THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, May 23, 2011

BPro archives free

Last year, I suggested:

Huckabay once told me that the vast majority of the articles are read when they are “new”.  That is, a tiny minority of articles are read via searches or archives.  The main benefit of the BPro articles is that they are read fresh.

Seeing that the older articles have limited value from a subscriber standpoint, and they would have tremendous value from a research perspective, can’t the older articles, say those more than one year old, be opened up to the public?

In addition to having limited loss of value to current subscribers, you get these benefits:
- hits from google search
- free advertising for potential subscribers

Furthermore, BPro’s contributor’s agreement has some IP on it that allows the author to republish his work after 6 months or 18 months or something.  Dan Fox for example likely saw it my way, because he would republish his old articles on his blog.  Rather than Dan republishing on his blog, I always thought it would have been better for all concerned to simply open up those articles.

I’m not sure who at BPro championed it, but thank you!:

Baseball Prospectus, owner of BaseballProspectus.com (BP), today announced it has made its entire archive of premium and fantasy content over one year old completely and permanently free to the public.

Hundreds of original articles from 1997 through 2010 are now available to the masses and will serve as a source of information to baseball analysts everywhere for years to come.

“It’s our way of saying thank you to the Internet for making our work possible over the years,” said Dave Pease, a partner at Baseball Prospectus.