Why We’re Moving Our Articles to a Metered Paywall

Beginning today, we’ll be moving our articles on both FanGraphs and RotoGraphs to a metered paywall. Readers will get 10 free articles per rolling 30 days; if you go over that and would like to continue reading, you’ll be required to become a FanGraphs Member.

Our player pages, leaderboards, and other data tools, as well as RosterResource, The Board, and our glossary, will remain available for unlimited use to all of our readers.

FanGraphs Membership now includes:

• Ad-free browsing
• Unlimited FanGraphs and RotoGraphs articles
• One-click data exports
• Customizable player page dashboards
• Dark mode and classic mode page styles
• Leaderboard custom reports
• Optional removal of photos on the homepage

When I think about where FanGraphs sits in today’s media landscape, there are a lot of things that make us an outlier. We are a 100% independent small business that has 14 full-time employees. Everyone who does any work for FanGraphs receives compensation. We don’t focus on chasing clicks. We don’t participate in SEO schemes. We don’t work with sportsbooks or gambling entities. We are a baseball site staffed by baseball experts for baseball fans and experts.

Unfortunately, we’re still very much reliant on programmatic advertising dollars, which you may remember being the focus of a post of mine earlier this year. Whether because of the 2020 pandemic, the 2022 lockout, 2023 search engine changes, or 2024 changes in ad tech, advertising revenue is unpredictable and unreliable. It makes business planning and hiring challenging, and leaves us vulnerable to revenue fluctuations that have nothing to do with the quality of our content or site tools. It isn’t transparent, its presence on the site creates a poor user experience that’s difficult for us to quality control, and it exploits your data to take revenue out of the hands of small publishers and put it in the coffers of the largest, most profitable companies in the world.

FanGraphs turns 20 years old next year. It has taken decades of work from dozens of people who have given their days, nights, weekends, and vacation time to build this site. For an independent single-sport site, the range and depth of content available at FanGraphs is truly special. We hope that these changes will help us further secure the site’s future long-term. Thank you to all of our Members for helping us get this far. Every time we have faced a decline in advertising revenue over the last five years, it has been our Members who have sustained FanGraphs and helped it grow. And if you aren’t yet a Member, there’s no need to wait until you hit your 10 article limit — you can become one now and help us continue to improve the site, just as we have these past 19 years.

Please let us know if you have any questions, either by leaving a comment below or by emailing support@fangraphs.com.