Now, with baseball indefinitely shut down because of the coronavirus, they’re trying to survive, The Boston Globe reports.
“It’s been very stressful time to run a business,” said Forman, who owns Baseball-Reference.com, part of the Sports Reference family of sites. “You’re trying to do right by your employees and their families. Nobody saw this coming.”
Dierkes is the founder and owner of MLBTradeRumors.com, a site that reports on the latest transactions and gossip from around the game. Walk around a major league clubhouse close to the trade deadline in July and you’ll find many of the players and most of the reporters frantically checking the site’s phone app for the latest news.
Outside of MLB.com, MLB Trade Rumors and Baseball Reference are the two most popular baseball sites on the web. In normal times, MLBTR would be getting an average of 1 million page views a day. That’s down by more than 40 percent, and advertising revenue has dropped by 50 percent.“It’s a double whammy,” said Dierkes, who has three full-time employees. “It’s devastating for the business.”
The same is generally true for Baseball Reference, which during the season generates 1.5 million page views daily. The site, which started in 2000 as a hobby for Forman, has grown into a company with 11 full-time employees.
Baseball Reference is the industry standard for looking up statistics, box scores, and the other minutia of baseball. Any time you read a story with some mention of statistics, traditional or advanced, it’s likely the writer went to Baseball Reference to look it up.
Forman also created sites for the NFL, NBA, NHL, professional soccer, NCAA basketball, and NCAA football. That traffic has helped Sports Reference stay afloat.“Overall we’re holding fairly steady,” he said. “Baseball traffic is down, but the NFL offseason took on new meaning with Tom Brady [leaving the Patriots]. The Michael Jordan documentary [on ESPN] was a big win for us, too.
But Forman is leaving one open position unfilled and shuttered the company’s summer intern program. The drop in Web advertising hit hard, but he’s making payroll.
“If the NFL plays in September, we’ll be fine,” he said. “If not …”
The same is generally true for Baseball Reference, which during the season generates 1.5 million page views daily. The site, which started in 2000 as a hobby for Forman, has grown into a company with 11 full-time employees.
Baseball Reference is the industry standard for looking up statistics, box scores, and the other minutia of baseball. Any time you read a story with some mention of statistics, traditional or advanced, it’s likely the writer went to Baseball Reference to look it up.Forman also created sites for the NFL, NBA, NHL, professional soccer, NCAA basketball, and NCAA football. That traffic has helped Sports Reference stay afloat.“Overall we’re holding fairly steady,” he said. “Baseball traffic is down, but the NFL offseason took on new meaning with Tom Brady [leaving the Patriots]. The Michael Jordan documentary [on ESPN] was a big win for us, too.
But Forman is leaving one open position unfilled and shuttered the company’s summer intern program. The drop in Web advertising hit hard, but he’s making payroll.
“If the NFL plays in September, we’ll be fine,” he said. “If not …”
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