THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thanks, Tango.  I don’t know what economic model will work for THT, particularly with ad sales trending way down.  And I don’t think a subscription service is in our genetic makeup.  But who knows?

I love THT and go to it all the time.  I really like the articles written and I think its probably the best site to go to if you can only pick one.  That said, I really would like it to stay free.  I’m a little cheap but I’d probably pay a small fee to maintain access.  The problem with a fee is it cuts out all the infrequent readers.  I like sending articles to my friends who are only starting getting into saber baseball.  I think THT is the best site to follow if you want to start getting into saber baseball stuff and I’m afraid a fee would prevent a lot of people from ever start using the site.

I wish there was a good way to fund the site.  Guessing the annual probably barely covers the cost of producing it.  Maybe you could start publishing a monthly journal of all the articles written on the site and sell it to subscribers so people could have paper copies of what is on the site.  Not sure who’d want this.  Maybe all us baseball nerds and maybe even some front offices would stock it.

I agree with Tango that Dave S. and the entire cast at THT are worthy of my support.  I only wish I had known that I had to follow the link from THT’s website to ACTA instead of going there directly in order for THT to benefit from me paying the higher price.  Now I’ll have to go to the tip jar:  https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=m4qne_OAkKbqfIxXpd7iutaatXM0LNsY7tGvUe3xq22_qlD4Wgogs4_Yeue&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f9fecf49521b3f5af727cc8f9db6c1fec14c4061fae0e9918

(I hope that link works.  If not, on the right hand side about 2/3 of the way down there is a yellow “make a donation” box that takes you to paypal.)

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/its-the-2009-hardball-times-baseball-annual/

Hmmmm… while Studes did provide a link to ACTA, he did not specifically say to use THAT link to buy from ACTA.

Maybe studes can update this text:
But please order it from ACTA Sports.

To read as:
But please order it from ACTA Sports using this referral link.

I would certainly pay for a THT subscription as I already pay for Baseball Prospectus even though the main thing I get it for (baseball analysis) has become less and less at the site.  Studes- You might want to check out http://changethis.com/pdf/53.01.BeyondFree.pdf
The article goes into the dilemma that you are facing--making money from a product everyone has come to expect to be free.  My recommendation would be to keep the site as is free and sell some type of premium subscription for any ongoing enhancements from here on out.

Will: that was an excellent article, thanks.

From that article:

“It is my belief that audiences WAN T to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s recent high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage.”

I see that THT accepts donations, but I’m not sure many readers even notice that tiny link. Maybe a semi-annual pledge drive would be a good idea. I’m sure you have a lot of readers who would be happy to pay something and this would be more direct than buying a $20 book that you only see $5 of. Maybe give some kind of token of thanks for donations of certain amounts and/or list benefactors in the THT Annual.

Pledge drives work.  My guess is that a site like THT would be able to get 5K, if they were to run it for a month.

Is that the best way though?  Seeing that BPro gets some 300K or 400K from subscription services, a pledge drive would be an awfully inefficient way to monetize the site.

What would happen if say THT locked up their content for 7 days, and then released it to the public.  Would it be worth $20 a year to 250 people to do that?  There’s 5K right there. 

This is just like selling concern tickets to preferred members a week before anyone else.  THT can have a separate section for subscribers only.  And a week later, all those articles appear in the main section.  The regular readers won’t even know really, since the premium side is separate.  Just like buying concert tickets.

I did not renew either my BP or my ESPN insider subscriptions this year.  After BP got so much worse in 2008, I think I’d need a guarantee of continued quality (e.g. New York Times Op-Eds) before I’d pay another subscription fee.

Is it possible to discuss with ACTA sports the possibility of offering the same book for differing amounts of money? The easiest way to donate would be to shell out an extra $5 when you purchase the book if you feel so inclined than to make a separate purchase altogether.

I also really think that the ‘advance preview’ would be a marvelous way to go about generating revenue without hurting the readers. Subscription systems which lock out content hurts casual readers, as mentioned, and I would wager that many casual readers have gone on to become important to the sabermetric community at large, and likely wouldn’t have without THT.

You’ve got to wonder though how much money is really available to be made in the sabermetric industry. If the Hardball Times wrote about the stock market instead of baseball statistics, he could probably charge $300/year for a subscription, simply because there’s a lot more capital floating around willing to pay for the information. Why? Because a decent stock recommendation (if such a thing exists) pays for the subscription fee many times over. OTOH, sabermetric research is more a form of entertainment, and so it has to compete with other forms of entertainment for discretionary income. If you’ve already paid $60 for a ticket to tonight’s game, then that’s $60 less available to pay for sabermetric insights.

