Tom Hannon spent years building a baseball history site into millions of monthly views — then watched AI search quietly take most of that traffic away.
His answer was building something readers pay to belong to, instead of something they just pass through.
Watch the Full Interview
Tom Hannon has been an entrepreneur his whole working life: a paper route at 10 that became a real business by 20, then close to 30 years publishing and distributing magazines.
He built that same distribution business three separate times, selling it in 1997, rebuilding it in 2000, selling again in 2006, rebuilding again in 2012, and selling once more in 2017.
He knows what it looks like when a business model runs its course. He watched it happen again with his own content site, and this time the cause was AI.
When Your Traffic Model Stops Working…
In 2018, after an injury forced him out of the distribution business, Tom launched This Day in Baseball. It’s a site built around one simple idea: whatever today’s date is, here’s everything that happened on it in baseball history.
It worked. Millions of views a month, over 100,000 backlinks, years of research behind every page.
Then AI search happened. “I went from having several million views a month to having a hundred thousand,” Tom says. “AI destroyed that entire model. There’s just no point in having a website with historical artifacts because whatever you put up, AI is going to steal it anyway.”
The falloff built for a couple of years, then fell off a cliff last November and December.
“The real problem is there’s no way to monetize your content if you don’t have enough traffic,” he says. “With ad revenue, whether you’re using programmatic ads or whatever, you need so much traffic to make any real money. It’s almost impossible unless you’re like MrBeast.”
It’s a problem a lot of publishers are living through right now.
Tom decided that the solution lay in a side project he’s already been building for years: a business where people pay directly for access, instead of a business that lives or dies by what a search engine (or an AI model) decides to send its way.
… Build Something Worth Paying For
That side project is Classic Baseball Broadcasts: a membership site built around an audio archive of real baseball broadcasts, going back decades.
It’s organized so members can browse by player, team, ballpark, or date. Thousands of hours of historic broadcasts, sourced from donated recordings, archive.org, and old collections.
Tom started building it around 2019, motivated in part by watching his own father (a lifelong baseball fan) end up in assisted living with nothing built for him to do.
Then he turned that personal project into something people would actually pay to join, month after month.
That part took him a few tries.
“I tried to do it on a WordPress site alone without a real membership product and that was incredibly difficult,” Tom says.
He went through Teachable, Soundwise, Private Podcast, and Mighty Networks next. None of them built to handle real audio libraries that members could browse and search rather than just stream in a feed.
“I went through a lot to get to where I am today,” he says. He eventually built the site on WordPress with MemberPress running the membership layer, and that’s where it finally worked.
What MemberPress Runs Behind the Scenes
The front end is built with Divi and Advanced Custom Fields, pulling from a database of thousands of hours of content.
Click a game and you can click through to the ballpark, the announcers, and every player on the field, each with their own audio archive.
But the part that decides whether someone can get to any of it, and how they pay for the privilege, is MemberPress.
Members log into an account page to reach the content, submit a support ticket, browse the archive, and manage a monthly or annual subscription, with a 7-day free trial to start. “We’ve tried to make it a really easy experience,” Tom says.
Two features have turned into real growth levers for him specifically. “I use the gifting add-on and I have a corporate membership,” Tom says. And the corporate side is where he’s putting most of his energy now.
Rather than waiting for individual signups, he sells the archive directly to assisted living facilities as an activity for residents, a channel he’s already landed several accounts through.
“My real goal here (although I’d love Joe Baseball, the 50-year-old who wants to listen to 1957 Boston Braves games) my real goal is to get into corporate assisted living facilities,” he says.
It’s a B2B channel most single-founder membership sites never think to build, and it exists because MemberPress had the account structure to support it.
The Parts that are Still Hard
Tom is candid about what isn’t solved yet.
About 90% of new members come through his daily email newsletter, a subscriber who wants to hear a featured broadcast gets a two-week sequence before hitting a paywall.
Out of every 200 new newsletter subscribers, about three convert to paying members, and two stick past the free trial. He calls that a little above average, and it still means the newsletter is carrying most of the business.
Organic and Facebook traffic fill in the rest, and both have thinned out unless he pays to boost them.
The bigger lesson is one he keeps coming back to. “There is no such thing as passive income. That is a crock,” he says. “The sales process isn’t linear. It comes in spurts in ways you don’t expect.”
He’s also had to catch himself building for his own taste instead of his members’. “I’m a baseball historian myself and I have things I love about baseball history, but I have to listen to the customers.”
Where AI Fits Now
Tom’s relationship with AI is more complicated than “it destroyed my business.” He uses Claude for research today, through an integration in his email platform.
And he’s kept an eye on MemberPress’s own work in this space too. “I know MemberPress recently did the same – the MCP” he says. “I haven’t really used it yet for me personally, but that’s really the main things I use.”
He doesn’t touch ChatGPT. What he won’t do is let AI write the archive itself. When he built out This Day in Baseball’s articles, he’d go find the opposing pitcher, the conditions, an old quote from the game, rather than stopping at the bare fact. “What I’m really trying to do is bring authentic pieces to people, and AI doesn’t really do that,” he says.
He’s close to finishing a book now too. It’s a “this day in baseball” reference, organized team by team, tied directly back into the site, so a date links straight to the broadcast or player page on Classic Baseball Broadcasts.
Tom’s traffic model got taken apart by AI search almost overnight. What replaced it wasn’t a bigger content operation, but a smaller one, built on direct relationships and recurring revenue instead of pageviews.
If you’re building something people would pay to belong to, MemberPress’s membership and corporate account tools are built to run both the individual and the B2B side of that. Current plans are on the pricing page.
You can find Tom and the archive at Classic Baseball Broadcasts, or connect with him directly on LinkedIn. He says he’s happy to talk baseball, business, or both.
Want to learn from more entrepreneurs like this? Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the rest of our Business Founder Series, where we sit down with online business owners to hear how they got started, what’s working, and what they’ve learned along the way.
Add a Comment