Is A Link To A Website Worth $5 Million?

from the say-that-again dept

Ok, if you follow baseball even just a little bit, by now you’ve heard the news about “the trade” whereby the Yankees received Alex Rodriguez, considered by many to be the best baseball player around. While this, on the face of it, has nothing to do with technology, there was one aspect of the deal that kept bothering me. In the very last paragraph to the news report explaining the terms of the trade, they explain how the Yankees made up the difference to keep the overall value of A-Rod’s contract the same, while still having him reduce the present day value of the contract by $5 million. In exchange, they’re giving him a hotel suite for all road games and are allowing him to link to the Yankees website from his own website. Say what? How could a link be that valuable? Maybe, the hotel suites are really expensive – but it doesn’t seem so. Another ballplayer points out that such hotel suites are pretty standard and cost about $16,000 per year for a player. Over 7 years, that’s $112,000. Let’s be kind, assume he gets a really nice room, and round it up to a nice $150,000. That leaves $4.85 million for the link. Here’s a link to the Yankees website right here. Has Techdirt suddenly gone up in value by $4.85 million dollars? Do I just send an invoice to George Steinbrenner?


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Comments on “Is A Link To A Website Worth $5 Million?”

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6 Comments
bbay says:

news people

Maybe the journalist got the specifics of the technology it wrong, I’ve seen that happen once or twice.

Maybe they’re going to link from the team’s site to AR’s site. Not that that’s worth $4.5M, but at least that’s something they could actually offer (since they control the content on their website).

The other way around doesn’t make any sense, he could do that ANYway.

eeyore says:

not about money

A-Rod wanted out of Texas, and a $5 mil cut in pay to him was like one of us buying a combo meal at the golden arches. They’re playing up the website link angle because the player’s union doesn’t like to see contracts get devalued in a trade. That was what scuttled the A-Rod for Manny Ramirez deal with Boston. And Steinbrenner had to feel like he was getting something out of the deal, so they evened up the cut in pay with the “link” business. Of course it helped that Texas is ponying up 67 mil to send A-Rod packing.

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