June 14, 2013 at 1:38 PM
2013 Annual Drive - Help Keep SoxProspects Free!
Dear readers,
We’re asking
for your help to help raise $3,000 to help keep SoxProspects.com free for another
year. We've kept the site 100%
free to the public for just shy of ten years now, and we hope to do so for the
foreseeable future. As you may have also noticed, we continue to expand and
improve our content, including new features, everyday coverage, first-hand
analysis, improved layouts, and a new forum host. Unfortunately, costs continue
to pile up with these expanded features.
As we've done over the past five seasons, we're reaching out to the
community for donations to help keep the site free for everyone. Donations help
cover site costs in two primary areas: (1) first-hand coverage costs for
scouting and player columns; and (2) web hosting fees (including forum hosting
costs).
Your
donations help us travel to Ft. Myers in the spring to cover spring training
and in the fall to cover the Instructional League. They also help cover the costs of travelling
to Pawtucket, Portland, Salem, Greenville, and Lowell games for scouting and
first-hand coverage. In terms of web
hosting costs, the site resides on four servers, each with their own set of
annual fees. We anticipate that our
costs in these two areas will exceed $10,000 in 2013. While we make limited funds from online
advertising revenue, we simply don’t make enough to cover all of our
costs.
In each
of the last four years, several readers made donations ranging from $5 to $200
to help defray these costs. Thanks so much to everyone who chipped in!
One
thing I’d like to note is that while we've remained free, other similar
baseball sites charge for content. For example, Scout.com costs $90 per year,
Baseball America charges $66 per year, and Baseball Prospectus costs $39.95 per
year. I think those sites are great in their own right, and are absolutely worthy
of subscriptions. I’d also like to think we’d be worthy of comparable rates if
we ever decide to go that route, but we've decided that we want to keep the
site free for as long as we can. Donations from regular readers go a long way
towards making that happen.
Ultimately,
through draft signing season, we are asking our readers to donate what they can
to help keep SoxProspects.com free to the public. If you want to donate, first,
we would like to thank you profusely – it’s truly appreciated. To donate, visit
our DONATIONS
PAGE. All payments are secured through PayPal, although you don’t need
a PayPal account to contribute. All of the donations will go directly to our
costs – none of the owners have taken out a dollar of profit out of the site's
tills over the last six years (obviously we’re not doing this to get rich!).
Last, to
any of our regular readers that are not members of the SoxProspects Forum,
please sign up! We’d love to get some new members in on the discussion and some
new ideas floated around during our peak season! And to all of our current
forum members out there, don’t be afraid to start new discussion threads –
especially threads on specific players. It would be great to get more
player-centric discussion going on the board in addition to the other topics
already being discussed.
As
always, thanks to all of our readers for visiting the site and all of our forum
members for posting!
Sincerely,
SoxProspects.com