The State of FanGraphs 2026
Hello! This year marks 21 seasons of FanGraphs, and as we look ahead to the August 5 anniversary of our launch, I wanted to thank you for reading and visiting the site. And, as has become an annual tradition, I also wanted to provide you with an update on the state of FanGraphs.
I started last year’s version of this piece by listing all of our new features and site improvements. As this year’s list is even longer, instead of detailing everything up front, I’ve included a Feature Appendix at the bottom of this post. Take a look – it’s quite a scroll. What I was struck by as I was compiling that list is just how much we’ve been able to accomplish with our Members’ support, support that has translated into new features, voices, data, and other random fun stuff you didn’t even know you wanted. From the written work of our dedicated team of baseball experts to all the stats and leaderboards, the data and fantasy tools to the prospect analysis, the projections, RosterResource, the mobile app, the podcasts, the chats — the depth and breadth of the site is very special. Plus, we do it all without private equity funding or sports betting partnerships, allowing us to produce the independent analysis and high-quality tools you’ve come to rely on.
And while I think the future of FanGraphs is bright, I also think it’s worth talking about the realities of running a sports media site in 2026, the challenges we see looming, and why your support matters more now than it ever has before.
First, if you are a FanGraphs Member, thank you so much for your continued support. Membership is set to account for about 80% of our revenue this year. Six years ago, that number was about 25%. Still, our Members only make up about 2% of what we believe to be the real-life human visitors to the site. We want our work and data to be accessible, but we’re up against a number of challenges.
Data Is More Expensive
FanGraphs isn’t free to operate. We don’t scrape data, opting instead to maintain agreements with all our data providers. This has been our model from day one, both because I wanted FanGraphs to be sustainable and for our data to be reliable, and because people deserve to be paid for their work. This strategy seems to have worked out, but it comes at a cost. Our data costs have nearly doubled over the past five years. At the same time…
Advertising Revenue Is Down, While Bots and Scraping Cost Us More
Our advertising revenue has decreased 50% since 2024. There are multiple factors at work here, some of which are good. We’ve decreased the number of ads on some pages, and our Members enjoy a fully ad-free experience as one of their Member benefits. But as I mentioned, even with the growth we’ve seen, Members only account for about 2% of our total users, and there is a massive discrepancy between the ads served to non-Members and the number of pageviews we’ve served. This May, multiple site analytics tools we use claim we served about 12 million pageviews to non-Members; ads were served on just 2.1 million of those pageviews. That’s only about 18% of pageviews, compared to 51% two years ago. That’s a staggering amount of missing ad revenue.
| Time Frame | Total Pages | Pages with Ads | % With Ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2024 | 6.9M | 3.5M | 51% |
| May 2025 | 7.5M | 2.5M | 33% |
| May 2026 | 12M | 2.1M | 18% |
Two things are likely happening here. First, we’re seeing a lot more bot traffic, which often doesn’t register as the sort of browser session that advertisers care about. We estimate that at least 60% of all traffic coming to FanGraphs is from non-human sources, including web crawlers, AI bots, and scrapers. In addition to the decline in ad revenue, this has led to increased server costs and us spending valuable time figuring out where the offending traffic is coming from in order to keep the site operational.
Second, folks are much more apt to use ad blockers these days, so while our overall site traffic hasn’t declined, our non-Member users are seeing ads at much lower rates. This creates the untenable situation where we’re serving up more content, but also serving up fewer ads because those ads are either being blocked, or the thing using our resources isn’t even a person.
Those are some of the challenges we face right now, but the landscape we operate in also has some big potential shocks on the horizon, one likely to affect digital publishing more generally, the other specific to baseball.
The Impact of AI
First, I’ll take this opportunity to share our editorial policy around the use of AI. All of the editorial content at FanGraphs is written entirely by the members of our staff, without any assistance from generative AI models, and that will remain our policy going forward. You don’t come to FanGraphs to read ChatGPT’s analysis, and there’s no way it could come up with the headlines Michael Baumann does.
And while the development team has found AI to be a useful coding tool, we don’t use it to create stats or metrics, or ask it to source the data displayed on the site. I have no interest in Claude hallucinating Jacob Misiorowski’s strikeout rate or average fastball velocity (though you’d be forgiven for wondering if either is real).
Of course, AI’s impact goes beyond the need for code checks or an editorial policy. Put simply, AI is taking our content and repurposing it in a way that could make it so that there’s no need to actually visit the site. Indeed, changes to many popular search engines mean many people unfamiliar with FanGraphs might not even discover the site in the first place. Just think about the AI results you see on Google. How many people are going to click through to our Brewers Top Prospect list, a piece that took days to write and edit, when Gemini will serve up much of Jesús Made’s scouting report, tool grades and all? If there’s ever been an existential crisis for online publishers, it’s this. Whether it’s Membership or advertising revenue, our business model depends on visiting the site, and AI seems poised to keep people away, eroding the link between writers and readers.
Baseball’s Looming Lockout
The precise impact of this winter’s seemingly inevitable lockout is tough to gauge, as it will greatly depend on how long it takes MLB and the Players Association to reach an agreement. But if the pandemic and the last lockout taught us anything, it’s that not having major league baseball isn’t great for a baseball media site. We saw our traffic dip 50% during the 2021-22 lockout. The support of our Members helped us weather it, but it was a challenge, and if we were to lose an entire season, I’m not sure what it would mean for FanGraphs without significant Membership growth.
So what should you take from all of this? Well first, become a FanGraphs Member! Membership allows us to continue to grow and improve the site, providing a source of revenue that’s immune from macro forces like AI or baseball’s labor dispute, and that’s more stable than advertising. We’re in a moment where it’s incumbent upon all of us to support the writers, artists and publications we love, or risk losing them. Obviously I hope FanGraphs is on that list for you, but this isn’t just a FanGraphs thing. Unfortunately, the era of good free content is over. Ultimately, the advertising model syphoned a shocking amount of money away from publishers to middlemen and tech giants, and AI is threatening to destroy one of the most reliable ways for us to surface our work to new readers. But your direct support puts you in the driver’s seat. It’s not what SEO wants, or AI wants, or what the advertisers want. It’s what you want.