IMHO, just because you really enjoy doing something doesn’t mean you’re entitled to be supported via donations, pledge drives etc. An awful lot of people would love to be professional actors, writers, artists, sabermetricians, etc, but most have to settle with pursuing their interests on the side for a period of time. That means you’ve got maybe 3-4 hours per day to work at your novel (or your pitchFX study) rather than 8. Not the end of the world.

Also, imagine if Bill James started working for the Royals in the late 70s instead of cranking out the Abstracts. (a) He’d probably make a lot less money, (b) sabermetrics wouldn’t exist in the way it does today, and (c) his research would be dictated by the needs of the Royals, rather than his own interests (I can’t imagine a team commissioning his Hall of Fame book, for example).

"You’ve got to wonder though how much money is really available to be made in the sabermetric industry.”

BPro has 10K subscribers at 20-40$ a year.  No reason THT can’t have 10% of that.

I can see paying $20/year for BP’s fantasy package if the pot in your league is $250. But ... it’s hard to justify paying for articles alone when the Wall Street Journal, NY Times etc are free.

But, the reality is that BPro are doing it.  And in that first year, most of the subs were full-price not the fantasy-level ones.  I don’t know what the current split is, but I’d guess well over 50/50 are the full-priced ones.

I just wonder whether the market could support three or four subscription services like BP. I just can’t imagine paying half a dozen websites $5-10 a month. Especially sites I skim through casually while eating breakfast.

I had a subscription to BP a few years ago but I let it expire because it was never essential reading—just another site to skim every day. So, based on that experience I wouldn’t subscribe to THT or anything similar. I think I’d only be willing to pay for a site that offered content I felt compelled to sit down with every day for at least half an hour.

Dackle, I agree with your last post.  Anything THT gets will be a siphoning, of some part, of BPro.  Also note that there are other sites, like Sons of Sam Horn, that have premium “supporter” subscription services.  There’s some money to be made.  It’s just a question of getting the right organization behind it.

I don’t think a full-fledged subscription would work. I’m sure you could make $8K-10K selling a fantasy baseball draft kit for $15-25.

Yeah, right now 100% of the revenue goes to BP, where in all fairness it should maybe be 35% Fangraphs, 30% BP, 25% Hardball Times, 10% other (numbers for illustration only—no qualitative judgement implied). I think there is a name (can’t remember what it is) for this principle in econommics—the best dentist in town gets paid $5m a year, the second best makes $500,000, even if there’s only a tiny difference in their skills. The best player on the team makes $28m (ARod), the second best makes $14m (31st highest salary last yer)—even though ARod isn’t twice as good as Pujols, Alfonso Soriano etc (guys making around half of ARod’s salary). I like that mental image actually—Baseball Prospectus = Alex Rodriguez, The Hardball Times = Albert Pujols.

@Dackle: I’ve heard of something called the “rank-size principle” in urban settlements; maybe that’s what you have in mind.

On this whole issue I think the revenue has to be thought of as all-sources: subscription (if any), advertising (if any), publication sales.

If you broaden your concept of “baseball sites” beyond those that have a major focus on sabermetrics, clearly some others such as Baseball America are drawing revenue from all three streams. And I suspect that BP’s revenues are coming to them partly for the expanded coverage they’ve given in recent years to prospects (read: Goldstein’s columns), and partly from adding more “common” coverage (read: Perotto and others). IOW, the audience and potential subscriber base for “sabermetric” analysis is probably smaller than the subscriber base of BP.

Perhaps most importantly, you have to figure that the audience of fantasy baseball information is much much greater than the audience of sabermetric analysis. And the one product that BP has that feeds that audience is PECOTA.  Without PECOTA I bet BP would lose half of its subscribers. I don’t now how much money the other fantasy sites make, or the fantasy services offered by some of the big news sites.

But right now you have most of the best sabermetically based “forecasts” being given away on their non-subscription websites! PECOTA and Shandler are prominent exceptions, and their sites and books appear to make enough money to sustain a fairly large stable of writers and analysts. (BP also gets what appears to be decent advertising revenue as well as revenue from subs and book sales.)

