Website: www.sportspyder.com
Interview With: Dallas Devries
How many founders does Sports Spyder have and what are there names?
Two brothers — Dallas DeVries and Derek DeVries
What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?
I have a background in computer and systems engineering and Derek in fine arts. We ended up working together at a few startups together out of school. We’ve gained most of our technology experience working for these fast growing startup companies, and even went through a big acquisition on one of them.
What does your website do?
SportSpyder aggregates over 2000 news sources to a single location. Most of the sources show up on SportSpyder within an hour of when they are posted. People can use SportSpyder to comment, vote on, and subscribe to the articles we aggregate.
When did you launch?
February 2003. The site has gone through quite a few iterations since.
How have you built your community?
Sportspyder.com was built out of metsny.com. I orginally came up with the idea when I got sick of visiting a dozen sites to see if they were updated with Mets news. This was back when RSS was relatively new, and not widely adopted by mainstream news websites. Metsny.com was relatively successful, and we thought — why not do this for all the major sports teams? Our community now is largely NY sports fans but its starting to spread quickly to other areas.
What types of marketing do you utilize?
Mostly word of mouth. However we give webmasters the ability to easily include headlines into their website and many people have found us this way. SBnation also uses our RSS feeds in many of their blogs for displaying headlines for their specific team.
Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?
We created an online store to for each team using Amazon Affiliates. We have several ad providers: Tribal Fusion, Value Click, Burst Media, Casale Media and Google Ads. We are testing driving a site called Pubmatic which is suppose to optimize all your different ad networks. They are in beta but in my opinion but could end up being a valuable resource.
Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?
Self funded. Our startup costs are purposefully minimal, with the biggest cost being the effort we have spent developing the site in our spare time.
Are you looking for more funding?
We aren’t actively looking for funding but if the right opportunity presented itself we would consider it.
What is your favorite feature on your site?
Honestly getting my Mets news from dozens of sources within an hour or so of it being posted anywhere. This is why I started the site and why I think people keep coming back. Our search engine is pretty cool too, as you can search about 200,000 sports articles from the last six weeks.
What type(s) of technology do you use?
We started in PHP and migrated to the Ruby On Rails framework when it came out of beta. Derek has recently completed a book titled “Rails for PHP Developers,” which is in part due to experience working on the site.
Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?
Over the last eighteen months I have seen the sports blogging industry explode. When we initially started SportSpyder a lot of teams didn’t have much news outside of the major news networks. Now there are several great alternatives to the mainstream sites. Almost every mainstream site has added sports blogging of their own over the last year. I predict that decreasing revenues with print papers will result in us relying more on networks like SBnation and MVN for sports news. We hope that in the future that SportSpyder will increasingly become the gateway to for accessing and finding all the best sports content.
STN’s Take:
There is nothing better then a person with passion building a website for exactly for what they want. We can’t remember where we read it but a very successful venture capitalist said that he would only invest in a company where the founders are building something they would use on a day to day basis. This is great advice for any entrepreneur. Dallas has used his passion along with his brother to build the best sports aggregation site out there. There is really no reason anyone should not be using this site if they like to follow their team’s news on a daily.
We do have a few suggestions for them though. The first is that they need to do a better job of indexing their individual news pages. On the comment page they just have each individual article indexed with a number. We would like to see that page indexed with the title of the article. We think they will be very surprised by the new amount of search engine traffic they get when people search certain key words if they make that change. Odds are they will come up higher then all the dumb newspapers out there that haven’t hired a search engine optimization consultant. We would also like to see the comment page come up when one clicks on the page for news like the way Digg and Ballhype do it. This reminds people to come back and comment about the article and create a community feel. Along with putting the comment system in front of the reader more, they need to give people a reason to comment by setting up a system that rewards the top commenters.
