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*Carpy48* · 07-22-2024, 01:34 PM

The "Team Spotlight" series just ended and hopefully many of you have enjoyed it. If you joined the league more recently while the series was running you might have asked yourself what this was all about.
Around the beginning of the year, I had one of my famous 'totally random' ideas. The Team Spotlight Weeks were supposed to solve two issues in the league: a) give users more opportunities to make money and b) help increase general activity within the graphics community. Particularly in the graphics department submissions had been at an all-time low, or at least since I took over as department head in late 2019. There had to be something that could be done to change that and we all knew by now that simple graphics tournaments didn't really help. During double draft weeks, we usually see some activity spikes, but in between those, there were times when activity dropped. We've even had weeks with zero submissions and that is usually something really rare for us. Low activity also meant low(er) payment for the graphics graders since those directly depend on submissions as opposed to seasonal (fixed) payment for the media graders. Originally the "Spotlight Weeks" were only meant to help the graphics department, but we later expanded the idea to the media department which was a huge success.

This series was meant to highlight two teams every week and eventually give every user in the league the chance to write about their own team or create some graphics and get paid extra. When we started there were 46 teams in total, but halfway through the series we saw the J expansion in April and then we had 48 teams with Ottawa and San Diego. If you're curious how the two weekly teams were paired it mostly had to do with two thoughts: Obviously, we would pair a J team with an SHL team every week where this was possible - to cover both leagues, but they were also paired in a way that we didn't have teams with similar main colors (no two green teams for example) and also no two teams that were geographically too close to each other. The order itself was very random, someone had to come first and someone had to come last. We only made an exception with the two J expansion teams and paired them with each other to make a special week about both.

How do you measure the success or failure of this series?

For graphics, we can look at the amount of submissions we receive every week. We have the natural spikes during draft weeks because that was (and still is) usually the time to receive a bonus so people create more graphics during those times. However, if we compare regular - non-draft - weeks with our Team Spotlight bonus to regular weeks before the series, you can see an increase in submissions. For media we can't measure it or at least not that easily, because it's not tracked the same way we track graphics. I counted submissions manually so if someone notices a mistake it's my fault. Nevertheless, we can compare the different teams to each other. Which teams were more popular than others and received more submissions? You can see this in the other graphs below.

First let's take a look at the graphics submissions comparing pre- and post-spotlight submission numbers. Below you can see submissions from last year (blue line) that show clearly how we've had some weeks with zero submissions. The spikes you can see are 2x draft weeks which always lead to, well, spikes in activity, but it was rare to see weeks with more than 10 submissions towards the end of 2023.

[Image: P9HP0lN.png]

In this following graph you can still see the spikes during the three-week breaks we took for the drafts, but also clearly the higher general activity within the graphics department that the Team Spotlight Weeks have brought us.

[Image: 0oYBDPh.png]

Here is a slightly different version of it without the large spikes. We've seen a continuous increase in activity, probably because the Spotlight Weeks were something people anticipated or were used to already and then a slight decline towards the end which might have been because we ran out of SMJHL teams to cover, I don't know.

[Image: o3I2MPk.png]

In general, we were happy to see that users wrote media for almost all teams in the league (the two exceptions were Ottawa and Anchorage). We could also see that some teams seemed to be more popular than others with a total of three teams getting a total of six articles: San Diego, Seattle and Winnipeg. We should probably also highlight @FuriousChicken who has gone and wrote an article about every single SHL team which was an impressive effort.

[Image: zb0xNwV.png]

What did we learn from this experiment? It was a successful series for both the graphics and media departments and for the users as well. We will take a break from it right now, but we will repeat this some time again in the future. If you were among the more active contributors, don't forget to claim your bonus here.

To finish this report, I would like to thank a few people who helped with this series.
@Evil_AllBran for helping with brainstorming after I presented yet another random idea and also for coming up with the name of the series, @Keven for the nice graphs above and answering all my stupid questions and of course the media heads @MikeLiut and @TheGreatToeJam for their support plus all other employees from both departments. We couldn't have done this without you.

MikeLiut · 07-22-2024, 11:16 PM

Congrats Carpy for this great initiative!

Popol · 07-23-2024, 07:10 AM

Looks like it really made a big difference in the activity level for the graphics, that's a win!

By-Tor · 07-23-2024, 10:58 AM

So this proves WPG is the best

Credit to enigmatic, Merica, tweedledunn, and jaypc8237 for sigs

trella · 07-23-2024, 04:32 PM

Loved this idea and honestly planned to participate more, but life happens. Really appreciate the efforts to encourage media and keep the forum alive

Thanks to @karey and @JSS for the sigs!

Former USA Fed Head, Carolina Kraken Co-GM, Tampa Bay Barracuda GM

FuriousChicken · 07-24-2024, 08:17 AM

This idea gave me a good way to slowly gather the data I was already gathering, and make a weekly thing about it, instead of gathering all of the data to make a whole article around the chaotic chart Smile

ShadowFenix · 07-24-2024, 10:56 AM

I was a big fan of this idea! It gave me incentive to write about teams that I probably wouldn’t write about otherwise. And given that I’m still “new” to the league, it was pretty nice to do research into teams and actually learn about them, rather than only knowing about my team. I would definitely participate again if/when it gets run again. Maybe next time I’ll aim for the 10 week threshold. I got 6 this time, so 4 more weeks should be easy peasy

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