At the very least, I think you all need to give some thought to what products you have that can appeal to a bigger paying audience—and this has to be fantasy players, and the product has to be preseason forecasts and tout sheets, coupled with in-season updates, player injuries reports, prospects, trades, etc. Fantasy players feed on that stuff. And then you have to question why you’re giving it away—other than your devotion to baseball stats—and whether it’s this part of your product that you most need to try to sell for cash.

It’s three months later, but I just wanted to clarify this comment from post 15 because I felt like it came across as being a bit snippy with Studes, and that wasn’t intended:

So, based on that experience I wouldn’t subscribe to THT or anything similar.

I guess the point was that 20-25 years ago, there was really just the Baseball Abstract and then Elias, as well as the Sporting News guides. So, the reason I wouldn’t subscribe is not because of the quality, it’s just that there are so many other competing “products” out there now. It’s hard to justify paying say $10 a month for access to the Hardball Times site, when you see a copy of Sports Illustrated on the newsstand for a comparable price. A lot of money goes into publishing that magazine—paying writers, photographers, printing costs, and regardless of what your opinion is of SI, you’d assume that the reader is getting a comparable value back out of it. So, if SI is $39 a year for 54 issues, then I don’t know if I could pay $120/year for THT.

There is of course an argument that a lot of specialty industry magazines are very expensive—a one-year postal subscription to Random Lengths, a lumber industry magazine, costs $260. Sabermetrics could be considered a specialist industry.

I did pick up a copy of the Hardball Times annual and quite enjoying it. Even if the articles weren’t written especially for the book, I think I’d be willing to pay for a nicely printed collection of all the articles published on the site over a year (or every quarter). Sometimes I think a lot of interesting research is even appearing in the comments on this site, and I think I’d also be willing to pay for a nicely printed and bound collection of all the comments and posts on Inside The Book, maybe mixed in with a few articles. Just a thought.

Even if the articles weren’t written especially for the book, I think I’d be willing to pay for a nicely printed collection of all the articles published on the site over a year (or every quarter). Sometimes I think a lot of interesting research is even appearing in the comments on this site, and I think I’d also be willing to pay for a nicely printed and bound collection of all the comments and posts on Inside The Book, maybe mixed in with a few articles. Just a thought.

You know, those are fascinating thoughts/ideas.  One drawback to the free flow of information on the internet is that there are lots of great ideas, research, etc., that is presented to a limited audience, such as on this site, and then is lost forever (obviously it is still there, but you know what I mean).

Putting some of it into a nicely bound, paper publication is a heck of an idea…

Obviously, there are price points at which you would pay for content.  I read a fascinating piece about iTunes applications (did I link to it a few months ago) where even ONE PENNY made a difference between getting the app or not.  Apparently “free” was far more powerful than anything.  That is, the difference between free and 1 cent was far more than 1 cent and 2 cents.  I suppose it’s obvious, because who wants to a) give out their credit card unneedlessly, and b) get into the habit of paying for every single software you come across that might be cool.

THT is different because it’s not “new”.  We’ve had extensive “try before you buy”, just as Fangraphs.  (Not that either site will consider charging for content.)

But, like I said, suppose the model is this: you get exclusive previews one “time period” ahead of everyone else (like when you get a chance at a concert ticket purchase before it goes to the general public).  How much would you pay for that “time period”.

Would, for example, it be worth to you $1 a month to get a one-day preview?  How about $2 a month for a one-week preview?

Some articles are timely-required, so that THT or Fangraphs couldn’t afford a one-week embargo on content.  But, others are not.

That said, the only way THT or Fangraphs can charge is if you make Fantasy content the driver.

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As for the bound book, I’ve had that idea alot for the past several years.  The problem is that it’s going to take alot of effort to go through all the threads (which themselves are always growing) to come up with great summaries.

In a sense, the collator would need to be backward-looking the whole time, and in the meanwhile, not really contribute anything forward-looking.

If there was alot of money to be made, you could justify it.  But, I don’t think such a “Best of The Book” would sell more than 250 copies at 9.99 each (PDF).

Dackle, it’s interesting that you bring this back up right now (and I in no way thought your comment was snippy).  We’re going to roll out a subscription service in the next day or two, combined with a purchase of the Annual.  I have no idea if it will sell much at all, but it seems worth a shot, particularly because we keep losing book sales to Amazon.

Don’t worry, nothing on THT will change.  This will be a new, added service.