Our pledge to you is that if you support us, we’ll keep producing all the great baseball analysis you’ve come to rely on, and continue to grow the site in new and interesting ways, just like we have for the past 21 years.
New Feature Appendix
More Voices
- Four New Full-Times Hires
- Six New Contributors
- Baseball Simulator
- PitchingBot Visualizer
- Heat Maps Pivot Tables
- Squared-Up Explorer
- Hot Streak Finder
- Paired Pitches
- Power Rankings Board
- Count Progression Analysis
- Greater Customization
- RosterResource Integration
- Prospect Integration, including The Board
- Score and Game Status Push Notifications
- Article Push Notifications
- College Leaderboards
- KBO Leaderboards
- NPB Leaderboards
Over 100 New Metrics, Including…
- Statcast Bat Tracking Stats
- ABS Zone Stats
- Strike Zone Breakdowns
- Spin and Arm Angle Metrics
- Statcast Spring Training Data on Player Pages
- Statcast Minor League Data on Player Pages (Triple-A/Florida State League)
RosterResource
Site Enhancements
- Updated Game Graphs, Box Scores, and Schedule Pages
- New Pitcher Cards with Live PitchingBot Data
- Updated WAR Graphs Tool
- Updated Player Comparison Tools
- Pitch Type Leaderboards
Projections
Other Cool Stuff
- Spring Training and Holiday Headers
- WBC Flag Banners and Opening Day Bunting
- Additional FanGraphs Walk-Off Metrics
- Trade Value ELO
- New Merchandise
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Thanks for the update, David. Glad I’ve been a member for years and I plan on being one for the long haul!
I’ve already got my three-year membership locked in, already got my FanGraphs Mug. Please come up with other ways to liberate me from what bit of disposable income I have. It’s yours.
On AI-generated content: About 1/4th to 1/3rd of all the assignments I receive from my students are AI generated. And what I keep trying to find new ways to show them, new ways to have them discover on their own, is that the AI work is detectable to the discerning reader because it’s so, in their words, mid. There’s a soullessness and a playing-it-safe aspect to it that means that it’s never interestingly awful or interestingly good. It’s unable to fake that human connectivity.
Compare that to FanGraphs, where every single thing I click on takes me to something where I can feel a mind-to-mind connection of the unique human being working through their thoughts. Thank you.
If I may ask, what do you teach, Transmission? I am in the humanities at the university level, and even my extremely talented students now mostly believe they’re not here to learn, just to get a credential. I’m seriously considering going back to blue book or oral exams–curious how you are dealing with assignments in the AI era.
Also in humanities, university-level. How I’m handling it is a very long answer that’d be too big of a thread hijack. But in brief, between the classes I do live online and my desire to follow “Universal Design” and inclusion principles I’m trying to avoid blue-books. But I get why they’re having a resurgence.
There’s a lot of “prove to me that you’re a human reacting to things that happen live in our class” in my assignments and rubrics and a bit of seeding assignments and course materials with invisible “easter eggs” directions that trip up AI into generating bullshit content that students don’t see. (That, too, runs into problems with students who use assistive reading devices…)
Agreed, strategies that force students to prove they have engaged deeply are the ticket, and I’ve tried to reward that deep engagement even when the final product is lacking. And point well taken on grading mechanisms that are fair to all students (which is why it is such a shame that AI has destroyed the most pedagogically useful tools for demonstrating and evaluating deep thought). Finding the right balance is getting harder and harder–I line edit everything my students write and leave extensive marginalia that we then review together, which historically had always been worth the extra time spent grading. I’m not sure it is any longer, as so few of my students seem to care about the comments and suggestions.
I’m becoming more convinced by the day that solutions to dealing with AI meaning that actual assistive technology is also impeded is a not-insignificant part of the point of AI. All the billionaires behind the AI push also seem to be eugenics freaks who would love to un-person anyone with any kind of impairment, disability, etc. Much love and appreciation to educators like you who really care about those students.
In biology, and undergrads are a supermajority pre-health and are not that interested in learning for learnings sake. But I’ve also seen grad students in AI for things like candidacy exams and problem sets, which bothers me a lot more. Why go to grad school if you don’t have a deep love of learning and performing research?
Unthinkable that a grad student would not care about actual mastery. I remember my advisor telling me “you’re an apprentice; you will do this for a long time before you actually understand what it is you are doing. For now, mimic.” I think the patience for such a model is gone.
I suspect academia isn’t seen as a pathway to mastery of much of anything anymore. It’s more about networking. If Who You know matters more than What You know, what’s the incentive to actually learn anything?
I’m not an educator, but I always felt the point of University (and High School, to an extent) wasn’t really to learn things. It was to learn how to learn since you aren’t going to know everything yet when you graduate and even if you did, things are going to change. You need to know how to figure things out you have never seen before. Otherwise, you can probably be replaced by a machine and this was true even before LLM’s.
That said, kids who let LLM’s do their assignments aren’t learning anything or learning how to learn.
Agreed. I tell my students that I want to encourage deep thought, which is more important than having them retain the historical and theoretical minutiae. Unfortunately, even that approach is failing as students become more and more instrumentalist. I don’t mean that as a criticism of them, either; they’re just responding to the pressures of their world.
maybe this is a tad on the nose for a baseball website, but i find myself reaching for the concept of “tools” a lot lately. kind of a metaphor for myself going into sort of… post-prospectdom, i guess. graduating, even, one could say.
as i look back on an undergrad track record that is. um. bad. i think what i’ve learned is still very valuable and applicable. i have tools now, for new and novel problems. maybe they’ll be in my field, maybe they won’t.
i worry that a lot of my peers are so results-oriented (and fair enough, that’s what gets you in the door most places) that they’ve boxed themselves in with a process dependent on something kinda volatile. granted, that goes the other way. the student ‘carried’ by gemini got an “a” in class, maintaining a 4.0. i sank further to a 2.XX that i daren’t specify further from shame. (it’s worse than you think.) but i trust that i learned plenty from the class, and i think it gave me tools beyond what the “c-” on my transcript says.
still stings, though 🙁
HS and College are definitely more about learning to learn as learning things.
I always tell my entry level hires (in software) that it’s OK not to know things as long as they’re ready to learn. I expect them to learn more about doing their job in their first year than college ever taught them. The first few months are always an adventure (and sadly some of them aren’t ready to learn).
