Website: www.footballoutsiders.com

Interview with: Aaron Schatz

When did you start Football Outsiders?

I started messing around with football stats in December 2002, and we launched the site at the end of July 2003

What made you start it?

Well, I had been working on these advanced football stats, because I was a Bill James fan and a football fan and there really wasn’t much out there. I shopped my first couple articles to some connections I had through my previous job, people at ESPN and FOX were sort of interested, but felt it was content for a very small niche. So I decided I would just launch my own site and try to publicize things myself.

What is your background?

I have an odd background, I’ve had a ton of different careers — not just jobs, but career paths. I have a BA in Economics from Brown. I went into the radio business for a while, where I was a DJ and music director at an alternative station in Daytona Beach, Florida. When I left radio, I worked as a music journalist for a while, then a market research analysis. Finally in 2000, I got a gig writing a column called the “Lycos 50,” which talked about what people were searching for online — Lycos uses it for external PR and for internal market research. I started FO as a side project while I was working for Lycos.

Have you been able to turn Football Outsiders into a full time career?

Yes. I was laid off by the rapidly shrinking Lycos in February 2004, and I started to look for other jobs in the Internet search world, but it became clear after a while that I had made enough connections with FO that something was bound to happen. My first couple freelance deals didn’t come through until the season was about to start, but that was enough money for me to go off unemployment, and FO has been my career ever since.

The statistics you have on your website are amazing.  How many hours do you work a day?

Oh, I don’t know, ten hours maybe? What’s strange is that very little of what I do these days involves new research. During the season, I am too busy writing the articles that make me my living, and editing everyone else’s articles on FO, running the business end, dealing with advertisers, and answering e-mails. When I started doing this, I used to create the stats with a lot of manual cut and paste but at this point people have written programs for me that compile the numbers a lot faster. With the season almost over, the next month or two I’ll be doing new research and tweaking numbers, then we write the book, Pro
Football Prospectus 2008.

What was your tipping point?  What put you on the map?

Gregg Easterbrook was fired by ESPN in November 2003, because of something he wrote at his New Republic blog that was seen by some people as anti-semitic (and was also anti-Disney, which may be a bigger no-no for the WWL). I knew that my site appealed to the kind of intellectual football fans who read his column, so I used it to my advantage by starting a contest where our readers would “write Gregg’s column for him.” This was when the political blogosphere was really exploding, so I used this hook to get publicity from political writers like Glenn Reynolds who never would write about a football stats site
otherwise. Easterbrook eventually got wind of the contest, thought it was hilarious, and he actually wrote his TMQ column for FO for two weeks — for free — until he signed a new deal to write for NFL.com.

What type of technology do you use?

Wordpress

What ad network(s) do you use?

We use a combination of AdBrite and ContextWeb, plus Vibrant Media textlinks. We’re also on blogads, although I must admit to being disappointed, the amount of ads we sell through them has really dwindled this year.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

Maybe $2,000? A little more? I don’t make a living off the site. The site makes me and my writers famous, and we make our money off our outside writing gigs — and then there’s the hefty chunk that comes in from selling fantasy football projections each August.

What are some of your favorite sports websites and what are some of your least favorite websites?

Well, Baseball Prospectus was one of the reasons I started doing this, I still read it every day, and I am proud that I’m now friends and business partners with those guys. Doug Drinen was another one of my big influences, the new Pro-Football-Reference is amazing and Drinen has a lot of interesting stat analysis ideas on the P-F-R blog. Any
self-respecting sports fan who lives in Boston should read Boston Sports Media Watch every day. I read Pro Football Talk, like everyone else. I like Deadspin, although I must admit that most of the blogs that have been stylistically inspired by Deadspin get too snarky for me. At a certain point, you start running out of interesting ways to make fun of people, and it just gets repetitive and mean-spirited.

And everybody wants to criticize ESPN, but the thing is, that site is so huge and encompasses so many things that you are bound to find both material you love and material (and style) that drives you insane. I still enjoy Bill Simmons, I read Matt Mosley’s Hashmarks, Pasquarelli’s Friday columns. I’m a baseball fan, I like Gammons and Stark and Neyer. I have a ton of respect for NBA analyst John Hollinger, although I don’t read him that often — frankly, it’s hardenough for me to follow a second sport now that I write about football for a living. No way I could follow a third sport.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

I don’t know. In many ways the technology drives changes in what possibilities there are for content, and I have no clue what
technologies will change in the next ten years. One thing I know is that the barriers for entry are so low on the Internet that there will always be new sites popping up, new ideas for sites, new talent appearing. Those new writers will complain that the last generation of Internet writers were sellouts, and this will last for a couple years, and then the best of those writers will sell out too, and more new sites will start, accusing those writers of selling out, and so on. Endless cycle.

STN’s Take:

For anyone who is heavily into reading between the lines when it comes to football statistics, Football Outsiders is a must visit.  We don’t really have the time to keep up with all their new stat terminology but we definitely pay for their fantasy football projections on a yearly basis.  Anyone that takes that much time to look at football stats should be better at predicting them then the average guy writing a column or some fantasy football magazine.

Aaron seems to to a great job at monetizing his traffic though we think a contextual ad at the end of each of his posts could bring in some solid cash for him.  Our only suggestion would be to organize his site a bit better.  When we go to his site, things seem to be all over the place.  We would like to see a little more organization. The top features seem to interrupt his main page and the upper right sections of “FO goes mainstream” and “Extra Points” kind of stick out.  If he moved his “Top Features” to the upper right and then made his right sidebar flow evenly, the main page would be much easier to read.