THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tango, is there any way you can pass on the contact info for that Bill James solicitation? Not a BJO subscriber, but I figure it can’t hurt to ask, at least.

Hey, sure, why not?  Thought it’s hard to beat autonomy.

Colin, if you write to someone here:
http://www.billjamesonline.net/toursite/ContactUs.aspx

I’m sure it’ll find its way to Bill.  Any correspondance I’ve done goes to one of three people (Pat Quinn, John Dewan, and Bill).

I thought I read somewhere (a long time ago) that Fangraphs was David’s full time job. I guess one of us is incorrect.

I know that Tim Dierkes, the owner and main writer for mlbtraderumors.com, has that site as his full-time job. He wrote a post earlier in the year about him quitting his former job, titled “Taking the Plunge” (I’d post the link here, but I don’t want to bother you with the spam folder). He obviously didn’t say how much he makes from the site, but it had to be enough to live off of if he quit his old job to do it.

Eight thousand a month?

That would about cover what I’m making now, and save the commute....but I’d literally have to give up my full time job to be able to write one article a day.

For those without BJO access but who have ESPN Insider: Neyer posted the subscriber and cost figures on his blog.

Baseball-Reference is tough; every time I come across a random player (Yamil Benitez, Pat Meares) I have this urge to sponsor their page.

Tango, maybe I’m missing the sarcasm, but why would you assume that Fangraphs is making a similar amount of $ as you are from Google Ads? Do they not have a larger viewership?

I’m sure they do, but I make peanuts from google.. I think we just broke the 10$ barrier.  I’m guessing Fangraphs maybe is at 100$?  Whatever it is, it’s peanuts.

Don’t forget, money from advertising is not just a factor of traffic, but also propensity of visitors to click, and the price of ads a page pulls.

It may be the case that Fangraphs gets 4x your traffic, has users that are 4x as likely to click on an ad, and ads that are 4x as pricey due to differences in content between the sites.  Those are conservative possibilities, but they show how a site could make 64x as much as this one, without any enormous differences from yours.  Just a thought.

Some of it’s placement, too - your ads are so far down the page that nobody ever actually has to see them to use anything on your site, so far as I can tell. And you can do other things with them - put multiple ad blocks on your pages, put ads in your RSS feeds.

Right.  Per Colin’s suggestion, ad placement is big as well.  I never noticed you had Adsense here, because it’s below all the content.  I’d put it on the right hand side.  I use Firefox right now, and the header of your site is wider than the posts and comments section, by about the width of an adsense block.

Am I the only one that when I get to the main blog page, that I hit the END button to bring me to the bottom of the page and page up to get the Recent Comments?

In any case, I don’t want to really put ads on this site anyway.  I’m happy with the Amazon referral system.  That one really works.  I’d be surprised if Google Ads were a good source for other sites.

We make two to three hundred a year from Google Ads.  We have them placed unobtrusively at the top of our home page and the bottom of our articles.  If I made them bigger, perhaps we’d double that revenue.  But then we’d be taking up ad space from advertisers who pay us more.

I always start by going to the end of the home page when I come here.

For the amount of money that goes into FanGraphs, I’m comfortable saying Google ads are not a good source of revenue for the amount of traffic it gets.

I’d need to have about 10 times the traffic for them to really do the trick.

Thing is, more and more people are using FireFox, which comes with AdBlock Plus. 

I did not even realize that there were Google Ads on THT, for I have never seen them.

The basic point is that Ticket Broker ads work, and Amazon referral system works.  Google Ads don’t even compare (at least among our demographic).

Google Ads is earning us $1.50 a month.  It’s an incredibly crappy return, and making it more prominent (obtrusive) to triple that to $5?  No thanks.

Studes is saying it gives him $20/mo, which makes perfect sense, since he gets at least 10x the traffic.  Fanrgaphs has traffic in-between us (but Google Ads is more prominent).  I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets similar results as Studes.

Compare that with how much you can get from, choosing at random, AaronGleeman.com, according to BlogAds.com ($250/3mo).  Clicking on THT’s site, and they’re showing double that (which makes sense since they have double Aaron’s traffic).  Fangraphs’ traffic is in-between these two, so they should charge (if they decided to go via BlogAds) at least 100$/mo.

readerships probably overlap quite a bit. but i can see friendly ego clashes among the main players, maybe

Typically adsense revenue for FanGraphs is between $100 and $200 a month, sometimes it’s a bit higher on peak months.

You have to realize this is still a very low cpm.  Our cpm with google ads ranges from .25 - .50 cents.  It’s either that baseball related ads on google are not in demand and can be purchased for low prices, or FanGraphs has been smart priced.

This is also with one unit per page, so the rpm is still going to be .25 - .50 cents.  I don’t think adding additional ad units that rely on a cpc model is going to increase rpm linearly like real cpm ads would.

I tried running amazon and ticket ads at times, the cpa variety, and I’ve found them to be less successful than google ads.  Maybe it’s the placement or how I’ve run the text ads, but they’ve still been worse.

Very interesting.  I’m surprised there’s that much of a discrepancy.  Perhaps that your site is so data-driven, it shows how different things are.

Tango, speaking of page-downing to the recent comments on the blog homepage, could you put an anchor tag (that’s what a “http://url.com#comments” thingy is called, right?) right there so we can bookmark a page that automatically loads with the recent comments viewable?

Sky - if you check, you’ll find that each comment has its own anchor tag. For example, this link:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/psst_wanna_work_for_bill_james/#22

goes straight to your comment.

I think he means so he can essentially bookmark the bottom of the blog homepage, not any individual comment.