A Fall FanGraphs Membership Update

With the postseason in full swing and the offseason looming, it’s time for a FanGraphs Membership update.

First, I’d like to thank all of our Members for their support this season. Your Membership dollars go directly to paying our staff and keeping the lights on at the site. When you subscribe, you are supporting our 10 full-time employees and 23 contributors, and I thought I’d take this chance to briefly highlight the work they do every day.

In addition to myself, we have nine full-time staff members. Ben Clemens brings you insightful daily baseball analysis, co-authors the Trade Value series, and is spearheading our upcoming Top 50 Free Agent rankings. Sean Dolinar is our lead web developer and is constantly making updates and additions to the site, creating new tools and improving the user experience. Kevin Goldstein, provides first-hand knowledge of how teams operate as well as insightful prospect analysis, and hosts Chin Music. Jay Jaffe brings you daily baseball analysis, deep dives into the game’s history, and is the foremost expert on all things Hall of Fame related. Eric Longenhagen is our lead prospect analyst and spearheads all of our prospect and draft coverage, as well as maintaining The Board. Jason Martinez is the man behind FanGraphs’ RosterResource and makes sure every roster move and player contract is meticulously tracked. Meg Rowley, our managing editor, makes FanGraphs “go” and co-hosts the Effectively Wild podcast. Paul Sporer is RotoGraphs’ managing editor and the co-host of The Sleeper and The Bust, and provides fantasy rankings and analysis year round. Dan Szymborski is the architect of the ZiPS projection system and provides daily analysis as well.

Our contributors also do incredible work. Alex Chamberlain provides deep dives into Statcast and other data for both FanGraphs and RotoGraphs. Ariel Cohen is the mastermind behind the ATC projections and the Beat the Shift podcast. Devan Fink analyzes everything from league-wide trends to individual players. Brendan Gawlowski delves into prospects and the KBO, as well as happenings from around the baseball. Dylan Higgins produces our Twitch streams and FanGraphs Audio, and edits Effectively Wild. David Laurila provides insightful interviews with players and team personnel from around the game and writes the Sunday Notes, Talks Hitting, and Learning and Developing a Pitch series. Jake Mailhot manages our Power Rankings and also provides detailed player and team analysis. Justin Mason authors the Roto Riteup and co-hosts The Sleeper and The Bust. Mike Podhorzer, a veteran of the fantasy baseball industry, provides daily fantasy analysis and projections. Michael Simione dives into pitching with his Throwing Heat column for RotoGraphs. Jon Tayler is FanGraphs’ other editor and the voice behind our Twitter account. And Jeff Zimmerman does it all for RotoGraphs, including rankings, the Mining the News column, and injury analysis.

In addition to those familiar voices, your support allowed us to hire several new writers this spring. Jon Becker assists with RosterResource and writes the Bullpen Report for RotoGraphs. Jeffrey Bellone designed and writes the FanGraphs Newsletter. Justin Choi covers a variety of topics from around baseball and the KBO. Nicklaus Gaut looks at streaming analysis and fantasy strategy for RotoGraphs. Luke Hooper is our graphic designer and does video breakdowns and analysis. Lucas Kelly looks at fantasy baseball strategy and writes the Bullpen Report. Owen McGrattan does deep-dive statistical analysis into a number of topics. Sara Sanchez does player analysis and also examines the game’s intersection with broader culture. Alex Sonty writes the DFS Pitching Preview for RotoGraphs. Tess Taruskin writes about prospects and does video analysis, as well as contributing to our Daily Prospect Notes and prospect lists. And Chad Young, one of the original Ottoneu fantasy players, writes about all things Ottoneu.

These are the people who bring you the baseball analysis you read, the stats and tools you consume, the podcasts you listen to, and the streams you watch. We all appreciate your support.

And now for some Membership data.

You may have noticed that the Membership graph on the homepage has hovered around 20,700 Members all season. (If you recall from my previous posts, that graph counts all of our direct sales — Memberships, donations, gift Memberships, and merchandise — toward our Membership total.) Our “peak” raw Membership number (not including merch, gifts, and donations) came on March 30, 2021. That was the anniversary of the day we first asked for help weathering the pandemic, which also saw our biggest single-day Membership increase ever.

You might wonder why the homepage graph hasn’t climbed more since. In large part it’s because last year, the composition of our Membership had some unique and unsustainable characteristics. The slight decreases you’ve seen in the Membership graph come mainly from there being fewer new donations and a dip in gift memberships and merchandise sales compared to last year:

We never really anticipated maintaining the same pace of donations we saw last year, so this is mostly expected, as is some amount of year-over-year Membership attrition. As of October 7, we’re actually a handful of Memberships above our previous peak. And if you look at the year-over-year numbers compared to October 7, 2020, our Membership numbers are up about 15%.

Again we are incredibly grateful for our Members’ continued support. Not only have you sustained the site, you’ve helped us build a better FanGraphs. And if you enjoyed our coverage this season and are one of the over 5 million visitors to the site this season who isn’t a Member, we hope you’ll consider becoming one. We want to continue delivering the high-quality baseball analysis, stats, and tools you’ve come to expect, and we can’t do it without you.

As always, you can support our site 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. You’ll also have access to Dark mode and Classic mode, and be able to download many of our most popular RosterResource pages as Excel workbooks. Ad-Free Members also enjoy the site with faster loading times and no ads — it’s the best way to experience FanGraphs.

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.

Buy some Merch!
Buy some FanGraphs merch! We will be restocking soon, so keep an eye out for future announcements.

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 our Membership goal, we will treat every $30 donated as one new Membership towards our goal.