I'm sure they all have day jobs. You have to decide if you're running a business or a hobby. They decided they were running a business while still promoting themselves as normal guys. IMO they'd be better off making their content free and relying on ad revenue, but that is my DIY ethos coming through.
In addition to moving rankings and ADP behind a pay wall, they also had a Black Friday sale to pump up subs, which could be an indication of money problems.
Weird that the forums are still open and going on as if nothing has happened. Whatever the story it is not clear enough for a staff person to post an update.
I'm not going to say anything's impossible, but you pretty much can't support yourself in fantasy football on ad revenue. You just can't. Not since the dot-com bubble burst. The forerunner to FBGs used to be ad supported, but then when that was no longer viable, they switched to a subscription model. (From what I hear, everyone told them it would never work; people simply didn't pay for content on the internet back in 2001 or 2002.)
Since then, how many fantasy football sites of note have been ad supported? FBGs charges a subscription. 4for4 charges a subscription. PFF charges a subscription. Rotoviz charges a subscription. Dynasty Football Warehouse charges a subscription. Under the Helmet charges a subscription. ESPN Insider charges a subscription. Rotoworld charges a subscription. Rotopass sells a single subscription that will get you into multiple subscription sites. Numberfire, Rotowire, RotoGrinders, The Fake Football... hell, even PFR supplements its revenue by selling sponsorships to player pages. I'm sure there are plenty of others that I'm forgetting.
I'm not saying a site can't get by on ads. FF Today is ad supported. I believe Fantasy Sharks is, too. Dynasty Nerds is. But I know from experience that it's a tough row to hoe. When I was at DynastyRankings.net, we planned on supporting our site through partnerships with DFS and through Google Ads. DFS, unfortunately, was about two years away from takeoff, and Google Ads didn't even provide enough to cover hosting fees. If you're just looking to put something on the internet and let people read it, like a personal blog with higher production values, then ad-supported can make sense. But there's a reason why most of the major players are pushing subscriptions.
I can say that pretty much no one in the space is getting rich. But the nice thing about Footballguys is that, while they're not paying a ton, they pay enough that I feel like my time is valued. That's a pretty powerful thing. And I know the guys at DLF value and appreciate their staff and want to be able to provide them with the same- something to show that their time and effort and talent is appreciated.
I don't think anyone's trying to quit their job or anything. Almost everyone at every site has a day job. But DLF is a business, not a hobby, and part of that is maximizing revenue and paying its staff.
For DLF, and FBGs, and all of these other sites that aren't just glorified personal blogs paying people with "exposure", the question becomes how do you maximize revenue. You need some free stuff to attract traffic. At the same time, the free stuff you offer should serve to convert visitors to subscribers. You want to give people a taste of why they want to subscribe, but if you give them too much then they no longer have any reason to.
FBGs has its rankings behind the paywall for a reason; the rankings are one of the most valued items they offer, and gaining access to those rankings drives a lot of subscriptions. DLF had its rankings outside of the paywall for years, which I appreciated, but I've always felt that it was a poor business choice, since it removed one of the most compelling reasons for people to subscribe. Same with the ADP data. That's a huge value-add. Plenty of people would be willing to pay for it. You're losing out on revenue by not asking them to.
In many ways, FBGs and the other seasonal sites have it easier in terms of deciding what's free and what's pay. FBGs just makes everything free before June 15th, and everything pay after that. That way there's plenty of great free content for people to see what we're all about, but if they want access to the really hot, time-sensitive stuff during peak drafting season, they need to subscribe.
In dynasty, there's not really a "peak drafting season". It's a year-round hobby with various different peaks and valleys. So it makes sense that DLF would be experimenting with what combination provided the highest-quality free services without eating into subscriber totals. I don't expect them to get it right on the first try. That's the sort of thing they'd tweak and fiddle with until they find something that works for them.
As for the Black Friday Sale, I'm obviously not privy to their financial situation, but I wouldn't read too much into it. Black Friday Sales are so common because they work; sales are tremendous tools for driving revenue. When they work, they tap into a value-conscious market that would otherwise never have subscribed in the first place, creating a new revenue stream that doesn't eat into any of your existing ones.
But sales only work if consumers find their rarity to be credible. We see that a lot on the app store, where some apps bounce back and forth between $.99 and $2.99 so often that anyone interested in buying knows to just wait a couple weeks until it's back down to $.99.
You need to make a credible threat that the sale is one-time-only so that you don't wind up tanking your revenue outside of the sale period. And the easiest way to make that threat credible is to have that sale at the one time of the year when everyone else is having sales. That signals to the consumer that they shouldn't bother waiting around for random price drops in the spring, unless they're willing to wait all the way to next November.
The fact that the sale coincided with the move behind the paywall is just savvy business sense. Any time you take something that was free and start charging for it, customers are going to be annoyed. An easy way to smooth over that annoyance to some extent is to offer an immediate price discount.
Anyway, like I said, I'm obviously not privy to their books, but as far as I know everything's going great over at DLF. And I'm glad about that, because they're great guys and gals and they do great work.
by HEADBANGER » Fri Jan 01, 2016 2:15 pm