For my whole academic career finals were blue-book, hand-written in proctored rooms. Usually with multiple exams at the same time, so you weren’t even able to cheat off the person next to you.
Why wouldn’t you do this? It’s the only way to test actual knowledge today. Homework and term papers are pointless given AI.
To be clear, lots of people are going back to blue books, but for many fields they are not the best measure of learning. If you ask students to write an essay on a dense theoretical topic, you get a much better sense of how deeply they know the subject matter than a blue book exam could possibly provide. They question is whether I can convince students to actually do the work themselves. It’s better for their learning and for my assessment if they do, but that doesn’t seem to be a winning argument these days.
Throw the old school blue book exam at them. Let them have a note card or paper, hand written. A list of potential exam questions to help them study. make them think a little bit.
Generative AI as an educator is so tough right now. I try to teach ethical use, since I know they’ll use it whether or not I forbid it. And I do use if for coding in the lab. But it’s an amplifier for those that know what they’re doing and can detect AI slop outputs. For intro level coding, I think students need to muddle though the basics. For writing, ugh. It can help polish truly shitty writing (without that soullessness you mention), but it cannot come up with anything truly interesting or innovative (like when students write grant proposals or papers).
For the baseball context, it can never substitute for actual scouting, coming up with interesting ideas for articles, or innovative analyses. So long live this site.
That’s also something I discuss: that you have to know enough on your own, to know when AI is giving you slop. It requires a preexisting expertise.
Trying to keep this linked to baseball context, it’s like you and David say about scraping scouting reports: Gemini can steal and vomit back out the FG Scouting Team’s grades on Jesús Made, but it’s me following along in the live chats and comment threads and reading horizontally across articles, for months, that lets me understand Made as a prospect. All that comes from a vibrant, dynamic set of human interactions that the FG staff and community create, organically.
being a student (in stem, though hopefully with a wide enough worldview!), the amount that i see my peers relying on llms to munch their textbooks for them is kind of staggering. granted, this is partially an issue of access to profs/tas, and also of textbooks which are often written in really mind numbing ways. but i think just learning how to learn *from a textbook* is such an important skill that i see some of my peers losing in real time because they want the cliffsnotes and bullets that gemini spits out, and then getting feedback from it in live time, rather than crunching it for themselves.
maybe this is just me being a luddite but hearing people say that ‘gemini carried my ass thru quantum mechanics’ is really disheartening. even if the factual content hasn’t changed and is being absorbed fine, i feel like we’ve lost something…
man y’all are so crusty
Retired professor of finance. I used to tell my students a mostly true story about a guy I worked with who admitted to cheating through a top college program. He left college cum laude with a mid six figure job. But got fired in a month. He could not fake a lack of the correct knowledge and math skills needed for that job. He was fired 4 times in a year and wound up an entry level stockbroker in 3 years making $30k. There is far more to the story, but it worked on a few. Knowledge matters!
I was asked last year to teach media law at a law school and decided to include within the curriculum and assignments the use of AI so that students who will be lawyers in a year or two can responsibly make use of its potential while minimizing its risks.
I did not make that decision in an academic bubble. I surveyed practicing lawyers and found that most firms were already using AI and that the economic pressure to expand that use is intensifying: Clients want firms to minimize billable hours, and AI, if used responsibly, is a tool that can accomplish that.
Since I am not an expert in AI I brought in as guests lawyers who are as well as AI experts who aren’t lawyers but whom have an interest in shaping its use in ways that are responsible. I also assigned the writing of legal memos that included the use of AI in research — and required critiques of how well or poorly that AI functioned, and how its utility might be improved.
Banning a tool already being used in practice seems a poor way to prepare students. Better to teach how to wield that tool responsibly. There will always be people who seek shortcuts that short-circuit their growth as critical thinkers. But in the right hands AI is a supplement to critical thinking and not its replacement.
Long live Fangraphs
Membership fee is the best money I spend every year.
Thank you for all you do! Buying a Fangraphs membership has changed the way I watch baseball for the better. I absolutely love the detailed articles that cover baseball from college to the pros to the hall of fame. And it’s so cool that you hold weekly chats with the authors – that gives me a chance to ask a pro whatever is on my mind about baseball.
Go Fangraphs! And Red Sox.
I forgot to mention the comment sections! There are so many different personalities, fandoms, and experience levels, that you find yourself learning something new or viewing a situation a different way all the time. A few examples I recall fondly:
I’ve had my emotional claims about the Red Sox fact-checked by more rational readers.
In a similar vein, I enjoyed watching that Orioles fan last year fight back against all the early season dunking with the detail of a beat writer.
I’ve also made claims on players or prospects based on stats/numbers and had readers provide context that changes how I interpreted things.
Asking “why” to any comment is a reliable way to learn something new.
Totally agree about the comments. I get so much information from them and I’m amazed at the depth of knowledge these readers have.
One of the last pure places on the internet it feels like.
Agreed – I LOVE the weekly chats with the authors, always read after the transcript, or when live at times. I watch baseball more than ever, and fangraphs is huge in the background helping make sense of everything about baseball — it’s the best.
From a fellow Red Sox fan, which is obvious, who first went to Fenway in 1948, I would like to write in support of everything you said. Monday afternoon at 2:00 is reserved for Ben Clemens chat. His responses to my inquiries are such that I feel like I personally know this man. Everybody involved with Fangraphs has added to my enjoyment of baseball and the commenters are the best. There are no trolls and even when there are debates they are conducted civilly, without rancor. It is more than just another part of my life now and a day never goes by that I don’t spend time at Fangraphs.
Go Fangraphs! And Red Sox!!
Hell yea Appy.
So glad to see that AI policy. Happy to be a member and I plan on being one so long as Fangraphs (and I) exist!
brb, rewriting my will to ensure that my heirs have FG memberships paid out from my estate
May I say great screen name?
Huh, I thought Baumann was AI and proof of concept for machine headline writing.
Ah, well. frytakemymoney.gif.
I appreciate this annual update because it brings out the silent members to offer up their plaudits. They’re the secret sauce who really help to keep things afloat – happily paying their dues and gobbling up articles and player pages and roto news and comment sections, but doing so quietly in the background.
