughbred racing commentary as far as I can tell!
It doesn't help when blog owners get so sensitive to anything they view as criticism of their remarks (or their friends in the business), that they initiate policies geared toward silencing the few people that actually enjoy reading, and responding to their blog posts.
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