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The New Obstructed View (and a word on ads)

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As you can certainly tell, OV has gone through some extensive changes. While the partnership with Bloguin alleviated much of the work for us (and when I say "us", I mean dmick89. He is the one that does nearly everything behind the scenes, and OV simply wouldn't exist without his leadership), it introduced other problems. Chief among them were the awful commenting system and the ad redirects, especially on mobile. People come to Obstructed View for bi-weekly game recaps and incoherent ramblings, not to download Words With Friends. Traffic has been down at OV for a couple of years now; the three reasons for that are that I'm the primary writer here, everyone (including me) has just been a lot busier, and that we were part of a blog network that frankly wasn't facilitating the easy use of our website (and that's not a slight to Bloguin, who worked with us pretty well all things considered).

One of the benefits of striking out on our own (again) is that we can choose the ad experience that we want. Right now, that's no ads at all. We aren't heavily trafficked and server space isn't all that expensive. Even the best ad service sites out there have their problems. We aren't in this to make money (at least I'm not), we are in this because we feel that we have interesting things to say, and we enjoy the comments and community that we've fostered here (I say we like I brought people in, but many if not most of the readers here pre-date me). Our blog isn't Bleacher Nation and it isn't Bleed Cubbie Blue (fortunately); we don't live on ad revenue and don't have to answer to anyone. Will that change in the future? I'm not the boss and I don't make those decisions. For now, we like the clean look of this site.

That brings me to something I'd like to talk about: ads. I read a very interesting twitter exchange from Sean Forman, who runs the sports reference business. This family of websites is incredible, and it's no stretch to say that Baseball Reference is the single most important baseball website in existence. I use it daily; I have a Play Index subscription, and it feels almost illegal how little it costs for what benefit it provides. Sean Forman deserves some sort of compensation for the service he is giving to everyone; lots of people don't pay him at all, even by just allowing ads.

 

Places like Sports Reference (and Bleacher Nation, and FanGraphs, and any commercial internet venture) depend on ads to survive. Every time you use an adblocker on baseball-reference, you deny them money. It is stealing from a moral standpoint, in my opinion. I used to use adblockers, but it's hard to do so in good conscience when you actually see the cost. I don't want baseball reference to go out of business; you don't either. At the very least, please whitelist the websites that you visit frequently and have trusted ad services.

This brings me back to Obstructed View. It was very hard to ask you not to use an adblocker on our Bloguin site; in fact, some times it was the only way to actually interact with the website! I personally have no dog in the fight as far as ad revenue: we don't have ads, and when he did, we weren't exactly fielding competitive bids to own the Cubs. If you still want to support us, however, there are three ways you can do that:

1. Support the sites that are necessary for Obstructed View to exist. I couldn't write as well if baseball-reference went down tomorrow (I could, but it would suck a lot more). FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America are all invaluable resources as well. MLB.com probably doesn't need the money, but it's nice that at least their website is serviceable, doesn't serve malicious ads, and allows you to embed videos into posts about as easily as is feasible. 

2. Tell people about us! We have a twitter account that doesn't annoy you (it simply tweets new articles, and not much else). We have a facebook account that does the same thing. We aren't trying to overload you with information, but it is helpful to us if you follow that stuff simply because it gives you a few gentle reminders that we exist.

3. Engage us in the comments! It is usually a positive feedback loop. If you comment, and aren't shades of Yellon, you make a positive contribution to the site. Other people read that comment, gain value from it, and maybe add their own. You read those comments, gain value from it, and the cycle continues. Big if true.

Two things to close this not-Cubs related post out. First, I don't speak for anyone else at Obstructed View, and I didn't tell any of them I was writing this. If the next post is from David announcing a new program where you have to send vials of sheep blood in exchange for access to this site, that's his prerogative. This is only my perspective, and does not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else. Last, while we are certainly always oscillating between re-discreditation and un-re-discreditation, I very much enjoy the community here. While this isn't a dig on sites like Bleacher Nation, as a website grows and grows in popularity, it just becomes harder and harder to moderate, and you necessarily lose part of the familiarity and camaraderie that makes those websites great in the first place (you can try to be a blogger-militant like Alvin, but then you become Alvin). It means a lot to me (and probably to everyone else) that while our posting has slown to a glacial pace (and I'm trying to pick it up again), we've still been able to hold on you guys. Thanks a lot.

To conclude, fuck the Cardinals.

 


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