Just like Jack Torrance at the Overlook, they have always been there. Now we just need to find a way to double their numbers. Party in the gold room! There’s Davy holding court over at the bar, there’s Eric regaling a tableful of members with tales of prospects past, someone spilled their Advocaat on Dan.
Happily a member forever and always, and #bringbackNotGraphs
Love, Love this site. Became a member just over a month ago, and couldn’t be happier. Good luck Fangraphs!
If you, anonymous reader, are considering, get a membership — worth it in spades for the quality of content, approaching endless — projections, articles, the nearly daily chat sections where authors field questions — love it.
FanGraphs is a clear #1 on my list of media subscriptions – I’m happy to be even a tiny part of such a fantastic project!
Became a member in 2020 after reading that years version of The State of FanGraphs.
Loved every minute of it.
I’m sure I could look this up, but I’ll drop this question here in case others were wondering:
Are there tiers to membership? Can I give more? Or is it a flat rate for all?
Thank you all so much for this site and community.
This ^^^^^^^^
I would like to know what the cost would be for a tier that allows us to order a 3K word essay posted to the site, our choice of writer and topic. It would have to be prohibitively expensive, right? $1,000? $5,000? $10,000?
There should be a tier that keeps the Trade Value Elo widget active year round. That thing was addictive.
I am a more recent member but will continue to do so forever–thanks for the great insights and (more importantly) headlines
As a 99th percentile user (and 520th overall) I couldn’t imaging my baseball fandom without FG. I have already passed it on to my teenage son and the value for the membership cost is astounding. Keep up the great work!
I’ve been just a tad off pace since they started revealing this at 98th percentile each year. I’m in awe of the 99 percenters. You’re my heroes!
How do you see your member “ranking” like that?
It’s in the bi-weekly newsletter mailed to Gold Tier subscribers. The seeding sets up one helluva end-of-year tournament.
I was ranked something like the 7th most active user on the site in that thing and I was like “I know what’s wrong with me, what is wrong with those six people ahead of me?”
Same. Only being 99th percentile was motivation to slack off at work harder than I ever have before.
mere 98% myself
Thanks for the update Dave.
On the topic of new things, well actually old things, could we get the filters back on the leaderboards? Even as a member exclusive thing? It would be nice to be able to do filtering directly on the site rather than having to export everything to Excel. This was a nice tool that used to exist but then just sorta disappeared at one point. Maybe because it was a little buggy/slow, but it was nice to have,
Proud to be part of the 2%, this is my favorite website, appreciate all that you do!
Five percenters are part of a Nation of Islam offshoot
Three percenters are right-wing militia members
Two percenters are FG members <—YOU ARE HERE
One percenters are in a biker gang
Appreciate this and all that everyone at Fangraphs does! You guys make baseball more fun than it already is. Please continue to educate and entertain readers as you do everyday. and more retro merch please!
I stumbled upon Fangraphs two decades ago and consider it my happy home page to the internet.
I have a few comments coming from a loving fan.
-I’ve checked out what the ads look like here even though I’m a Fangraphs sub. IMO they make this site completely unusable…and to be clear, when I say that, I’m not even talking about going in-depth on stats, I’m talking bare-bones page navigation. I’m not complaining, but sharing two cents material to your site’s financial future which matters a great deal more to me than perhaps it should.
-Acquiring the next generation of consumers within a much more competitive internet landscape is extremely difficult with such clunky ads! Consumer expectations re: clean interfaces are sky high.
-Beyond clunkiness, ads don’t seem tenuous for small publishers. Maybe they rebound some day, but that’s small comfort to navigating the challenges in making it to that “some day”. I’m honestly pretty surprised that your Members % is just 2%!
-Would you consider a supplemental substack subscription model for articles? Adding clean interface subscription channels strike me as: 1) more controllable revenue, 2) potentially additive to your subscriber base, 3) very unlikely to cannibalize, 4) another landing page to redirect to your homebase statistical hub.
FanGraphs is almost too good to be true and I really, really hope you can keep chugging along. The site is as good as ever and it seems like the pace of innovation is increasing. Next thing I need is some way to teach Google that if I search for a baseball player, I want their FanGraphs page to appear at/near the top of results. Obviously, I can just go straight to the FanGraphs dot com but sometimes I’m lazy!
I would love to give you guys more money than just my membership, but it’s actually kind of hard.
Give me more merch! Better merch! New merch! Put the shop on the banner at the top! I am probably naive in thinking this would make a significant difference, and absolutely ignoring the massive overhead, but my god does every content creator I know push their merch as hard and as often as possible. Based on some occasional transparency, it seems to be a huge driver of revenue.
You guys also curate and create a lot of useful data. Sell it! I’m sure that you don’t have the rights to do so unilaterally, but if you can work out agreements with some of the providers that you purchase from, I guarantee organizations of a lot of kinds would buy data through you instead of trying to collate stats from college, the minors, and Asia themselves. You’re already a source of truth for people with deep pockets who wouldn’t blink at licensing fees in the tens or hundreds of thousands, and speaking from first-hand experience, it felt like you were actively trying to stop me from giving you a bunch of money for your data. You have an incredibly valuable research engine and you could make so much money from business sales with it.
Yeah I would really like a simple, comfortable, lightweight trucker cap with the FG logo on it. Mesh in the back, adjustable, keeps my forehead from getting burned. The kind of thing that I would wear to a game in Kansas City in July.
Would be neat to have it in different colors but I’d buy it even if it was just green like the site theme.
On MLB.com it looks like a Royals trucker cap is $36. That seems like a pretty good comp and I’d absolutely I’d pay at that level.
(Note: I was today years old when I learned that the lightweight baseball cap with mesh in the back was called a trucker cap).
(Also, I picked Kansas City at random, I just know it’s hotter there in July than in Minneapolis)
Been a member for as long as paid membership is a thing. Would never change it for the world. Adore this site and visit daily. You guys rock.
Least regretful subscription I have. This site is a national treasure.
Crazy times…
I asked this last year -but from a cash flow perspective, do you prefer us signing up for a 3 year subscription at the lower rate or the yearly subscription? I’m indifferent and want to do what supports Fangraphs best, and will be auto renewing either way
Yes hoping someone can answer this please, it’s something I’ve also asked and wondered about….
