Here is a link to my latest article, and a summary.  The article deals with the value of certain fantasy information.

Here is the article.  As most readers know by now, one of the reasons I started this site was the fact that the general information out there is either superficial, incorrect or generally of little marginal utility.

The article addresses this principle.  Let’s look at Johnny Cueto for example.  We all know he is good. So articles dealing with the fact that he is good are of little utility, simply because everyone knows it. Touting him to fantasy owners and saying “pick him up” is advice that offers no advantage to the owner.

Moreover, the utility is decreased even more by the fact that you cannot apply the advice in many instances.  In any keeper league with good owners he is already kept, in auction leagues with reserves he was certainly auctioned unless your league is weak, and in mixed leagues with waiver priority you can’t get him.

Similar comments apply to Peter Moylan and others.

The valuable information and quality advice takes it a step further or even two steps further.  Good advice is information that tells you how good he will be, or presents a dissenting opinion from the obvious fact that he is good right now. Even better is the analyst that told owners to get Cueto long before he was brought up, in the preaseason.  There are a few websites that mentioned this in the preseason, but most did not.

For example, Razzball.com runs a column where they tell you whether to buy sell or hold on a particular player based upon the type of league you are in.   Whether you agree or disagree with the actual advice is one issue, but in terms of the quality of the advice, it is far better than most.

The dissenting opinion and the timing of the advice is probably more important than the advice itself. One example in the article is the case of CJ Wilson.  Virtually every website told people that Wilson was allegedly vulnerable and that they should pick up Benoit. That advice fits exactly with the fact that everyone knows it and therefore the value is nil.

The best websites and analysts are those that present the dissenting opinion so that owners can make their own judgment; in this case they presented the evidence to produce a fully supported opinion that Wilson was not vulnerable but was well qualified to hold the job.  Moreover, this information would/should have been presented by the best analysts in the preseason when it has its highest utility.

So, I posit in the article that a good test of a website’s value is the fact that a non-obvious opinion is at least presented, and is presented far earlier than most so that the information’s utility is not completely subsumed by the fact that it is common knowledge.

This isn’t always true of course as it is not possible to apply this criteria to every player. But it is a good evaluation tool to look at how often it happened. There are many websites that virtually never have good information that goes beyond the conventional opinions, some well known and others obscure. I think these websites are useless.