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The State of FanGraphs 2026 | FanGraphs Baseball

The State of FanGraphs 2026

by David Appelman

June 23, 2026

Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images<br>Hello! This year marks 21 seasons of FanGraphs, and as we look ahead to the August 5 anniversary of our launch, I wanted to thank you for reading and visiting the site. And, as has become an annual tradition, I also wanted to provide you with an update on the state of FanGraphs.

I started last year’s version of this piece by listing all of our new features and site improvements. As this year’s list is even longer, instead of detailing everything up front, I’ve included a Feature Appendix at the bottom of this post. Take a look – it’s quite a scroll. What I was struck by as I was compiling that list is just how much we’ve been able to accomplish with our Members’ support, support that has translated into new features, voices, data, and other random fun stuff you didn’t even know you wanted. From the written work of our dedicated team of baseball experts to all the stats and leaderboards, the data and fantasy tools to the prospect analysis, the projections, RosterResource, the mobile app, the podcasts, the chats — the depth and breadth of the site is very special. Plus, we do it all without private equity funding or sports betting partnerships, allowing us to produce the independent analysis and high-quality tools you’ve come to rely on.

And while I think the future of FanGraphs is bright, I also think it’s worth talking about the realities of running a sports media site in 2026, the challenges we see looming, and why your support matters more now than it ever has before.

First, if you are a FanGraphs Member, thank you so much for your continued support. Membership is set to account for about 80% of our revenue this year. Six years ago, that number was about 25%. Still, our Members only make up about 2% of what we believe to be the real-life human visitors to the site. We want our work and data to be accessible, but we’re up against a number of challenges.

Data Is More Expensive

FanGraphs isn’t free to operate. We don’t scrape data, opting instead to maintain agreements with all our data providers. This has been our model from day one, both because I wanted FanGraphs to be sustainable and for our data to be reliable, and because people deserve to be paid for their work. This strategy seems to have worked out, but it comes at a cost. Our data costs have nearly doubled over the past five years. At the same time…

Advertising Revenue Is Down, While Bots and Scraping Cost Us More

Our advertising revenue has decreased 50% since 2024. There are multiple factors at work here, some of which are good. We’ve decreased the number of ads on some pages, and our Members enjoy a fully ad-free experience as one of their Member benefits. But as I mentioned, even with the growth we’ve seen, Members only account for about 2% of our total users, and there is a massive discrepancy between the ads served to non-Members and the number of pageviews we’ve served. This May, multiple site analytics tools we use claim we served about 12 million pageviews to non-Members; ads were served on just 2.1 million of those pageviews. That’s only about 18% of pageviews, compared to 51% two years ago. That’s a staggering amount of missing ad revenue.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member

It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.

We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.

1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.

2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.

3. Dark mode and Classic mode!

4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.

5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.

6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)

7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.

8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.

9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.

10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!

We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Click Here To Become a Member

Non-Member Pageviews/Pageviews With Ads

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