I was gonna add that the merch is cool too, but it looks like the tee and shorts I picked up are gone. Bummer, wear both a lot.
Thanks for a great site and all that you do for us hard core baseball fans! You can count on my support always.
Sure would be helpful to have Roto Riteups on the weekends.
Looks like there are a few people who actually don’t want Roto Riteups on the weekends. Or maybe this space is only for sycophants and fanboys. I’m a paying customer politely offering feedback. Voting thumbs down on constructive feedback sure says a lot about you.
It would be nice to have those riteups on weekends, but it’s also nice to let the writers actually get a break to some degree
Perhaps.
Do you think umpires, ballplayers, managers/coaches, broadcasters, beat writers, club house staff, ballpark employees, public transport workers et al. should also get weekends off so they can “actually get a break to some degree”?
Publishing an article on a certain day most likely means the writer worked on it the day or week before, and an editor worked on it the day it went out. Do you want Fangraphs editors to work 7 days a week?
Honestly, your original suggestion wasn’t offensive to me, but the attitude that followed it was.
Offensive? What a thin-skinned crowd these Fangraphs fanboys and sycophants show themselves to be. Surely this website can find a way to produce Roto Riteups on the weekends without its writers/editors enduring such hardships that it would make their employment at Fangraphs unendurable and traumatic. Perhaps weekend Roto Riteups are a way to give aspiring writes an opportunity to showcase what they can do. Or perhaps the weekend Roto Riteups can be rotated between existing staff. There are a myriad of ways to move forward and offer informed fantasy summaries on weekend mornings. What’s somewhat perplexing are the short-sighted and petty reactions from numerous Fangraphs members who would rather find their weekend fantasy summaries from other sites and sources. Equally perplexing is the insouciant willingness of this website to motivate current paying customers to go to other sites and sources 2-3 days a week for morning fantasy summaries (The State of Fangraphs, as it were).
Maybe you shouldn’t whine about down votes and call others thin skinned, at least not at the same time.
This comments section is quite the self-congratulatory Fangraphs cult. Brings to mind those creepy North Korean party conferences where nobody is allowed to stop clapping for the Dear Leader.
Your attitude reminds me of the “dear leader”!
Complaining about your unpopularity and calling your detractors names is more of an American dictator thing.
Troll much?
I finally became a member this year after being a reader off and on for over 15 years. I’m sorry I took so long.
With regards to reduced revenue due to scrapers have you considered charging those of us who want a daily update of statistics to their google sheets? I ‘m not even sure if it at all possible but it would certainly be a service I would pay for. In any case I will always support you.
Proud member here. Love what you have done for me as a baseball fan since I was about 12 years old. Hoping the new business landscape can be conquered by you guys and Looking forward to more!
Let’s keep goin!
1) Buy yourself a FG. If already a member, skip to #2.
2) Buy FG memberships for your loved ones. Give the gift of FanGraphs!
Great site. My memberships among sports, news, and streaming sites change over time. Not so with FanGraphs. Keep up the good work.
Thank you David and all the fangraphs staff for creating the best sports site around and continuing to stoke the fires of actual journalism. The quality and focus is unrivaled. Wish I hadn’t let my autopay cc lapse so I lost my 2020 badge, but this is the best subscription I pay
I am not a member. Paying means paying for articles of which I am a sporadic reader. i use the database every day. The only other choice is BBref and its not nearly as good from a sorting ability
I read Dan’s zips stuff religiously during the offseason. I suspect I am not unique in that regard
Imo you arent monetizing your best assets. Your own data suggests that saying that only 2% of site visits are paid
I would make the core FG database subscription only and stop charging for articles only. That is, pay for database, articles are free. Im guessing two things would happen. Your 2% number would rise to 80-90% BUT visits to the database would drop sharply (although the pricing should be very low given the usage ).
Your recurring revenue would step function up and grow smartly from there – the obvious risk is that people abandon your database once it becomes subscription. I think that probability is extremely low
Second, I look at baseball trade values website which is an awesome tool. You’ve let them take what should be a core FG tool and steal it and monopolize it. You have the database, the mastermind (Dan) and the writers to make the FG version of BBTV. You’d mint money combining that with your database and zips
Third, with all that new money Id invest more heavily in prospect coverage (analytical and writers).
If that isn’t your cup of tea look at traffic for all your articles and make the really popular ones completely pay by the drink. Id probably pay by the drink for Dan’s zips stuff
TD, interesting suggestions all. But in the meantime, could you join? Money talks, as they say.
I would add that you should be looking hard at where your product offerings rank.
Are they #1 or #2 in the space? Database, articles projections, prospects, chats, roster resource, etc etc. are they driving people to subscribe.
Are you everywhere where you need to be in the baseball analytics space? I mentioned BBTV already. What about gambling? An analytics site ! Gambling! Shouldnt these be married up? Hire someone with some gambling know how and figure out how to leverage your data. What about game threads? baseball think factory used to run nightly game threads which gathered up the best minds. This is a good way to enhance brand (and gambling!).
Horizontal integration ( NFL, NHL etc). Baseball reference does this. Is there money in it to leverage the database knowhow ? i dont see it as a good strategy but maybe theres money in it
Bottom line is that your database is one of two public databases. Make money off it – lots of sites have people that write articles
have you considered becoming a member?
I believe that adding sports betting content would tank their subscription rate enough to tank the entire site. A very large percentage of us are members here because there is so much content and data without any inkling of gambling.
In doubt that very much and you could easily rope off the gambling area for the sensitive souls who cant stand seeing it
talk about totally misunderstanding what makes fangraphs an amazing website
This sounds like a great way for the site to make zero money. Everyone who only uses the site for data would just have an AI scrape the site for what they want so as to avoid paying. In other words, this sounds like a great way to get access to the articles you want without having to pay or switch databases.
If stealing someones work is your way of not wanting to pay for something you use, then my suggestions for how to run their business probably isnt for you.
People here should stop pretending they are paying for the articles. You are paying for the data. They admit in their article that only 2% of the people who use that data are paying
Why they choose to let that continue is a business decision I don’t understand but Im sure they have their reasons and they must consider those reasons to be valid
I’m paying for the articles. I’ve downloaded data from FanGraphs exactly one time. Unless you’re doing historical research you might as well just pull from Savant. The only advantage to using FanGraphs is that you don’t have to do the math yourself. It’s funny that you talk about how few people pay for the articles in the comments to an article, where the only people that will see it are people who pay for the articles.
