Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild is Going Freemium

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley announce a new freemium model for the podcast: From now on, one of their three episodes a week will be available only to Patreon supporters. In this PSA, they lay out their reasons for making the change and explain how it will work. You can also read a written explanation here. Link to subscribe via Patreon Link to written announcement  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Hello and welcome to an unnumbered episode of Effectively Wilde. Are we allowed to make those? Wouldn't even call it an episode. More of a PSA. But I am, as always, Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Reilly of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Everything's fine.

Yes. Don't worry. Don't freak out too much. Everything's fine. Important to state that right up front because people see a programming note, they see an announcement. Uh-oh. The podcast is ending somewhere. No, none of those things happening.

So for once, we won't banter around the bush here. We will just get right to it and say that the podcast itself is not changing at all, in fact. But what is changing is the delivery system, the distribution of the podcast. The show itself, same hosts, same schedule, same content you know and hopefully love. But what is changing is the way that people can support. and access it. So the upshot is that we are going to a partially subscriber-only model. I guess you could call it freemium.

Effectively freemium. Essentially, we will be making one of our three episodes a week for our Patreon supporters. And the other two we will continue to make and deliver as we always have. but in order to access that third one, you will have to become a Patreon supporter if you are not already won. So this is a change that is, I think, not out of step with the wider podcast landscape and media environment, but it is obviously a significant shift for us. So we want to lay out a little bit of the rationale and why we're doing this, because this podcast has been around for quite a long time without really any changes, financially speaking,

which is, I guess, why we are belatedly getting around to making this kind of change. But still, after this long, I know that it can be a bit jarring to have something that you depend on and are used to being the same week in and week out being slightly different. I think that, you know, we feel very fortunate to have the community around effective. wildly wild that we do. I think that it is something that marks the podcast as unique within podcasting, within baseball podcasting. Certainly it provides a space for conversation and friendship and community that I think is really special and has always sort of far exceeded the Patreon, but is also centered around the Patreon in some important ways, whether it's the discord,

or more importantly, like our ability to make this show the way that we've made it. We boxed ourselves into a little bit of a corner, Ben, by having principles, you know. Yeah, let's pat ourselves on the back a bit. Yeah, but I think that part of what I appreciated about effectively wild when I was still a listener of the show, and not a co-host, was that it was a space where I didn't feel like I was being sold something, where I was not asked to sit through an ad read that was for a product that had not been approved by the FDA to treat or diagnose any diseases, that was not trying to get me to gamble, and that really made room for rigor, both statistical and whimsical. And I think that's a really special thing.

It's part of why the show is so damn long a lot of the time. And it also puts us in a bit of a pickle as we think about how best to sustain the show and have it feel as it always has. So maybe we can talk about the pickle, you know? Well, we have avoided doing something like this or anything that would generate more revenue for quite a while, I think through a combination of being bad at business, which I will certainly say about myself. I'm an English major.

I don't know what your excuse is. You did finite stuff for a while. Yeah, but like that was so long ago, man, who even remembers those days? Liberal arts at heart. So through that and then also just wanting to make the best podcast possible for the most people possible, and then just genuinely enjoying making the show,

which I hope comes through in the show and through my almost pathological reluctance to ever take an episode off, which you have reminded me that I can do. Yeah, although I'm about to start making that argument a lot less. That's true. Now we're really going to have to stick to a schedule. Three shows a week, baby, here we go. It's true.

We're making people promises. Yeah. But because of all of those things, we have never looked at it primarily as a money-making venture. And Sam and I did it for free, for the first four years, and so the idea that anyone would ever pay us anything was kind of amazing. So we're not looking to get fabulously wealthy off of this podcast, but as people probably can see sort of surveying the wider landscape, we are something of an outlier in being a show that is

independently produced and hosted, that is ad-free, aside from very sporadic sponsored segments, which we haven't had in a while. And not in any way, paywalled. We're just kind of a unicorn in that respect, and there's probably a reason for that in that it's not really the best economic model, frankly. So we want to make a change that will make the show sustainable without impacting the show that we want to make

and that we hope people want to listen to and we'll sort of set us up for the long run and to enlist the support of our listeners has been the best way that we can do that we have determined. So for quite a while now, our model has basically been backwards where we give everyone the whole show, and then we pretty much put out a tip jar and we say, if you like this, would be great if you could support it. And we are immensely grateful that many people have. And it's why we've been able to do this. for so long. But it is sort of inverted from the typical model, which is pay something to get something

in kind of a more tangible way. So we've been consulting with folks at Fangraphs and people at Patreon and a lot of longtime listeners and Patreon supporters. And we were talking to one of the people at Patreon, and she was walking us through some of the data on their site where when people sign up, there's an entrance survey and people can select why they are supporting you. And more than 60% of people who signed up for our Patreon, the number one reason is to financially support the creator. And then a distant second, like 13% or something was to get access to exclusive stuff. And the Patreon person we were talking to was sort of stunned to see those figures because usually it's the reverse, evidently. You know, people sign up to get something other than just the satisfaction and joy of enabling a.

