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Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/126636
MiLB engineers a major relaunch
BY ERICFISHER
ST
AFFWRrTIR
Minor League Baseball over th e next two
weeks is relaunching Web pa ges for MiLB.
com and more than 150 individual teams
as well as starting new mobile sites for the
clubs, marking th e fir st major results of
a ne w cooperative a gre eme nt with MLB
Advan ced Medi a .
TheMinor LeagueBaseball-MLBAM
pairing yielded th e Baseball Internet
Rights Co., a holding compan y owned
by Minor League Baseball and operated by MLBAM . Th e ag reement,
ratified in December 2008 , proved
to be conte ntious in some cor ners
of th e game during its for mati on ,
as th e disparities between th e size
of large, Class AAA markets and
smaller markets in th e Class A and
Rookie leagues are quite large.
But s ince that r atification ,
Minor League Baseball and BIRCO
executives have spent the last 15
months ste adily conv incing teams
to opt in to th e voluntary agreement. Th e
cu r rent ro st er of teams participating in
BIRCO is now nearly twice the n umber of
clubs wh ose sites were previo usl y hosted
by MLBAM on an individual basis.
There are 178 affiliated clu bs that could
be tapped for th e effort.
"We're now at a point where we have
meaningful critical mass a nd ca n reall y
tell a bigstory to nati onal advertisers," said
Frank Burke, BIRCO cha ir man and owne r
of the Class AA Chattanooga (Tenn.)Lookouts. "It 's been a long proc ess, and for some,
it's been a little hard to imagin e being part
of a national network, but we can now get a
vas t number of eyeballs and, importantly
for a lot of us, a lot of content and fu nctionality th at would have been abso lutely
impossible to develop on our own."
Burke cited as an example a mobile site
for h is Lookouts club as some thing that
would not have been a fiscal priority for
the team on its own .
MiLB.com and the individual team
sites that were host ed by
Ml BAM
estimates that trafficto the new
Mi lB.com and team sites will increase.
MLBAM com b ine d for ab out 7 million
unique visitor s and 50 million page views
per month during the 2009 season, according to MLBAMestimates, numbers that are
proj ected to rise in the new structure .
Much of BIRCO'sdevelopmenttodate has
been about creating an operating structure
th at will generate the desired efficienc ies of
scale wh ile still allow ing for local -market
individuality and choice. The est ablished
platform will offer clubs one of three levels
of operating maintenance, depending on
how m uch th ey wa nt to do themselves on
a day-to-day basis.
Within that framework ,MLBAM will sell
national advertising. Individual club s will
retain some local inventory both on their
home pages and wit hin th eir interior Web
pages. Site design will have many common
eleme nts but not a fu lly un ifor m structure
lik e th e 30 MLB team sites have.
Ticketing also will remain largely up
to individual clubs, provided th e team's
provider is one of several pre-approved by BIRCO and MLBAM .
On top of the newly developed
mob ile sites for the club s, minor
league di gital product offerings
this season will a gain include a
live game video pa ckage and live
Gam eDay functionality for each of
the Class AAAleagues and th e Class
AA Texas League.
The Class AAA Round Rock (Texas)
Express sa id th at th ey,and perhaps
some other larger minor league clubs,
may not see a net increase in di gital
rev enue r ight away from BIRCO.Th e
Express has been webcasting games for
th e last decad e. But Minor League Baseball
Presid en t Pat O'Conner has been aggressively pu shing a "Power Of One" con cept
sinc e h is December 2007 election, atte mptin g to have th e affili at ed minors ac t as a
more unified and powerful en tity.
"Overall , the sky's really the limit for us
now,but the big thing is we need to get out
and tell ou r story," said Reid Ryan , presi dent and ch ief exe cu tive of Ryan Sanders
Baseball, owner of th e Express and the
Class AA Corpus Christi (Texas) Hooks,
anothe r BIRCO member.
Web site to provide sports power rankings
BY ERIC FISHER
STAFF WRIT
ER
New York-based Web site publisher Mediaite plans next month
to la unch SportsGrid.com , a destination devoted to compiling
power r an kin gs of individuals, teams and companies fro m
across th e sports world.
The new site wouldjoin sister operations Mediaite.com, GossipCop.com , Styleite.com and Geekosystem .com . The power
rankings wou ld be tabul ated by us in g a spec ially developed
algorithm th at pools a variety of metrics, including TV ratings; Web traffic and circulati on counts; atte ndance; number of
Tw itter followers;on-field performance for players and coaches;
and franchi se va lues.
Mediaite wa s founded and is led by Dan Abrams, former
general manager of MSNBC and current chief legal analyst for
NBC News . Th e power rankings on Mediaite.com have quickly
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