I did pay for the odds data that was here. I paid every year. I still would if the option was available at the same cost. The draw odds made up about 3% of the pageviews and traffic here on the site per year. I served about 1-1.5 million pages per year in the odds section. I guess that's why I'm not super eager to try and create something myself......there ain't no money to be made by providing the service for free. I broke about even each year after paying for the service.
For MonsterMuleys.com, ya it's a bummer that the service went away from you guys, but there is nothing that can be done. Jon offered me the option to keep the pay service on my site, but I still had to pay for it, plus charge you all the full price to use it, which in the end made no sense to me.
In the end, the demand really wasn't that great for the service when it was free anyway, it can only get worse when asking people to pay.
The vast majority of hunters in the world don't hunt but one or two hunts and year, so paying for draw odds probably isn't high on their list. I think it's a select few who really "need" to look at lots of odds data for many different states. That's my opinion anyway. And, I'm betting that the different state agencies out there will begin building better systems of delivering the odds data, rather than just dumping them in a PDF file.
Like I said, sorry it went away, but it's out of my hands completely. I knew when I entered into the deal with Jon that this was a possibilty. It's hard to make money with a website. It just isn't like the commercials that come on at 2 o'clock in the morning say. Jon had hoped to make it on advertising, but it takes a LOT of traffic to generate a few dollars.
I have thought a lot about what I could do to replace them in a format similar to before, but there is nothing. It's a service that takes a lot of time to update and maintain every year, and demand isn't high enough to offer it for free and hope to pay bills with ad dollars.
Brian Latturner
MonsterMuleys.com