podcasts to continue to be made. So I think that in that sense, we have been sort of out of step with the way that people typically do this. And I know the feeling as a consumer because there are people putting their hands out left and right, right? Like all of us are sort of overwhelmed with how do we support independent media and how many newsletters can one person possibly subscribe to and how many things can you be a patron of and how many podcasts? And it gets kind of of overwhelming and so I'm reluctant to add to that but that is the model that seemingly is the most effective and and I know that being on the other side of things because there are so many people asking me to pay for things that if someone is not asking me to pay for a thing and is just

giving me that thing and then saying hey if you feel like it chip in well I don't always I'd like to say that I do but I don't always unless I start feeling guilty and I think this is the the free rider problem. I'm the free rider. I should show what this is worth to me. And eventually I might get there. But I reach that epiphany faster if I'm confronted with that choice to pay up front. That is just kind of the way it works. Yeah. And we understand that the desire to support the show and access those episodes might be there and the means might not. You know, we read our exit surveys when people cancel their patrons. And sometimes they give more. more specific feedback.

But a lot of the time, it reflects a change in financial circumstance of bell tightening. Yeah. And so that was a big part of why we wanted to make sure that there was still a lot of show available for folks that did not come with a requirement to be a part of the Patreon. Yes. Most of the show. Most of the show. And as you know, there's a lot of show.

That's a lot of show, man. There are a lot of podcasts that have a free episode and then a couple of paid ones or whatever it is, but we are still remaining majority free. And frankly, doing more podcasting just for free than a lot of podcasts do in their entirety. So we hope that it will still be a rewarding experience to listen to effectively wild, whether you are a supporter or not. We're going to kind of navigate how we handle which ones are subscriber only. I think it will typically be one a week. It may turn out to be the third one. It may vary depending on the week and what we're covering

because we can be a bit unpredictable here. We don't always know in advance what we're going to be talking about. So there could be weeks when we have three free shows and then the next week there's one or something. But it'll essentially work out to one a week being solely for subscribers. And in terms of the content, any episode, whether it's in front of or behind the paywall, will be recognizably an episode of Effectively Wild. And all that entails. But I think we will probably lean a little more toward evergreen material in the paid ones,

snap blasts, deep dives, emails, cold calls of 90-year-olds, what have you. And we will continue to be more responsive to news, for instance. instance, on free ones as a way of still being discovered, still being out there if people are trying to find a podcast that is talking about some recent event. But it won't really be an ironclad rule. There will continue to be a bit of all of what makes this podcast what it is on both the paid and free ones. We don't want to make the paid ones feel any lesser than the free ones. And we also don't want to give the impression that we are shifting all the good stuff to the pay ones or that we're using the free ones to rehash or advertise the paid ones.

So one way or another, we hope that you will be satisfied with what you're getting. And as you alluded to, one of the ways that people do this, if they don't have this model from the start, which is increasingly common, if you are switching over to a model like this, often what happens is people add stuff. They do more episodes. And that probably goes over a little easier because, you know, If you can just say, well, we're not depriving you of anything that you have enjoyed. We're just offering something extra. Well, that's probably an easier sell.

The problem is that we have sort of screwed ourselves by being prolific for free for so long. Yeah. And so we are essentially at max podcasting capacity, I think, both in terms of our time and yours, the listeners. So it probably would have been nice if we had been doing two every week for all of these years. and we suddenly just decided to add a third one for subscribers, as opposed to we had three, and now one of them will be four subscribers, and it's almost like, you know,

sure would be a shame if anything happened to that third episode you liked. But we are a bit boxed in terms of how we can proceed. As you noted, we want to remain ad-free, and we will. And I know that there are probably people who are saying ads are unnecessary evil, I'm used to them. I'm resigned to them. They're on every other show. I can just skip past them. I'd rather have that than a paywalled episode. The thing is, though, from talking to a lot of other hosts of comparable podcasts, it's not really an either or comparable financial proposition in terms of how lucrative it is to add ads to your show versus getting subscriber support. And then, as you noted, there are all the ways in which you inevitably end up compromising. Yeah. There's the quantity, the number of ads on some shows.

It's like Anakin Skywalker. He's more machine now than man. Some pods are more ad than episode. And then there's the content. If we said we will do some ads, but not the ones we object to. Well, we are, after all, a sports podcast. And the options are fairly limited, right? And so if you don't want to hawk gambling

in prediction markets and crypto and AI, et cetera, and boner pills. You know what? I won't even lump boner pills in with the others, you know? I think people would pay extra to hear you do a boner pill average. You know, they probably would, right? And look, the world needs boners. I mean, maybe not as many all the time for everyone, but it's highly dependent. It's kind of a case-by-case basis thing.

