Website: Ninja Tickets
 
Interview With:  Cliff Mark

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?
 
Our CTO and co-founder is Dan Marsh; he can program anything.

What is your background and qualifications?
 
I heard once that entrepreneurship is something you’re born with, not something you study. I think this describes me pretty well but in terms of tangible qualifications, I graduated from American University with a Math and Philosophy background, and I’m enrolled in University of Maryland Business School.  Dan has an incredible resume; I think he once hacked into the Kremlin on a dare.

What does your website do?
 
Say you need some tickets to a hot concert or sporting event, how do you get them?  Do you go to ticketmaster to see if there are any left, then check out stubhub, ticketsnow, and maybe an auction site?  That’s how I used to do it, and I decided there had to be a better way to buy event tickets.  I ended up creating NinjaTickets, which indexes numerous ticket stores across markets. In other words, you can see all the available tickets and find the best price on the best ticket, just by going to Ninjatickets.     

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?
 
We don’t charge users any fees to use our site, and the sites which we index charge no additional fees for buying through us either.  

How have your marketed your site?
 
You name it, we’ve tried it.  I have been yelled at by parking police for putting flyers on cars, we’ve had radio ads, ad words, redirects and we have even sent out some unsolicited emails (we don’t do that anymore though).  I’ve found that just being a member of the community has yielded the highest ROI for us.  

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?
 
Most of our funding comes from friends and family. 

Are You currently looking for funding?
 
That’s a tough question, but the answer is yes.  Our goal is to raise about $500,000 dollars in the next three months. 

What type(s) of technology do you use?
 
We program in python, and run the site on LAMP. 

What is your favorite feature on your website?
 
When I use Ninjatickets to get seats at an event, I know I’m getting the best price on a ticket. That’s pretty cool.  We have a couple of unique features that makes me feel confident that I’m getting the best price, like Live Results (with a toolbar) which ensures that at the time of search, any ticket (on the sites we index) will be listed, no matter how recently added, and any sold ticket will be excluded, no matter how recently sold.  We have a patent pending for this technology.  The other great feature we have is that we rate the tickets based on value, so we look at the location of tickets within their venue, and then the price of the tickets and we assign impartial 3-star “value ratings.”
 
Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

I think in a couple of years a large number of event tickets will be bought through comparison shopping sites (just like plane tickets today).  I think we will likely see the use of RFIDs inside of basketballs, baseballs, and footballs which will enable more accurate referee calls for things like yardage, or if a ball is foul or not.

Weplay which is described as a NYC-based community site for you sports received a round of venture financing according to paidcontent.org. The round will be $4.5 million. According to Paid Content backers are Pequot Private Equity, MLB, CAA Representation, and Derek Jeter. Other athletes that are behind this include Lebron James and Peyton Manning. That is some great star power and it will be interesting to see how WePlay actually makes money.

It looks like they will own every video uploaded to the site so they are counting on getting footage of a Lebron James type player at age 9 or 10 and then they will be able to sell the footage later.

Website:  Rotowhine

Interview With:  Jeff Andriesse

How many founders does Rotowhine have and what are their names?

Rotowhine was founded by me (Jeff Andriesse) and Greg Fox.

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

Greg and I both have backgrounds as sports information directors for universities, where we did a lot of things that have helped us make the transition to Rotowhine smooth. We were both writers and editors who managed web sites. In terms of fantasy sports, it is just something he and I have done for a while now. We are pretty insane about it. That’s probably helped us as well. If we were rational, this would never have gotten off the ground.

What does your website do?

We are a glorified blog, in essence. We each write long columns and short blog posts. We also have podcasts and a message board.

When did you launch?

We launched in July of 2007.

How have you built your community?

Word of mouth through friends and family to start out. We have slowly gotten hits through Google Ad placement and some link sharing. We are still in the infant stages of this thing. Our budget is very small for advertising, so we are biding our time and hoping that we get noticed. You have to really believe in your content for that to happen.  There has been a lot of positive feedback, so that’s a good sign. Our goal is to be one of those Bookmarks everyone goes to during downtime at work.

What types of marketing do you utilize?

Google Ads, primarily.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

We have no revenue streams. We are not selling fantasy game playing or gambling, merely providing content. Thinking about Rotowhine actually producing consistent revenue seems very far away. That said, it has never been why we started this. Rotowhine actually began several years ago with a blog at Blogspot and we have only recently launched the site as it looks now. In short, it is a labor of love. We’re both keeping our day jobs for the moment.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

We are completely self funded.

Are you looking for more funding?

Ideally, we will find investors who can enable us to do some aggressive marketing. Right now we are just looking to get noticed by the right people who may like what we’re doing enough to either use our content on their sites or hire us to write. We just entered into a deal with FantasyFanatics.com to produce a weekly fantasy basketball column for them in exchange for placing their RSS feed on our web site.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

We have advertised for guest writers, and while we have only used one person’s submissions thus far, I think our Guest Column program has a lot of potential. We aren’t paying, but we want to become a web site that is more than just two people writing everything. Our guest columns allow us to start building a real community. With our backgrounds, we are pretty picky as to who we give a column to. Nate Sullivan is a guy we met through this web site, and he’s submitted some stuff. He’s a very good young writer. We’d love to build a stable of columnists and bloggers. Right now, in fact, we are starting a world-wide search for a blogger who can take over the Daily Whine section of our site and allow Greg and I to focus on columns and special features.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fine work of my colleague Chris Bernardi, our webmaster. He’s made the site what it is: much more than a blog. We use WordPress for our content management but thanks to Chris we’ve incorporated it into a unique-looking site. We have podcast and message board capabilities, so we’ve incorporated a lot of things into the site.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

As long as there are servers humming, sports will thrive on the web. Fantasy sports is a booming hobby with web sites galore. Our task is daunting in the face of so much quantity and quality. I don’t think any prediction regarding fantasy sports would be bold at this point. Anything is possible. It is an exciting time.