Been on the journey since the beginning. Thanks for 26 years. Glad to support.
Enjoy the site a lot. I’d love if the download/filter features added in stuff about how a player was acquired by a team/became a pro. IE: drafted/round/overall pick #, IFA/year, ideally bonus included too. I’d love to see what guys the Jays drafted/IFA signed are in the majors right now – ie: if no trades/releases/free agency existed which teams would be damn good or suck – we can guess, but it’d be fun to filter to it. Using BR I can see the Jays have historically sucked in round 4 and had WOW luck in round 5 (Dave Stieb, Pat Hentgen, Michael Young, Mike Timlin) but I’d like to see that here instead.
Yes I really want to read how each prospect was acquired in tne prospect lists when they were traded. Sometimes it is mentioned in blurb but seems kind of easy to automate ?
Proud member here. I have been a nearly daily reader for years and years. Keep up the great work, all.
As long as we’re requesting features for members, I would love to have an option off my profile that let me see articles I commented on recently.
Someone else suggested this recently in the comments and I couldn’t agree more. I think it would help bring real users back to articles multiple times and hopefully bump up that 2% number David referenced.
FG is WordPress-based so I think a relatively simple filter hook could be applied that links to a comment author’s content.
Strongly seconding (thirding?) this feature!
I second this. It would also be nice if it were easier to see the newest comments on an article, including replies. I enjoy reading the comments and when an article has 50+ comments and I come back a few hours later to see how the conversation(s) have progressed, it would be nice to find those new comments easier than having to scroll through and look at the individual time stamps.
I see no mention of the excellent women’s quarter zip, the Fangraphs feature introduced in early 2026 that has had the most positive direct impact on my life.
FanGraphs 4 Lyfe
FanGraphs forever, Wiggum never.
I cannot imagine an Internet without FanGraphs. Happy to support y’all as long as you keep doing this wonderful thing.
I subscribe to 6 or 7 sites, but I am a die hard fan of one team. I don’t play fantasy baseball. I mainly want my team’s top prospect lists from this site. I love the detail you put into those, but would prefer updates more frequently – ideally at year end, before the season starts, after the drafts, and after the deadline. You could put together a top 1000 prospect list easily with all your info, and update it monthly, even if it wasn’t fully baked. I think the masses would join for that. Just trying to help.
I know this is just a suggestion so I don’t want to be harsh, but what you’re asking for is actually a lot more work than you seem to realize. Updating the top 100 monthly means you not only have to get updated looks at a ton of different players but also be able to contextualize those updates with respect to all other prospects. Updating the team lists 4+ times per season would also be a huge endeavor: even if you only touch, say, 10% of write-ups in a given update, you’re still talking about thousands of extra man-hours per year, not to mention the inevitable drop in quality of the reports under such a workload.
This place is a joy and a refuge from the BS that is everything else.
Could charging for access to the database help? Better human authentication? We need to make the bots pay! Google is summarizing articles and data seemingly without a cent going back to fangraphs
100% happy to pay for ad free fangraphs. Here’s hoping we at least double the number of users doing so this year!
The thought of Fangraphs using AI hadn’t even crossed my mind because, well, the content continues not to be enshittified and everyone working here seem not to be the type to desire enshittification.
I like to pay good people to do good things. Consider my membership locked in
I very much appreciate everyone’s hard work and contribution to FanGraphs. It is the best baseball website bar none. Happy to be a member.
-Two things are likely happening here. First, we’re seeing a lot more bot traffic, which often doesn’t register as the sort of browser session that advertisers care about. We estimate that at least 60% of all traffic coming to FanGraphs is from non-human sources, including web crawlers, AI bots, and scrapers.
If ad services can detect it is a bot like an AI web crawler, couldn’t Fangraphs in theory do the same and prevent access to the site? It keeps server costs down and then also has the benefit of essentially stopping AI overviews from being updated that prevent site traffic correct?
Dave, i’m a very proud original member. I am actually willing to pay a bit more since I get so much use from this. I donate 4 figures a year to my local public radio and I feel fangraphs is just as valuable in my life. I would be willing to give more, have you considered adding higher membership tiers where I can opt into paying more, in exchange for some nominal goodie? Baumann and Clemens will write a headline about you, Szym will sign a picture of his cat, etc?
I’d be happy to give anyone a signed picture of a cat, and you can even choose the cat.
CatGraphs with Dan Szymborski:
dan, can we do a 1 for 1 catgraph swap? i have a grouchy orange lady on her last legs (18 this year!) and a stupid fat tortie for your choosing
Is Mittens signing the picture of Mittens or is Dan signing the picture of Mittens?
My Handsome Pete has terrible penmanship…
I love this comment!
Thanks for the update.
“We estimate that at least 60% of all traffic coming to FanGraphs is from non-human sources, including web crawlers, AI bots, and scrapers.”
This is the edge of my technical knowledge, but while you can’t stop non-human from sending requests to FanGraphs, have you looked at blocking these request so they don’t return data reducing the load on your servers and perhaps over time reducing the bot requests when they don’t work.
Second, have you checked that you aren’t losing money on memberships? I worked for a well-known site whose revenue came from ads. People, both internal and external, frequently asked about an ad-free membership and we found it was cost prohibitive — the most frequent users would pay $50-100/year to not see ads, but those were the customers to whom we served ads the most and they were worth far more than that. I autopay my FG subscription and don’t even think about it, but I suspect your top 2% users — the ones who are members — cost you a ton of ad revenue.
I work as a Director of Ecommerce. I can attest that bot traffic to our sites have gone up significantly due to various AI bots. However, bot traffic is not necessarily bad traffic. Want to gain organic search/AI visibility and subsequent human traffic resulting from Google or ChatGPT inquiries? Then those entities need access to crawl your website via bots. However, we’ve implemented rate limiting to better manage the server resources those bots take up.
I’m also assuming when the say “60% of all traffic” they mean 60% of pageviews, not 60% of sessions or users. A resource website like this must have a gazillion unique pages. A bot could take days consuming every page and filtered subset of pages on this website.