But, you know, there are certain things that we. We do not want to advertise whether because we have a moral objection to them mostly or because they're kind of awkward to hear or do an ad read for maybe. So if you're ruling all those things out, it doesn't leave a whole lot. And from what I've heard from others, even if you say we're opting out of this or that, you inevitably get pushed to do those things because that's where the sponsors are increasingly. Yeah. And we've had, and we've shared this with listeners before because I do think giving folks

like insight into our thinking around this and our process for how we, you know, make the show work financially is valuable and kind of community-minded, I guess. But we've had conversations with podcast networks, with folks who do sort of programmatic advertising on pods just to make sure we understand like what does this landscape look like, what does it mean financially, what are the options? And, you know, invariably, we get to to a point in that call where we say, well, we don't want to do any gambling ads. And the person on the other end goes, oh. Silence.

Click. Yeah. You know, and to your point, the list of things that I hear on podcasts often, and I should say, like from creators who I enjoy listening to, whose work I respect, who I think are like, you know, good people, but who have to make money doing that. Like the number of AI ads that I have to answer now, you know, sometimes like immediately after a segment where one of the creators is like decrying the influence of AI in Hollywood or whatever, it's a tricky thing. And again, I don't want to present us as being like so morally gifted or whatever. But I do think this has been a consistent sort of stance of ours.

I think it's important within the context of sports media and media more. generally. I don't want the show, and I hope that what we're proposing here kind of threads the needle on it. Like, I don't want the show to feel extractive from our listeners because, again, that's not the kind of show that we've created and it's not what makes the show so special. I think part of why, and we haven't even had a chance to really talk about, like, major league baseball's official predictive markets partner or whatever the hell, polymarket bills itself, as these days, but I think part of why I find myself so exhausted by the infiltration of sports budding and polymarket and I always want to call it cashy, like the cereal, but that's not right,

is it? That's not what that company is called. But part of why I find it's so exhausting isn't even how damaging I think those industries have started to prove to be toward individual people. It isn't even the obvious conflicts of interest that arise between sports media partnering with sports books. It's that it's taking this thing that is fun and important to you and like a part of your understanding of yourself being a baseball fan and just layers in another means of taking your money from you. And it's relentless, you know? And so I don't want the show to feel that way. And I think that this is sort of our best path forward to make sure that that isn't what we end up needing to turn to. Although, again, like, if you decide you need to do a hymns read, like maybe a joke one.

It could be one of our bonus episodes. We could just do. Yeah, that could be a Patreon perk perhaps. Yeah, fake ad reads for. And to be clear, people I'm sure would come up with goofy ones they'd want me to do. but a lot of them would be you and like hymns, me undies, you know, in the very the brunt. We do have expenses that go into making this show and some of them have increased over the years. And we do also invest a lot of time and effort into the podcast, whether it sounds like that always or not.

It is professionally produced, whether it's professionally hosted is in the ear of the beholder, I guess. But it is certainly professionally produced. And what with one thing and another, fan graphs technically loses a little bit of money on the show. And so we're not looking to retire or buy a boat or anything. But we would like to ensure that we can keep making the show the way that we want to and that everyone wants us to. And it's a topsy-turvy contracting environment out there. And you don't have to look very far to find things that you have loved, that have gone away or that we all have, and it's just hard to make the math work sometimes.

So we are asking for people's help to make the math work. And I guess we should say something about the math, something about the pricing at this point in the podcast. This is our 10-year anniversary of joining Patreon, this very month, in fact. And this week is the start of the 15th season that we will have covered on Effectively Wild. My God. Yeah. Raise anatomy over here. I know.

Getting old. Someone just pointed out to me, the Astros were still in the National League when this podcast started. It's already improbable for a sports podcast to have lasted this long and it would not have happened without the community support. Yeah. But another way in which we've probably been bad at business is that we have never actually raised prices in those 10 years on Patreon.

And as people may have heard, there's been a bit of inflation over that period, roughly 40%, I think. And we have not raised those prices and we have even added some value and perks to those tiers. So I hope that we've banked a bit of goodwill while we were not banking as much money. But what this amounts to is our main tier now that we expect most people to be at is $10 a month with a 10% discount if you sign up for the annual subscription. And for that, you will get a minimum of four subscriber-only regular episodes a week, 52 a year, plus the monthly off-topic bonus AMA episodes that we have been doing for some time now. So that's 12 more episodes a year.

