April 24, 2005
Blogging Baseball
MLB.com has a new affiliate, MLBlogs.com. For about $50.00 a year, you can set up and write a baseball blog, powered by a special version of Movable Type. Plus, you have MLB.com behind you, meaning you have the potential for a lot of visitors.
MLB.com has some interesting people blogging. For staters, Tommy Lasorda. (I can't hear or see the name Tommy Lasorda without thinking of Fletch.) They have a groundskeeper, a fan whose specialty is catching foul balls, and talent from MLB.com.
I was thinking this is pretty good. Maybe I should move Baseball Musings there. And then I see the mistake they made in setting up users:
Your diskspace allotment
The 50MB of storage space you have with your membership.
Your actual diskspace usage
The amount of your total storage you are using currently; this figure is updated daily.
Your bandwidth allotment
The 250MB data transfer you are allowed with your membership per month.
When your pages are visited or files are downloaded, the data is transferred and this counts as bandwidth.
Just 250MB bandwidth? BaseballMusings sent that to Australia this month. That's not much for $50 a year. I get 19 Gig a month for $11. Plus tons of diskspace. Plus multiple MySQL databases (which is why Baseball Musings can bring you the Day by Day Database).
MLB.com is thinking small. Blogs are a great way to drive traffic to their site, promote MLB properties, TV, Radio, fantasy games, etc. Bandwidth is cheap. Diskspace is cheap. Give each user 30 gigs of bandwidth and 1 gig of diskspace to start. Encourage them to blog all the time and give them plenty of room to grow. Make the big baseball bloggers want to move there.
The tools look really good. They have WYSIWYG editing. I saw some mention that you will be able to link to statistics in your entries, but I couldn't find more details. And, of course, being linked by MLB.com is huge. But instead of offering fierce competition to sites like Baseball Musings, they're limiting their bloggers to six hours of this site's readership. My suggestion to new bloggers would be to use MLB.com as a way of getting started, and as soon as you get big, get your own domain.
Update: 4/25/2005. MLB.com tells me they are going to be flexible with disk space and bandwidth. See this post.
Posted by David Pinto at
08:20 AM
|
Blogs
|
TrackBack (2)
Yeah, that is kind of sad that MLB didn't go the whole way to making this a great offer. Though $50/yr is only $4.17/mo, so I guess you can't expect TOO much from them. Maybe they'll have a Premium package that costs more but gives you more bandwidth. With the bandwith that MLB.com uses, you'd think that adding blogs to it wouldn't increase the percentage of bandwidth that they use much.
Considering you're building their brand for free you'd think they'd bend over backwards to make people want to do it.
If MLB had any brains at all they'd make it free. Administrative costs on something like that are extremely low and the ad positioning they'd get is perfect. Rabid fans flocking to your properties daily? A blogger.com blog is free, typpad is $9 a month ( I think) and dedicated hosting is +- 3 bucks on what Davids getting.
