Websites: www.baseball-reference.com, www.pro-football-reference.com, www.basketball-reference.com

Interview with: Sean Forman

What is your background?

I was a math and computer science professor at Saint Joseph’s University for six years before starting to doing the site full-time in May of 2006.

What made you want to start Baseball Reference?

It was spring of 2000, mainly I just wanted an online baseball encyclopedia and there were none out there.

What does your website do?

We present statistics for pro football, baseball and basketball. We have complete stats for all players and teams in league history and also scores for every game played in league history. We’ve recently started updating the sites daily and have expanded the offering (splits, game logs, etc) dramatically in the last year.

When did you launch?

Baseball and Football in 2000 and Basketball in 2004.

How have you built your community?

Organic growth. We do pretty well in search engine rankings, so we get a lot of traffic from people out looking for player and team stats.

What types of marketing do you utilize?

Mostly word of mouth. I’ve promoted our subscription feature the Play Index via google adwords, but beyond that it is from people liking our site and telling others.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

We sell ads through Federated Media and also have our own page sponsorship system for users who are big fans of teams and players. Right now those are probably 50-50 for us in terms of revenue.

Beyond that we have a subscription service on the baseball site that allows you to do things like get a list of every double hit by Vlad Guerrero or a list of every 10-SO game by Pedro Martinez.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

We are primarily self funded and have brought in one outside investor who has a lot of experience in the baseball stats industry.

Are you looking for more funding?

No.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

The Play Index brings the data that only groups like Elias had before right to your fingertips. Want to know how many 2-out hits Derek Jeter had against the Red Sox, you can find that in seconds with the P.I.’s event finders.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

We’ll eventually have box scores for every game in major league history from 1871 to the present.

STN’s Take:

We consider the Sports-Reference’s sites the Craigs List of Sports Websites. Extraordinarily successful, very simple design. Sean was pretty much bound to be successful when he embarked on baseball reference. There was nothing like baseball reference on the web so he created it for himself and other people flocked. We are sure over the years the simple design with no pictures has helped Sean create his site while keeping his costs low.

We do think it may be time for a redesign though. Not a big one. We like the idea of no images and a very quick and easy to load page but we don’t like the information overload on the front page. We would like to see the left sidebar be smaller and a bit simpler. Providing the links without descriptions would be just fine. Also, I am not sure why the baseball standings are on the front page. No one is checking baseball standings right now. Sean may be better off feeding his blog into there or promoting some new type of content. Also, even though they pretty much come up very high on every search engine for every baseball player, we would like to see their pages indexed like this: http://www.baseball-reference.com/barry-bonds instead of like this http://www.baseball-reference.com/b/bondsba01.shtml. They may be able to rank ahead of Wikipedia if they made this move.