So a total of I can do math, 64 episodes in total. And also, we will continue to do playoff live stream. And in fact, we will be adding a non-playoff live stream. We will be doing a regular season live stream to be determined when in the regular season that is. And of course, we will continue to offer access to our Discord group. And we will continue to thank people at the end of episodes by name. And we will continue to keep the show ad free, not just for Patreon supporters, but for everyone for the foreseeable future. And there are a couple of higher tiers still that we will be keeping with some additional perks.

Right now we have seven tiers. We've had seven tiers. Too many tears. The Patreon people were like, what are you doing with all these tears? Why are there so many? They're all wonderfully named, but this is a bit much, you guys. I know. Apologies to whichever effectively wild legends, we will have to demote from tier names on Patreon.

But another way in which we're bad at business just too complicated, so we're simplifying and consolidating. But the $10 a month or $100 a year will be the main tier that we hope a lot of you will join us at. And we will be communicating additional details about this via messages to our existing supporters. But we do want to show our gratitude to people who have supported us before they had this much incentive to. And so we will be offering discounted upgrades to that $10 month tier for Patreon supporters who are currently at lower tiers. Check your email, check your Patreon messages, check your spam filters, perhaps for details about that. But we hope that it will be a fairly painless upgrade for everyone, at least in terms of the actual mechanics of doing it. And then

we hope that the delivery system for the podcast, if you are a non-subscriber, you will continue to get the two free episodes a week in your regular feed, and you will also get a free preview, a shortened preview of the third subscriber-only episode. So you will know what else is being covered, and you will hear some of it, at least. And if you are a subscriber, then you will get a special feed so that you will be able to access all of the episodes as you have been in a single feed in your podcast app of choice. Please bear with us if there's any initial growing pains in figuring out the feeds and everything, but we want it to be as simple as possible.

We want you to get all the regular episodes in a single feed as you always have and not to get any duplicates or anything like that. So we will iron out any issues that may present themselves. And this is going into effect almost immediately. Soon, very soon. It is, and there are Patreon-related reasons why we had to do it that way. But also, we think this is the time to do it, and it's opening day, and we have some significant anniversaries here. And so our third episode of this week will be the first subscriber-only episode. So that'll be episode 2458 will be the first one that you have to sign up to here in its entirety. So we'll be sending additional details via messages.

You can, of course, check patreon.com slash effectively wild, which we will be linking to liberally in the episode description here on the podcast posted fan graphs, which will continue to appear going forward. And you can read more about our rationale for this and all of the details about tears and perks. And of course, we welcome questions and comments. We didn't do this lightly. I think the fact that we're this far into the podcast and we're just now doing it maybe makes it a bit more jarring, but also hopefully makes it more understandable that we delayed this long and that people will understand our thinking here and will be supportive to the extent that they're able. And it pains me that being a podcast completist cost something now because so much is paywalled across the internet that, I do value producing unpaywalled material, but there is a reason why so many people have moved to that way of doing things, because it just offers a protection and insulation, a way to keep making the thing that you like to make and that people like you to make without being subject to the vagaries of gestures wildly at everything.

Yeah. And I'll just say personally, like, I'm so profoundly grateful to get to do the show. I, because of the demands of my, like, full-time job, um, don't really get to write much at all anymore, which I miss pretty profoundly. And this is the place where I get to offer a perspective on the game and be in conversation with really smart and funny people about baseball in a way that I think has sustained my own affection for the sport in a way that I didn't quite appreciate until, we started having some of these, you know, external to fan graphs, external to baseball, in some cases, shocks to the system.

And so, you know, we understand this is a big change. I hope, as Ben said, that it will be one that at least logistically we're able to execute smoothly. I hope that it won't be an overly burdensome change for folks. But I just want to say that, like, however you engage with the show, whether it's two free episodes a week, whether you're happy to pay for that third paywalled episode, whether you're one of the delightful loons that decides to support us at the Mike Trout level for however long you do that. Like we couldn't do this show without all of those kinds of support and it wouldn't be the same

without the community that surrounds it. And so as we embark on this new season, I'm just, I'm really profoundly grateful to get to be a part of effectively wild. I do feel like something of a steward. of this seat since it wasn't mine initially. And I hope that, you know, we can continue to produce something that brings insight and levity and seriousness when it's required, but not too much of that and that it enhances everyone's enjoyment of the season that we're about to see and the ones that come after. So I'm just very appreciative and want to say thank you to everyone who's listening right now. Yes, I will echo many of those sentiments. And I don't expect people

to celebrate and rejoice, but we do hope that you'll understand why we made the decision and that you will at least welcome the news that we hope that this will put us in a position to continue to make the show for many years to come. So thank you very much to everyone who has supported us. We hope you will continue to, and we hope that many people will climb on board and join us at patreon.com slash effectively wild. Thank you all. We will be back to talk to you about baseball.

very soon. Longest announcement ever, very on brand for us.