FanNation | The Republic of Sport
Want to get rich? Start a sports myspace clone. Fan Nation has 1500 registered users and a total of 1200 blog posts in the last 140 days and (according to the Sports Business Journal) Time Warner just paid $25 million for a 40% share of the site. As a non-controlling share, that means they have a valuation of probably $80m or more. Or about $53,000/registered user.
How do I know how many users? Interestingly, the site was built on Ruby on Rails, which means that each user, blog post, comment etc. is given a sequential number.
I’ve heard rumors that Rails won’t scale, but with just 1,500 users it shouldn’t really be a problem.
Between this and the ArmchairGM sale last week (for $2m, though that appears to be more of a technology sale), I can’t really grok the prices these sites are going for.
Baseball-Reference.com Play Index - Baseball-Reference PI
Over the last six months, I’ve been building database tables, writing code, running tests and wrestling with the eight million plays from 100,000 games that the great folks at RetroSheet.org have recreated.
The B-R PI puts a friendly face on this data and allows you to search through it in new and interesting ways.
This also signals a change in the business model for Baseball-Reference.com. This is being offered as a subscription feature rather than a free feature for all users. I believe you will get your money’s worth as a subscriber, and while I naturally want a salary, you will also see us plowing the money back into the site in increased infrastructure, employees, and new and interesting data and features.
These tools are just the start and I suspect they will be only a quarter of the featureset that the PI has next Christmas, at least that is my intention.
We are just launching today and while the tools all work and you can sign up for the service, there are a few loose ends that need to be tied up like commercial and organizational subscriptions, and subscriptions for large page sponsors and the beta testers. Some of these will be tied up in the next week and some may take a little bit longer.
I will update this blog as new features or improvements come on-line.
Don Drysdale Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com
I’ve just rolled out a new feature on Baseball-Reference.com. You can now convert a player’s batting or pitching statline into a neutral setting or any setting you chose from Coors circa 2000 to Dodger Stadium in 1968.
To get started just go to a player’s page and click on “Neutralize Stats” within the pitching or batting toolbars. This converts the player’s stats to a neutral 162-game 750 run setting. From there, boxes allowing you to select a year, a league, and a team (or a neutral park) appear. The conversion is pretty quick and is performed in place. Clicking on “Return to Actual Stats” will put the real stats back into place.
The B-R PI is close to launching. The 750-run context will be free to all users, but the ability to convert to individual parks will be part of the subscription service. Until then (or maybe until after Christmas), both will be free.
Also, a big thanks to Justin Kubatko, who did 95% of the programming and all the mathematics to make this work.
The idea here is thanks to Bill James, with a couple of tweaks here or there. Description of Conversion Process
Baseball Books and Sports Books - BaseballBooks.net
I wanted to put out a plug for another project I have my hand in (though Greg Spira is the driving force). Over 2400 sports books and dvd’s are listed on what we are hoping will become an exhaustive list of all baseball books. Greg has his picks for best books of 2006 at the bottom of the front page.