We get asked pretty regularly about exactly who reads Ballpark Digest, so we’ve compiled the results of a recent reader poll for your review.
In terms of sheer numbers, between 42,000 and 52,000 unique IP addresses (which does not include search engines and other automated crawlers) check Ballpark Digest in a given month. There are many companies providing Internet access behind a single corporate IP address, so the actual number of individual readers on the site is much larger. In June 2013, there were 42,828 IP addresses and 775,677 pages served. That’s up some 5 percent from May 2013.
Those readers, according to the 190 survey respondents and an analysis of 5,603 newsletter subscribers, fall into three distinct categories: those who work in the baseball industry, which includes teams and leagues (46.3 percent); those who sell to the baseball industry (30.2 percent); and those who follow baseball and ballparks (23.5 percent). Within those working in the baseball industry, the percentages range from Triple-A (20 percent) and MLB (18 percent) to rookie (2.2 percent) and summer collegiate (11 percent).
In the survey, we asked a number of questions relating to the site and our future business plans. The most interesting thing from these questions: 56 percent of the readers check Ballpark Digest daily, while another 14 percent read it when they can. Interestingly, a small percentage of readers use other tools for following Ballpark Digest: 13 percent follow our stories through the newsletter, and another 9 percent follow it via RSS feed. Only 7 percent follow the site through Facebook or Twitter — which is totally in line with our referrer logs.
The conclusions we take from this survey: Ballpark Digest has a deep and devoted following in the baseball industry. Yes, we we could goose page views with lots more general-interest baseball stories designed to pump the number of casual fans, but that’s just not the way our business model works: we are focused on the baseball industry and will remain that way.
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