Responding to your feedback: comments section, clickbait, no ads, site layout and more

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you to everyone who responded to our survey yesterday! We got so many great answers, so I thought I would respond to some of them below.

For those of you who missed the article, I published a survey with some questions on how SempreMilan can improve. I was blown away by the number of responses and if you want, you can still submit yours.

I have read all of them so far and I will continue to read new ones that get submitted. That said, I wanted to provide some answers to the requests and suggestions. We take our work very seriously and with the help of all of you, we can definitely improve.

Top news not visible

“Not sure how to put it, but a longer list of older news, sometimes want to catch up with news from the last 2 days or something and clicking see older news instead of page 1,2,3,4 etc is painful.”

“You need to have a top 5/10 news of the day on the front page entire day. Sometimes major news vanishes and you have to dig deep to see it.”

“I often wish there were a ‘need to know’ mode, something like that. An area of the site where someone who’s time-poor would be able to go and read just the most important news.”

I fully agree with the above. It’s something we have struggled with for quite some time, and it’s certainly something we have discussed in the last year or so. The story spotlight, with the three ‘selected’ articles at the near-top of the homepage, is one of our ways to combat this.

Another thing that comes to mind is that our ‘most popular articles’ section is located in the sidebar, and thus far down on the mobile version. So we could perhaps move that up, or we could add a new category called ‘need to know’ as suggested above or ‘top stories’. There are ways to improve, for sure.

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention our newsletter here as well, even though it’s hosted on Substack and not the website. It’s completely free and has all the top stories from the week that has been, including longer takes on two main topics.

Comments

“User comments within the matchday liveblog”‘

“The discussion forum on the big articles after each match is are key element of this site. Any enhancements you make to the discussion forum would be appreciated honestly.”

“Like, dislike count for article and comments”

“The comment functionality sucks. I think it’s hindering the conversations.”

The comment section has been problematic, to say the least. Not because we don’t enjoy your comments, we do, please comment more! It’s just a hassle to manage given how WordPress works at the moment, as we have to approve many comments ourselves.

Some rightfully get flagged for moderation, others not so much, but the way it functions is just subpar in every way imaginable. It would indeed be nice to add a login feature, a better structure, likes/dislikes, editing function and so on.

I’m keen on making this a priority for the coming months, figuring something out with our developer. That includes adding the comment function within the matchday liveblog which, by the way, has the same style as Football Italia since we’re part of the same network.

I’ll keep you posted on this, I promise.

Fewer unnecessary articles

“Sometimes too much clickbait and unnecessary drama. Makes the website very amateur and less appealing. Other than that I love sempremilan.”

“Less speculation and clickbait during transfer season.”

“A more balanced and objective measured analysis. Too many clickbait articles that sound more like the unhinged takes my mates have at the pub than any journalist.”

This is something we have talked about internally over the years, or really ever since we started. It’s a rather difficult balance as we follow the MilanNews style of reporting, which is essentially to report almost everything (we have a source blacklist, though) and make the source very clear.

I think we do a very good job of always showing the source, first thing in the title, so that you can decide whether to read or not. However, we can always do better on this front, as we sometimes fall into the trap of writing for writing’s sake.

There are many examples of ‘poor sources’ breaking big news over the years, so it’s important to keep an eye on those too, but I do agree that we can be a tad more restrictive. Perhaps dialling down the output a little bit, plus the aforementioned ‘top stories’ feature, will help please all.

Because let’s remember, while some of you said there were too many articles, others said that’s exactly what they enjoy. I’m one of those who would rather keep tabs on more than less, for example, so it all comes down to the less is more/more is more discussion.

Content suggestions

“More information about the financials of the club and new sponsors, or new overseas academy connections.”

“More behind the scenes updates.”

“Olli’s audio bulletins were great, I miss those.”

“Possibly consider shorter podcast releases during the week to comment on things between the weekend matches.”

Let me just start by saying that there were tons of other good content suggestions, and we’re looking into how we can implement these into our weekly routines. However, I picked out the ones above for a very specific reason: we sort of already offer them.

