July 15, 2016 at 9:00 AM
2016 Annual Drive - Help Keep SoxProspects Free!
Dear readers,
We're asking for your help to raise $7,500 to keep SoxProspects.com free for another year. We have been able kept the site 100% free to the public for almost 13 years now, and we hope to do so for the foreseeable future. As we scout dozens of games first-hand each year, travel costs pile up. Other site costs often go up on an annual basis as well, and our ad revenue only covers a portion of them. So 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 travel costs for scouting and player columns; and (2) general IT costs (hardware, software, internet costs, hosting fees).
Your donations help us travel to Fort Myers in March to cover spring training and in the fall to cover the Instructional League. They also help cover the costs of travelling to affiliate games for scouting and regular first-hand coverage. We anticipate that our total costs will approach $15,000 in 2016. While we make limited funds from online advertising revenue, your donations help us ensure we can cover those costs.
In recent years, several readers made donations ranging from $5 to $100 to help defray these costs. We even had a handful of big donations over that amount, and ultimately raised about $7,000 in 2015. Thanks so much to everyone who chipped in!
One thing that we'd like to note is that while we've remained free, other prospect sites charge for content. For example, Baseball America charges $66 per year and Baseball Prospectus costs $54.99 per year. We think those sites are great in their own right, and are absolutely worthy of subscriptions. We’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 – while we reimburse ourselves for travel and IT costs, none of the owners have taken any actual profit distributions out of the site's tills over the last nine 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,
The SoxProspects.com Team