For the past six years, all of the revenue generated by this website came from banner ads. Though ad rates had been dropping prior to 2020, we’ve also seen an increase in traffic to make up for it. Free websites supported only by advertising seemed to be a thing of the past, but the model was working well enough for us.
Then COVID-19 hit, reducing ad rates significantly at Pro Football Rumors. In April, I wrote a post explaining our situation. I was heartened by the response in the comments. Many longtime readers urged me to create a way to support the websites directly.
Given the devastation of COVID-19, the status of a football website is not high on anyone’s priority list. We’ll continue covering NFL free agency, draft, and trade news with the same devotion we’ve had over the past six years. The free, ad-supported Pro Football Rumors remains unchanged. But for those regular readers who have the means and desire to support Pro Football Rumors directly, we’ve created Trade Rumors Front Office.
For $29.99 per year, Trade Rumors Front Office provides the following benefits:
- Ad-free, faster viewing experience on Pro Football Rumors, MLB Trade Rumors, Hoops Rumors, Pro Hockey Rumors, and in the Trade Rumors iOS/Android app. Please note that we may need about a week to perfect the removal of ads from the app. The ad removal will work instantly after sign-up on the four websites.
- Exclusive member-only online chats with Pro Football Rumors head writer Zach Links.
- An exclusive Trade Rumors Front Office badge will be displayed when you comment on Pro Football Rumors.
- Most importantly, you’ll be supporting Pro Football Rumors directly and helping to ensure our longevity and growth.
The launch of Trade Rumors Front Office is a big moment for us. Please consider subscribing!
30$? Pass, I will stick to AdBlock
Also, hosting nowadays is ridiculously cheap, I know because I am indeed a webmaster myself. Having a virtual text-based website isn’t drawing a whole hellava lot of Bandwidth, certainly not enough to justify the amount you choose to charge to simply remove ads that I guarantee the vast majority of online users today don’t see anyway.
Hosting costs don’t have much more to do with the costs of online publishing than the price of newsprint has to do with print publications. Someone is writing and preparing the articles every day all day. While those folks can work for free for awhile, journalists (even sports journalists) can’t work for free forever.
If none of ProFootballRumors.com, MLBTradeRumors.com, HoopsRumors.com and/or ProHockeyRumors.com are worth $30/year to you then you are right not to support TradeRumors. I enjoy it better here at ProFootballRumors.com. Over at The Athletic, it’s a lot more expensive and the beat writers call the Redskins, “the Washington Team”.
At least at PFR, we’re mostly free to call play as we see it. It’s a free speech zone (well as long as we don’t cuss but I can live with that, there’s enough sewer online not to have to get it with one’s sports).
It’s $2.50 a month. That’s not that much.
And the bulk of the money presumably goes to the writers and towards developing content, not bandwidth.
If you can’t afford it that is fine, you don’t have to try to make it look like their fault.
i think it’s more about giving back to people who have provided a service that many of us have used for free for close to a decade. In that respect, $30 seems cheap.
I had a hunch things would go in this direction. I would have preferred the site simply create a donation link to manage through the Covid crisis as many users including myself don’t use, or want the mobile app. Your claiming the free, ad supported PFR will remain unchanged but I expect it will disappear completely shortly after paid subscriptions gain traction. That is what happened at Pro Football Focus.
The free site isn’t going anywhere as far as I know. Trade Rumors are deeply committed to free access. Ad-free sounds good to me though. I loathe modern web advertising and where I can avoid ads for a reasonable contribution, I’m usually on-board.
Getting people to pony up for a subscription becomes more difficult if you continue to provide them with a free alternative so I’ll take a wait and see approach on how this develops. I hope everything doesn’t migrate to mobile apps but it’s a possibility.
With a subscription to PFR, you get ad-free access to three other sports sites: MLBTR, HoopsRumors and PHR. It’s a very fair offer. Many of us who have enjoyed years of free sports coverage are happy to contribute back. It’s kind of nice TradeRumors is letting us make the choice.