As someone who has never felt the need to sign-up for a subscription, I’m content to be in the 98% and deal with some ads. But over the past several months the ads have gotten worse and worse; more obtrusive, causing a larger performance hit, and occasionally making mobile browsing impossible. I know part of the business model nowadays is to make the ad-including experience unpleasant enough users pay to make them go away, but I’m far more likely to either put FG behind the ad-blocker, or just have its content summed up by an AI tool.
you should buy a membership and support the amazing people who run this site and write for this site
It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Yes. I want to visit the website and not have its ad-content slow it to a point it is unusable. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request of a website which, by their own admission, gets most of their revenue from serving ads to visitors.
Honestly “your ads sometimes makes the site crash” is probably way more useful feedback for their team than the same four users trying to badger everyone to subscribe.
The article states they get 80% of their revenue from members.
Comments from individuals with your attitude is why fangraphs should require a paid membership to login for any access at all. The tiered membership idea suggested by some could be a good idea for different features, perhaps. A quality product requires money and effort and moochers should not be allowed in my opinion, period. I do feel for the elderly and truly poor with that last comment for sure, but folks like yourself need to pay. !
If fangraphs went to a subscription only model to access all content, I guarantee that would be the demise of this site.
I’ve been around since fangraphs began. I would have been a top percentile reader from then til about 2018. Even though it was a tighter nit community back then, the community was way more open to and interested in productive discourse, teaching others, and imagination.. This place has become pretty unwelcoming to contrasting perspectives for a while now. And, subscribers have become a collection of cranky, stagnant know-it-alls who prefer this place’s exclusivity because it makes themselves feel smart and important. That’s why this place struggle’s financially. This is on the community itself because it’s how the community prefers to be unless it’s time to beg for support to keep it alive.
Yes, the quality of content has diminished since the days of Dave Cameron. Innovation has blinded creativity. Focus and emphasis of the sport’s micro events has far surpassed its high level events, values, and principles. And, the gambling comments are true, in that it’s a logical direction to go. Whether you agree or not, for years, I’ve seen the statistical pursuits of fangraphs fall way more in line with the business of the game compared to the love of the game. That’s why the content here is being poached so much. It’s because that’s what it’s most useful for.
And lastly, the snarky arrogance of the inner circle of subscribers here should probably go away. It’s old news and doesn’t do any good for expanding the reader base and new perspective that this place needs to survive and hopefully thrive.
My advice would be to pull your heads out of the sand and start thinking and working creatively as to how you can activate and spread the love of the game through the massive collection of resources this place has developed and compiled over two decades. Excite me about the nature of the game. Put away the microscopes and digital calipers and think big picture discoveries that raise interesting questions about baseball. Take a break from the solutions and implementation based fixation.
I’ll accept my several dozen down votes and continue waiting to see what happens.
I join those who recommend tiered memberships. I’m a 90%tile user according to the delightful walk off report, but I only use a small fraction of the site’s robust features (primarily player pages and fantasy articles). A lower price point for users like me might get more funding in the door.
And since I know my non-member fantasy league mates read this site for free, I’d love for them to pay $25-$40/year to compete with me, or for a paywall to block them completely 😈
My membership here is absolutely one of the best parts of the internet AND my baseball experience, and I’m so grateful for all the work you all do to continue to make that true.
Most value for your dollar on the internet. Thanks as always, David and team!
Happy to be a member. Your site has helped me not only understand and appreciate the game better, but also help viewers on my YT channel understand as well.
Thank you so much for the update! I’ve been a happy subscriber for 11-12 years ;0)
You need to team up with Ryan Goins for a “Commins and Goins” baseball centric podcast
i was a shameful adblocking unpaid user for some time. i became a member after cancelling my spotify subscription and reevaluating how much value the blog articles alone add to my life. while i miss having music on tap, i think fangraphs deserves the love, and the money, more than a streaming service that, sigh, just sucks, man.
i don’t even play fantasy, or dig super deep into the data fangraphs collects. i surely don’t maximize my subscription’s affordances. i have enough numbers to play with during the day. i am just here to read the funny ballknowers talking ball, and to rejoice in the knowledge that no, i am not uniquely and irreparably broken in my fascination with this sport. it’s the people that make this site tick, and the people who are its beating heart. surely that is worth something, even in this miserable, demoralizing, dehumanizing mess.
good, free content is dead. nothing gold can stay. long live good, reasonably priced content. long live fangraphs.
Appreciate this article as always. If there ends up being a lock out/loss of games is there some sort of inter active/fantasy game you could come up with to keep us interested and coming back? Maybe something using all player’s stats or including the Negro league stats. Just a thought.
i will never cancel this membership and I will pay more if you need me to
Subscribe and support FanGraphs!!!!!
I love the editorial work on this site, the engagement of the members, and the clarity and consistency of the charting. Thanks for all y’all do. The happiest membership I have.
I find myself more and more angry with people who won’t spend money for quality content/reporting via the internet, and then assume the free crap they get off of whatever website of choice for them is the truth and the whole truth. $80 is a steal for the level of content and data FG provides
I became a member during the pandemic. I was someone who always visited and when I heard about the urgency at the site, joined. Will be a member for life. I love your integrity around AI and as a high school teacher, appreciate your stance. Keep on being the best baseball website out there and if ya need to jack up membership a few bucks, it’s worth it. I don’t need a mug, just some great content!
First and foremost, thank you for committing to non-generative AI prose. In the age of slop it is getting harder and harder to find quality writing, let alone articles written by real humans.
With that said, I do believe AI could help FG, just not in the way you described. You have 21 years of knowledge. You have an excellent database. If you used AI to retrieve, not generate, you’d be doing something different than your policy. It could help writers fact check, explore ideas for new articles quickly and sift through the vast asset you own. It surfaces what you’ve already published, nothing invented. It could be for staff first, members later. If you add a natural language layer, more casual members can get the full benefits of one of the best statistical query tools in baseball. Importantly, no Misiorowski strikeout rate is hallucinated. It’s only retrieving what already exists.
Yes, Gemini can steal Made’s report. It can’t steal the way the writers of FanGraphs think about baseball and from a partial crawl, it can’t reliably link back to the origin source. A tool built on the archive could.
Keep the people reading FanGraphs. But make more people use FanGraphs.
