LoneStarFootball.net is 10 years old this month. It is hard to believe a decade has passed since I began developing this site. It has taken a village, to get us where we are today and yet so much is left to do. We have seen our ups and downs, bumps in the road, with a little bit of smooth sailing in the mix. Currently I am at a crossroads on what direction the site takes moving forward. Here is a little bit of backstory....
LSFN is an operation that has never been more than a hobby with a drive to paint as accurate of a picture of Texas High School football as possible. The initial model was simple, create an opportunity for historians to input data, allow crowd sourcing and provide a free service to Texas High School Football fans. This works great for the most part but definitely has its own pitfalls. The larger the database grew, the more expensive and complicated it became to maintain. The database currently is sitting now at 400K games and 14K teams with a flow of data additions and corrections 10 miles long. Crowd sourcing is a tricky business with historical scores. Newspapers printed one thing, the high school yearbook says another thing, and former players insist it was an entirely different score altogether... and yes this has literally happened more times than you would believe.
The site has utilized in page ads strictly to cover operational costs but I have always refused to be invasive in any way to users. This worked great for several years but with changes in how in page ads work now and the drive to keep the site "clean" the model just does not generate enough revenue to keep it going (even with 160 million page views last fall). So how to keep the lights on? The choices really are either make ads more invasive, charge a subscription fee, or take donations. I will be mulling my options over these next couple of months and hopefully will figure out a path moving forward. Please feel free to contact me with any ideas you might have as you are the reason why this site is here!
data@lonestarfooball.net
