Brewerfan.net Site & Financial FAQ

[squarepusher]

How much does it cost to run Brewerfan?

 

The cost of our hosted server is $50 a month. The cost of the Brewerfan store is $6.95 a month. The cost of the hosted message boards are currently $919 per 6 months or $153 a month.

 

How much money does Brewerfan take in?

 

See our running balance sheet here: http://www.brewerfan.net/downloads/brewerfan-financials.xls

 

Have you thought of using advertisement money to pay for costs of the site?

 

We have partnered with ticko.com for a small text link at the bottom right-hand side of the home page. We are also currently partnered with eBay, Amazon.com, and iTunes and their referral programs. Check out the "Support Brewerfan.net" page for details. We try to avoid large obnoxious banner ads, popup ads, and other blatant forms of advertising. In the future, as costs grow, we may include more advertisers into the mix, but we want to make the site as pleasant as possible for everyone who visits.

 

Why do you choose to use ezBoard for your fan forum instead of running it "in house"?

 

Having another service manage your message boards has its advantages and its disadvantages. While it's hard to integrate with ezBoard, programatically, it's been very helpful not to have to worry about the traffic to the forum. ezBoard also provides a fairly detailed set of functionality that I haven't seen offered (or at least exceeded) by other bulletin board softwares out there such as phpBB. As traffic increases and I have the time, I fully plan on writing my own forum software that has customized features that are applicable towards the baseball world, but of course, there are only so many hours in the day.

 

How much money do you make off items in the store?

 

Cafepress.com is our merchandise provider, and they allow you to set your own profit margins on their products, while they take care of all of the manufacturing and shipping. I currently have every item in the store set to $1 above cost. The goal is not to use the store as a fundraiser, but to allow people to support the site by increasing name recognition. If the store starts to generate more revenue, we may raise the profit margins a dollar or two, but the goal with it is always to provide reasonable merchandise.

 

I've seen hosts out there that only charge $20 a month, and they allow you to have a message board? Why are you getting ripped off?

 

Brewerfan.net is written 100% in Java, and as such, needs to have a host who can provide the facilities to run it. I program Java professionally, so the site is a way to support the Brewers, while supporting my ability to learn and grow as a programmer in the language I use professionally. A lot of the stuff we do behind the scenes is very complex, and "cheap" programming langauges like PHP just won't work, or at least, not as efficiently as Java.

 

There are all kinds of free software packages out there. Why don't you use any of them?

 

Some baseball fan sites use prepackged portal or content management systems software like PHP Nuke and PostNuke. I thought it would be more interesting to write much of Brewerfan.net's code from scratch so that we can completely customize the site to provide the best possible baseball fan site on the internet. We do, however, build on a large number of open source frameworks. I'll list and link them here for any who are interested in learning more:

 

the spring framework, SiteMesh, hibernate, quartz, struts, webwork, lucene, tomcat, MySQL, JFreeChart, Cewolf, jakarta commons, log4j, oscache, rss4j, velocity and xstream.

[OldHoss]

I was wondering if you have a Brewerfan.net business plan in place?

 

It seems if the site is picking up a lot of momentum lately, with mentions by both the TV and radio crews, radio interviews and record numbers of posters. Now might be the time to start thinking about taking the steps to have the site sustain itself either as a not for profit or a for profit corporation.

 

I really think, with the Brewers seemingly on the upswing, that the time is ripe to start aggressively pursuing advertisers for Brewerfan.net. I don't think it's too far fetched for Brewerfan.net to be self-sustaining in two years and profitable soon after.

 

Additionally, incorporation will help establish Brewerfan.net's legitimacy to the world at large. Incorporation will help you obtain press pass for Brewerfan.net and other things that will increase the site's visibility and accelerate the site's ability to make a profit.

 

It would also be nice to start generating some $$ so that the site can afford to keep people like Toby and Patrick around (as a side note -- I think that a printed Brewerfan.net draft guide could be very profitable), rather than losing them to other related sites.

 

I understand that their may be some legal hoops to jump through with the Milwaukee Brewers... such as a licensing agreement for the name; but I'm sure that it can be worked out.

 

Although I'm not a business lawyer and my current job does not allow me to practice law outside of my employment, I'd be more than happy to at least help steer you in the right direction if you think anything I've written makes sense. And if I've overstepped my bounds, I apologize.

[squarepusher]

There's no official "business plan" in place, but we have brought ILBrewerFan on board to try to give us some marketing ideas.

 

Making Brewerfan a LLC is probably something i'm going to try to do this summer, to protect the site.

 

If you look at the bottom of the screen in the fan forum, there are some ads provided by AdBrite, and a link where advertisers can purchase ad space. I'm going to give that a run for a little while. There is also a text ad at the bottom right of the home page now, that was able to provide a little revenue. I've also got one more advertiser in the queue that I want to get to.

 

Right now, the plan is to make Brewerfan.net make exactly $0 profit. I'd like to jack up the revenue though, to pay for the site costs and perhaps promotional items. Believe me, i'd love for nothing more than to be ablle to pay Batman a salary so he could do that kind of job full-time and be able to get into the press box, but it's hard for me to envision raising any type of dollars to actually employ a person... at least without seriously compromsing the site.