I love this site. Thanks for keeping us involved and informed.
Well… chatGPT introduced me to Fangraphs, so it’s not always bad
Been a member for a decade, and am hoping for a decade more. If anyone reason is on the fence, consider this a sign to get a membership, it’s the best subscription money can buy.
Been a member for a decade, and am hoping to go (at least) a decade more. If any non-members are reading this, consider it a sign to finally become a member. Fangraphs only sticks around if we pay for it, and it’s the best subscription money can buy.
Best membership service I gleefully pay for. THANKS FANGRAPHS!
Just became a member after years of using the site as a non-member. Not sure if this is the right place for this but will we ever get minor league leaderboards on the app? The app has come very far from where it was a couple years ago but it does irk me that this is missing.
I member!
These numbers kinda blew my mind. Didn’t realize just how big of an impact that ad-blockers, bots visitors, scrapers, etc. had on Fangraphs and just how dependent Fangraphs is on membership today. And how members only make up 2% of real-life visitors to the site. Crazy.
Now that gets me thinking about sites similar to Fangraphs (i.e. sites that are dependent on membership) … is that 2% kind of normal? Or is that super low/high? I have no idea.
If someone asked me, “How many subscribers make up ‘real-life human’ web traffic to Fangraphs?”
I’d probably say, like, 50%.
Obviously WAY off. Lol.
Proud member, who’s also part of the public media ecosystem. Meaning, I truly get how membership really matters, and all the other stuff we say on public radio fundraisers. You’re doing things the right way, and your loyal reader/subscribers benefit. Here’s to continued success in these difficult times.
Amazing stuff, as always, FanGraphs. Actually, I first registered as a member in 2024 to try it out. The free stuff I accessed was so informative that I felt compelled to finally become a full-time member in 2025.
Keep up the great work, you guys!
Would pay more. But I realize the current members value the site so much more than potential members and if the subscription is priced to where the current members value the site, then it would likely deter new members from joining. Anyways, glad to be a member and we’re here to support the site. Love what ya’ll do!
Had a recent job transition so had to pause my renewal while our budget was tight, and can honestly say my first purchase after accepting a new job was to renew my membership! (Coincidentally I’ve also dropped to the dredges of my fantasy league during this time, so I’m looking at this as an investment in the home stretch, ha)
aw man just now realizing my “member since 2016” flair went away 🙁
Love Fangraphs and all the writers. Thank you. Will always be a member. A few ideas … Add a message board section. Fangraphs has such a great comments section; a message board would be an extension of that and drive additional traffic. Charge teams (kind of a lot) for all the job postings if not already. This is a highly valuable place for them to recruit talent. They should pay for it just like any other job board.
Best site gets even better
Thanks for the update, David. I have been a member for 5 years, and started listening to Effectively Wild even before that. Unfortunately, I have mostly stopped listening to the podcast as the political views of Meg and Ben are not worth enduring for me. Meg’s tirade against Clayton Kershaw a few years ago was enough for me. She ignored his baseball contributions and his vast charitable and humanitarian efforts to harshly and repeatedly criticize his religious beliefs. They are entitled to their opinions and I appreciate their intelligence, but there are so many other podcasts and forums to follow sports without partisan political opinions. My views are likely a small minority of Fangraphs subscribers, but I don’t think I am a significant outlier compared to many baseball fans. My subscription auto renewed this year and maybe I will renew again for the great content on the site. But possibly some ex-subscribers or reluctant subscribers have similar experiences to mine.
Thanks for your contributions and the contributions of the many great writers on the site.
I share your views as well. I was in the same boat in terms of Meg on the podcast, it’s definitely taken a hit in quality as she’s much more emotionally charged than the previous hosts. I do still listen for Ben though, one of the best in the business and so thought out. The recent episode about the Giant’s pride night is much easier to listen to if you go into it with a comedic mindset.
Yes. The political agenda and “groupthink” is hard and heavy on this site and minimizes the positives. If it were ever to be a little less hateful towards different views, it would be a move in the right direction.
Sorry to hear that only 2% of the visitors are subscribers. Have always loved your content and in 2026 it seems better than ever.
You guys run a great site with plenty of value built in. Happy to be a member. This would be an interesting discussion, if it could actually happen at some point at an industry conference or something: how different sites manage to make money and provide content without being completely or majority paywalled. I think you guys have a good balance but would be curious to hear how other sites arrive at their formulas.
Happy to be a long time member. Great work FG team!
I really enjoy my Fangraphs membership. Thanks for all the baseball knowledge. 👍
Fangraphs really is the last great site on the internet. The features added this year have been incredible and well worth the cost of membership. Still hoping we can see bat speed, pull air and other statcast stats available in the player page custom dashboard options sometime soon. I love having all the stats that I think are important all in one place for a player! Keep up the great work everyone.
Thanks fangraphs for being in my life since 2016, sorry english is not my first language, but I speak baseball, and fangraphs it’s my bible.
Thank you very much for explicitly stating the editorial stance on generative AI, it’s a relief to see this align with my personal feelings and makes me all the happier to continue my membership support through thick and thin.
I really appreciate the honest update. I once asked ChatGPT a question, and when it sourced FanGraphs I quickly said “nope.”
I became a member coming out of the pandemic because I love this site. The app has gotten better, though articles still randomly cut off the end of some paragraphs. Such as “that’s a staggering amount of mi…….” in this article. But it doesn’t bother me too much because my mother taught me to use context clues.
This is the best sports site there is, IMO, with an obvious The Athletic nod where there is probably a much greater budget. As long as I can afford it, I’ll be a FanGraphs member.
Here for the last ten years as a paid member, and will likely keep at it. However, I used to throw the membership fees at you and say “take my money” but now at a higher rate membership is more at par value for me, so the fat has been cut, as I view the world.
I mean, we strive for efficiency!
Thanks for the update David!
Fangraphs is still THE premier baseball website bar none. And I am happy to be a paying member!
y’all gotta push some of the new features in the nav bar and/or figure out a better navigation experience! I learned about so many new features from this article
Congratulations David and the rest of the team. I’d love to buy this website a beer now that it’s legal.
When does Trade Value ELO go live?
Showing defunct ATM https://www.fangraphs.com/tools/crowdsourced-trade-value
This membership is the best money I spend all year.