This is going to sound like a shameless plug, but over on our Substack (which 36% of you apparently didn’t even know existed!), we regularly post financial updates and long reads about the business of Milan, including sponsorships etc.

Assuming the above comment regarding behind the scenes was about SempreMilan and not the club, that is something we also provide there. In fact, we have a whole series on our journey from the start until now. Of course, we are also rather open about things in our members-only Discord chat.

Then, we have the bonus podcast episodes each week and the Pub Chat episodes, which provide more content than the free weekly podcast. Not to mention that Lorenzo and Stefano have started doing instant reactions to games over there. In short, check it out!

Finally, I saw some wanting insight on the opponents each week and that’s something we have in the preview! But I’ll look into doing a separate piece for this.

Free/no ads section

“Thanks for all your efforts. I would like to see more podcast material, with better quality sound/video. Free to listen/view not with payment.”

“Less ads on the website!”

“No ads, no payments – it’s difficult but I am sure there are other ways to make money from traffic.”

“Please never go for a paid website. Fans must be treated like God. We love the team with all our hearts. Please don’t exploit fans.”

We have arrived at the most sensitive topic. I’ll be as blunt and honest as possible: providing more content for free, in addition to the website, newsletter and weekly podcast, just isn’t feasible for the time being.

The ad market has plummeted, or at least it’s not what it used to be, and YouTube revenue doesn’t get us anywhere (it’s very low). In an ideal world, all of our content would be free but it’s just not a sustainable business.

I don’t know if this is actually the case, so forgive me if it’s not, but in some conversations I’ve had with readers or people who are familiar with us (but don’t necessarily read our site), they think we are swimming in money. Believe me, it’s not the case.

Sure, we pay ourselves salaries like regular human beings as it’s our jobs, but everything we make gets reinvested into the business for one simple reason: we want to provide the best content possible. The ads are annoying, I agree, but bear with us as we find a balance that works for everyone.

Let me also just make this abundantly clear: the SempreMilan website will always remain free. There will always be an option to read the articles with ads, for example, even if we introduce an ad-free version that you must pay to get access to.

We keep our paid content on Substack (SempreMilan Insider) and that’s it. Maybe we will eventually move our bonus content from Substack to the website, but that still won’t take away from the main website’s current output.

Podcast questions

“Would love for there to be a place on the website to ask questions for the next podcast, since I am not on Twitter.”

Agreed! It’s been tricky with the podcast questions, especially since we have them in different places and that makes it difficult for Oli and the team. However, what I will say is that our Discord server takes precedence, so I would recommend signing up for the Substack to get access to it.

I will look into adding a ‘send in your question’ box somewhere on the site, where you can enter the question and your name.

Honourable mentions

A way to rate the players: I wanted to introduce this for the current season, but I ran into some difficulties finding a solution. I think I have it now (touch wood), at the very least so you can vote for the MOTM, so I will look to implement this in the player ratings articles in the coming weeks.

Video highlights section: This was a great thing that hadn’t even crossed my mind! I’ll bring this up with our developer and see what we can do. It should just be a case of embedding Milan’s YouTube channel, to be honest, but we might have some more fancy solutions too.

Stats section: Like most of your suggestions, I want to add this as well, we just need to figure out the right way to do it. Again, I’ll check with our developer and then I’ll come up with something design-wise.

Liveblog style: I want to give a special thanks to whoever left the long comment about the liveblog! It’s something completely new for us, so I greatly appreciate the feedback. I will definitely try to make the style more personal moving forward, as proper play-by-play commentary will indeed be too difficult.

Final remarks

As said at the top, I really want to thank everyone for taking the time to answer the survey (both for the praise and constructive criticism). It means a great deal to me and the whole SempreMilan team. I was expecting maybe 30 answers, but instead we got 140+! It shows we have something precious.

We don’t have an unlimited budget, so no changes will be possible overnight, but we’ll do our utmost to put a majority of the suggestions into practice asap. It’s back to the drawing board for a while, as they say…

If your feedback didn’t get a response here, give me a shout in the comments and I’ll get back to you asap! For obvious reasons, I just had to pick out the main bits.