It’s been a fantastic season all-round for Cork City thus far
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10/10 in the league, starting the 2017 season with the best consecutive winning run a Cork City squad has ever accumulated; a win on Friday against Bray would mean they’ve overcome every single team in the Premier Division, and maintain a massive nine point lead at the top of the table, as well as potentially burning off another team high up the table.
Into the final of the Munster Senior Cup already, City’s pre-season went pretty much as well as one could have hoped, and having secured our second consecutive 3-0 win away to Limerick a fortnight ago in the League Cup, next Monday brings the prospect of avenging the home quarter-final defeat to St Patrick’s Athletic in the same competition a few seasons ago.
It’s a feeling that’s spread throughout the club; the tension from last season pre-Cup final is a distant memory, particularly amongst the fans as frustration got the better of some from our recent league campaigns having come up short to an admittedly excellent Dundalk outfit.
On the contrary last season was a breakout one for Rebel Radio, who began our new internet radio service, switching over from an inconsistent YouTube platform to a ShoutCast server, and covering our first ever European games, including trips to Genk and Roma for the Seniors and Youths respectively.
Last season we dabbled in analytics, using the goo.gl link shortener to show us some interesting results, as countries such as Sudan and Cambodia coming up where some of our listeners resided. A large spike, too, for our commentary of the Linfield home game with their official website advertising our service, something which we encourage all clubs to do.
This Friday will be our 13th game already this season, meaning by Friday week we’ll have already reached the halfway point of 15 in our season target of 30, only a third of the way through the season and still with what hopefully will be a prolonged stay in Europe yet to come.
However, back to the task at hand, the numbers game.
This season we began a website, the very same in which you are reading this blog. In an attempt to centralise our content, and also provide a platform in which to give you extras like this blog, and our – somewhat sporadic – podcast ‘Rebel Yell’.
One handy note from the website is the opportunity to track how many people use the website, and therefore how many use our radio service, and the numbers are pretty much as expected based on our estimations from the year before.
So far we have had over 3,500 visitors to the website, with April proving to be the most popular month thus far, ahead of what we expect will be a spike with special guest Neal Horgan joining us for our live commentary on Friday for the Bray game. Of that 3,500 we had around 500 in January, 639 for Febuary, while a drop in March with less games saw just 550 visitors to the website.
April has been a brilliant month thus far however, set to pass the 2,000 mark for this month with an absolute rake of games involving the Rebel Army, including friendlies, while May 1st starts with two games in a single afternoon with the Robbie Galvin Cup followed by that League Cup quarter-final.
Facebook is slightly leading the social standings, ahead of Twitter 53% to 47%, in total providing around 1500 hits, while referrals account for a large 1750 of our visits thus far. 68% of those who logged in did so on a mobile, 26% from a computer and 6% off a tablet.
One of things we love to look at, particularly given the nature of the service we provide, is to see where around the world people tuned in from. While predictably Ireland provides the vast majority of our visits, there are some more unusual countries you mightn’t expect to be tuning in to a bunch of lads from Cork.
Six hits from China was probably the most surprising from my point of view, with five visitors from Russia, and viewers from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Closer to home, meanwhile we’ve had visitors from Hungary, Belarus, Austria and Iceland. The usuals of France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany come up, as well as one visitor from the tiny country of Luxembourg!
We’ll have another Analytics update for you later on in the year, but needless to say it’s all setup to be a bumper year for ourselves and Cork City, so keep tuning in, wherever in the world you are!