Sports Reference Blog

Surf Sports Reference Faster – Buy Ad-Free Access on all sites

Posted by sean on June 17, 2014

We like to keep our sites really, really fast and obsess over as many performance details as we can. Unfortunately one area where we have little control is in the performance of our advertisements as companies of our size typically outsource this task. We rely on ads for 85% of our revenue, but we are aware that some of these ads degrade our service.

We have decided to launch a new ad-free service. It's available on all of our sites and for $20 you can surf all of our sites ad-free. To sign up see the "AD FREE" link that now appears at the top of every page.

adfree

Using this service will make your surfing experience much faster and will continue to support our site.

Sign up via Baseball-Reference.com

A note for Ad Block users.

We are not doing anything to bar Ad Block users from the site or anything nefarious like randomly jumbling the stats, but once every two weeks we will show you a short note reminding you that we rely on ads for most of our revenue and will encourage you to whitelist the site or subscribe to our ad-free service. I know many Ad Block users will find this offensive (as you've already profanely e-mailed us).

We are following Ad Block's own guidelines on how to implement this note and have created what we view as a relatively mild, intermittent reminder that this site costs money and simply would not exist without advertising revenue. If even this biweekly reminder is too much for you, it might be best if we part ways.

I apologize that our original implementation had a bug that caused some users to see the Ad Block note over and over. This was not our intent and we apologize as this was a very disruptive implementation. Please report any behavior like this to us and we will fix it.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2014 at 11:36 am and is filed under Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Hockey-Reference.com, Olympics at S-R, Pro-Football-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “Surf Sports Reference Faster – Buy Ad-Free Access on all sites”

  1. sean Says: June 17th, 2014 at 2:29 pm

    bump

  2. Alan Jacobs Says: June 18th, 2014 at 6:38 am

    So how do I buy...???

  3. Mike Lynch Says: June 18th, 2014 at 8:43 am

    Hi Alan,

    Here is the link: http://www.baseball-reference.com/my/auth.cgi?do=ad_free_browsing

  4. RMc Says: June 23rd, 2014 at 8:30 am

    We...have created what we view as a relatively mild, intermittent reminder that this site costs money and simply would not exist without advertising revenue. If even this biweekly reminder is too much for you, it might be best if we part ways.

    The hell you say. I already paid my money to use this site; the last thing I need are reminders hectoring me for more money.

    "It might be best if we part ways," huh? Driving away customers is a pretty poor business model, pal.

  5. sean Says: June 23rd, 2014 at 9:51 am

    Rob,

    We certainly appreciate you subscribing to the Play Index, but that is a separate product from what we do on the freely available pages. Ad Block is a serious issue for us as we are probably 85% ad supported. All we are doing is asking you to whitelist or subscribe to ad free. It comes up once every two weeks. I don't feel that is too big of an imposition.

  6. Carl in Alaska Says: June 24th, 2014 at 7:26 pm

    Sean -- I got the popup you described for the first time today, even though I don't use Adblock. I did notice that some ads were blocked nevertheless. This is probably because I use Noscript with Firefox 30. The ads are not blocked when I use the Chrome browser.

    After some investigation, I determined that the ads come from doubleclick.net. I have now white-listed this site so the ads can appear.

    The ads are not particularly burdensome, and they are a minor price to pay to keep the current level of access to this site free. If it will help, I'll even click on an ad once in a while. Appreciate you folks trying to keep as much of the site as free as possible.

  7. Thomas Says: June 25th, 2014 at 7:26 pm

    I paid for the ad block and got the pop up message today. I guess I don't understand the logic behind telling me I can pay to have the ads removed but then shaming me for doing it. Why did you offer it if you aren't happy with me purchasing the thing you offered?

    I'm gonna use the site daily one way or the other. I want to support the site to keep it up and running. I thought paying for the ad block would be more helpful since I will probably never click on an ad.

  8. Thomas Says: June 27th, 2014 at 3:07 pm

    And at the same time I still have ads. So I paid $25 to not have ads, got yelled at for doing, then still have ads. Just for trying to be helpful to a site I love.

  9. Mike Lynch Says: July 14th, 2014 at 4:20 pm

    Hi Thomas,

    That should not be happening and we apologize for any glitches/inconvenience. Are you still experiencing any issues? If so, please let us know at [email protected]