The Blog, It Is A Changing (just a tiny bit)
Beginning on Monday, May 4, we are going to have a few changes going into effect. We believe these will enhance the experience for all our readers, even if, at the start, one such change will be a little inconvenient.
1) COMMENTS – It seems that DISQUS, the company we use for the comments has doubled their use of ads. There are now ads before and after the comments. It seems like overkill. We also do not receive any compensation for any of those ads and never have. The only way to get free DISQUS (which we understand and appreciate) is to allow them to run the ads, otherwise we would have to pay for ad-free DISQUS (which just isn’t an option at this time).
Squarespace, which is our web site builder, has a comment program embedded into their product. We have tested that comment feature and it seems to work well. It’s also ad free. That’s a great thing.
The inconvenience is that readers who would like to submit comments, or be part of our live game threads (when the games return), will have to set-up an account with Squarespace in order to comment.
Please, know, as always, that our commenting rules remain the same.
2) GOOGLE ADS – Also beginning Monday, we are going to partner with Google Ads to help defray all of the costs for maintaining the site. We have been bringing daily content to our readers free for over 30 months. This is a labor of love, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to deliver numerous articles each and every day all year long. We’re going to try out the Google Ads to help us keep this site running, and free, for our readers. Most of our “competitors” are affiliated with big time sports networks, and yet they still have ads all over the place. We don’t plan to do that, but we do need to ad some small ads onto the site.
Over the years, we have noted in previous articles that many (many) blogs and sites have gone behind paywalls (of various forms). Many of our favorite writers are no longer accessible for free. This includes Rob Neyer, Joe Posnanski, Jayson Stark, Mike Axisa, and so many more. Many sites (like the New York Times) that we used to link to in posts and our weekly Saturday Links feature no longer give free access to articles. More and more we are shut out of content. This is just the reality of the Internet. We are not going anywhere, but ads are part of what happens online. Save for a few banners on the side, and any commercials in the video player, we’ve brought our readers ad free content for more than two and a half years. We’re proud of that. Still, we also need to accept the reality that things cannot stay free forever.
3) THANK YOU – Thank you for being loyal readers. We hope these changes are not too inconvenient and that they do not detract, in any way, from your enjoyment of our site.
We appreciate all of you. Thank you for visiting us as often as you do!
