Today we celebrate 29 years of Tech Sideline (Hokie Central). Here’s an update on where things stand as we get ready for spring football and begin our preparations for 2025-26.
As I said in a recent message board post, I won’t bury the lede: subscriptions are king at TSL, so we’ll start with an important note (request) on that front.
Subscriptions Are Still the 800-Pound Gorilla
Twenty-five years after we first introduced pay content in late 2000, subscription revenue is still our bread and butter. Historically, it fluctuates between being 2/3 and 3/4 of our revenue, and last calendar year (2024; checks spreadsheet), subscriptions accounted for 78 percent of overall revenue.
Subscriptions are also the part of our business that is most sensitive to the mood of the fan base. Mood is good? Subscriptions go up. Mood is down? Subscriptions go down. The dreaded “lethargy?” Subscriptions go down.
There are other factors that affect subscription revenue, of course. A little history lesson:
In the summer of 2018, we decided after 22 years of being in Radford that we should move to Blacksburg. We made the move and increased our price from $60 a year to $85 a year, based on the fact that our non-salary expenses went up and we wanted to ramp up our operations with travel, more interns, etc.
Three years later, in the summer of 2021, we hired David Cunningham and increased our price to $100 a year. Then in the spring of 2023, we hired Andy Bitter and went from $100 to $120. Last summer (2024), we hired Nick Brown but kept our price steady at $120.
To summarize: In six years, the staff went from two people (me and Chris) to five people (me, Chris, David, Andy, and Nick), while our price doubled.
I tell that story to add context to my next statement: from 2018 through 2024, our subscription revenue — our total revenue, not our price — increased by an average of 13 percent a year. The only year it went down was 2020 (a 3% drop). Otherwise, it rose every year.
From the end of 2017 to the end of 2024, our total subscription revenue increased by a multiple of 2.3, which supported hiring three new people and also paid for the rent on our office, travel expenses, an army of interns and freelancers and the buildout of a cool audio/video podcast setup that cost about $20,000. And much more.
But in the most recent five-plus months, from the day the officials overruled the Hail Mary catch in last season’s Miami football game (literally from that day, not figuratively), subscription revenue is down 7 percent year-over-year.
That’s the largest extended year-over-year revenue drop we’ve ever had, and we’ve been through some tough times before. We lost a lot of subscribers at the end of Frank Beamer’s career, and towards the end of Justin Fuente’s time at Virginia Tech, we bled more subscribers. Hundreds and hundreds of them each time.
We’ve always soldiered on through those times without saying anything. These things are cyclical, and (for example) the drop in subscribers at the end of Beamer’s career was offset by a big increase when he retired and Fuente was hired.
But this time around, there’s more to the drop than in-the-moment fan reaction to a 2024-25 year that brought us a sub-.500 football team, a gutted women’s basketball team and the worst men’s basketball team in ten years. There have been tectonic shifts in college athletics consisting of (1) the advent of NIL; (2) a wide-open, no-holds-barred transfer portal; and (3) the suffocating dominance of the expanded Big Ten and SEC.
This has all been met by a Virginia Tech athletic administration that we at Tech Sideline feel lacks strong, vocal, inspiring leadership. These issues in college athletics have been bubbling for several years now, and the Virginia Tech fan base as a whole needs to be led and inspired in these difficult times, but that leadership and inspiration isn’t forthcoming from the Jamerson Center.
I don’t like saying that, because we get along fine with everyone over there (as far as we know, anyway), and we understand that these are complicated, unprecedented times in college athletics. But we also feel that Virginia Tech fans are loyal and willing, if you just tell them what to do. Yet, no plan for competing in this landscape is being publicly presented by Virginia Tech.
Back to the topic, though, and the topic is Tech Sideline. I feel like the state of college athletics and the state of Virginia Tech athletics have bottomed out, and somehow, they’re going to get better, or at least clearer. That clarity might come within the next year or two, or it might be further out than that. I suspect it’s more on the near side.
Until then, if you can hang in there — finally, here’s the “ask” after all that opining — don’t throw the baby (Tech Sideline) out with the bath water (college athletics or VT leadership). If you’re able to financially continue to subscribe, please keep those subs and renewals going. As I said in my message board post linked above:
In other words, if you're tapping out because you "don't like the direction of college athletics" or "don't like the management of the Virginia Tech athletic department" or "think the football program is a dumpster fire," please pause for a moment before you hit the cancel button.
March is a very important month for us, for two reasons: (1) it’s our biggest month subscription dollar-wise, dating back to the hiring of Andy in March 2023 and the new subscribers he brought with him; and (2) it helps fund our operations through the quiet four months of April-July before revenue picks up again in August.