For years I would use baseball-reference to look up stats, because the site was simple, loads fast, not a ton of ads or videos. Now, the past week whenever I load the site, my laptop fan starts spinning. I might have to use another site for my quick stat lookups.
I don’t like how now Baseball Reference has so many ad trackers that it heats up my computer whenever I open multiple tabs with their site.
I remember the days when you could BUY your own ad for ONE player on baseball reference. If I wanted to sponsor the Shawon Dunston page, it would cost something like $16/year. The cost was relative to how much traffic that particular player got. At one point I captured a bunch of the costs for various players. It was interesting to see which players got more traffic. I’ll have to see if I can dig out those numbers.
In 2009, I wrote an email to my brother bout Ryne Duren.
Fri, Jul 10, 2009, 6:15 PM
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/durenry01.shtml
Was an all-star three times. Finished 2nd in 1958 RoY
Lead the AL in saves in 1958 in saves with 20.You can buy a sponsorship for a Ryne Duren’s for one year. $15. They say it comes out to roughly a $1.25 per 1,000 page views. That means Duren would get 12,000 page views in one year. Let’s say you get a 1% CTR (click-through rate). That’s 1200 clicks for $15. That’s $0.0125 per click. About a penny a click.
A $1.25 CPM (CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand. The letter M is the roman numeral for 1,000). So a $1.25 CPM is actually pretty decent. The google ads on spudart.org earn me about $0.80 CPM. So paying $1.25 for a nice ad at the top of a page like that is actually pretty good.
I wrote about sponsoring Domingo Ramos’ page in 2010
I’m thinking about sponsoring the Domingo Ramos webpage on baseball-reference.com for $5 a year. What would my ad say?
I already have an old webpage for Domingo Ramos on spudart.org. I could revamp the webpage to match the ad concept.
Looking back at Domingo Ramos now, we can see that he started the trend of wearing over-sized baseball hats. Maybe the ad could be about Domingo Ramos: Trendsetter.
- Sponsorships ended in 2016
- Info page about sponsorships in 2012
- Screenshots of some of the dated sponsorships from 2011
- Interview with the guy behind baseball reference from 2016