We Still Need Your Help

October 6, 2020

With just a few weeks of the postseason left, it’s hard to believe that it has been almost eight months since the major league season was postponed. I’m sure that for all of us, these past eight months have felt like a lifetime.

Since March, we’ve been asking for your support and you’ve been there every step of the way. Things looked pretty grim when I published my first update on the state of the site as we grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we’re still here and that’s entirely thanks to you. We are so grateful to have such supportive readers.

For the last fifteen years, our small staff’s dedication and love of baseball have allowed us to punch above our weight in the baseball media space despite a tight operating budget. But the revenue landscape for FanGraphs has changed considerably, and once the postseason winds down, we’ll have five baseball-less months to bridge until the start of the 2021 season. And so I’m here to ask for your help once again. Even though our traffic has rebounded to within 10% of our normal August and September levels, our revenue has not, due in large part to the continued depression of online advertising rates. This has forced us to become considerably more reliant on Memberships to make up the difference.

At the beginning of April, I set the ambitious goal of reaching 40,000 Members by next April, a number that would help make the site fully sustainable. That goal remains, and would represent just 4.8% of the unique visitors the site had this August, which Google Analytics put at 834,000. I continue to believe there are enough readers who care about FanGraphs to make this goal attainable, and I am greatly encouraged by the 18,744 Members we are currently lucky enough to have.

Despite our fiscal uncertainty and baseball’s long delay, we’ve not only adapted our coverage, projections, and playoff odds models to fit this very unusual season, we’ve also added new features to the site. This includes incorporating Statcast stats into our player pages and leaderboards, adding new game and season stat aggregation capabilities to our player pages, and launching KBO leaderboards and player pages to make that league’s season easier to analyze and follow. We introduced the RosterResource Injury Reports and adapted the RosterResource Depth Charts to help you keep track of 2020’s revised roster rules. We’ve tried to help make at-home learning a little more bearable for parents and students with FanGraphs Prep. And we’ve had a little bit of fun, with Twitch live streaming events, a FanGraphs Nintendo game, and a retooled FanGraphs Audio podcast.

If you frequent FanGraphs, I urge you to become a Member and help ensure that we can weather the next five months. All the proceeds from Memberships go directly to paying our staff a living wage, as well as stats and server costs.

You can help FanGraphs continue in the following ways:

Become a Member
You can become a Member or an Ad-Free Member. You’ll see all the same great content and have access to all of our tools. Ad-Free Members enjoy the site with faster loading times and no ads. It is the best way to experience FanGraphs.

Donate to FanGraphs
We have a simple donation form you can use to donate to FanGraphs. Please note that donations to FanGraphs are not tax-deductible. For the purposes of this year’s Membership goal, we will treat every $30 donated as one new Membership towards our goal.

Gift a Membership
You can send a coupon code for a one-year Ad-Free Membership to anyone you like. The code never expires, and no credit card or other form of payment is required when the recipient signs up. Their Membership begins when they use the coupon code.

We look forward to bringing you more terrific postseason coverage in the weeks to come before kicking off the offseason with our annual ranking of the game’s Top 50 free agents.

As always, thank you for your support and keep safe!

We hoped you liked reading We Still Need Your Help by David Appelman!

Please support FanGraphs by becoming a member. We publish thousands of articles a year, host multiple podcasts, and have an ever growing database of baseball stats.

FanGraphs does not have a paywall. With your membership, we can continue to offer the content you’ve come to rely on and add to our unique baseball coverage.

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David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.