Website: The Sand Trap

Interview With: Erik Barzeski

When did you start The Sand Trap?

The Sand Trap launched in August, 2004, though I’d been planning to start the site for a few months prior.

What made you start it?

I had planned to “glom on” to an existing golf site, as a writer, and spent several months looking around and trying to find sites that interested me. Unfortunately, none of the sites had quite the focus I wanted – they were either oriented solely on one thing, were run by one person who intended to keep it that way, or – frankly – were too amateurish. By no means am I a professional journalist, but I’ve played one several times throughout my life.

What is your background?

You mean aside from my degrees in medicinal chemistry, French, and computer science? <grin> Despite what I told my high school English teacher, I’ve made my career writing for the most part. Sometimes it’s been writing programming code, but more often it’s been writing. I ran an electronic magazine called “Apple Wizards” which reviewed Mac hardware and software and covered Mac-related topics in the late 1990s. I was Editor-in-Chief of SegaWeb, a games news/reviews site after that. I’ve written reviews for MacAddict and had a column at a site called MacOpinion for awhile. In about 2002, I moved into programming and consulting.

Nowadays I still find myself doing the same general things as I was in 2002 – consulting, programming, development, writing.

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career? What is your goal with this blog?

I maintain a personal blog at http://nslog.com. I blog for fun, enrichment, and as one of my favorite Mac bloggers says, “so google can index my brain.”

Though The Sand Trap is powered by WordPress, a blogging package, I’ve tried to push it into a realm where it’s not so much considered a “blog” as it is an electronic magazine. I think “golf blogs” have a bad name as flippant, personal, insignificant golf diaries, as in “today I went out and shot 77 with two birdies…”.

I think The Sand Trap is so much more than that. We publish the best reviews of golf equipment you’ll find anywhere, bar none. We cover the world of golf, not just what’s happening with our own games or in our own neighborhoods, and we’re a staff of eight, not one or two. We view ourselves as a sort of electronic magazine, as I’ve said, and very few other golf blogs seem to share in that approach.

That’s not to say that the other golf blogs aren’t interesting – I subscribe to and read about 50, after all – but just that they aren’t going about it quite the same way we are.

What type of blogging software do you use?

WordPress with a fair number of plugins and a custom theme I’ve built along with some other tweaks. The appearance of the site hasn’t changed, but a little over a year ago we moved the site from MovableType to WordPress, and thus far have been very happy with the move.

What ad network(s) do you use?

We don’t rely on an ad network. Titleist has been sponsoring the site for most of the time we’ve been around, and our click-through numbers are high enough that they keep coming back. We’re happy to have them, both as a
stable partner and on a personal level, because I’ve always appreciated and used Titleist equipment.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

Enough to pay the bills and a little extra for staff rewards like our yearly Newport Cup. I make a living doing software and web consulting, and each member of our staff earns their own living as well. I think that if we ever became worried about making money with The Sand Trap, some of the appeal and joy of writing for the site would be lost. Currently, I’m happy to keep it a
site for people who are passionate about golf – myself included – to share their thoughts with a large audience.

If you could get something for free to help you out with your blog, what would it be? (Ex: design, marketing, ad optimization, etc)

I think we’re doing fairly well and we’ve been on an upward climb in viewers, listeners, and more since launch. I said before that the site hasn’t changed much in appearance for several years, so I’m looking to redesign the site at some point, but the current site works quite well for now.

What are some of your favorite blogs?

I subscribe to about 200 blogs, and I have favorites in every category. Photography, golf, technology, Apple, humor… I’ve got all the topics in which I’m interested covered.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

No bold predictions. I think blogging is mature, and yet diversifying at the same time. We see corporate blogs and we see blogs about someone’s cats, yet both are called “blogs.”

Everyone from the NFL to the PGA Tour has done more with real-time statistics and broadcasts online lately, and I’m happy to see that trend. I think it can enrich sports viewing or bring sports viewing to people who can’t get to a TV because they’re stuck at work or something.

But bold? No, I’m sorry, I don’t have anything for you there. I’m fairly happy in the knowledge that technology marches on.

Website: East Windup Chronicle

Interview with: Aaron Shinsano

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

Aaron Shinsano
Jackson Broder

What is your background and qualifications?

I worked at a daily newspaper in Oakland, CA for five years. Jackson works part time as a scout for the Twins. We both live in Asia, me in Korea, he in Taiwan. We both came here on masters programs and ended up teaching English. We both teach at colleges. I only do 12 hours teaching a week, so I have plenty of time to write. For better or for worse.

What is your website about?

Firstly we cover baseball as it relates to Asia, secondly we cover anything else related to Asia. Thirdly we cover anything as it relates to anything.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

We’ve gotten a few freelance writing jobs via the site, and just recently I started what will be a regular shift at MLB Traderumors (which is how I first read Sports Tech Now) that pays a little. Jackson just got hired to write sports for the Taipei Times.

We use Google AdSense which generates about ten big ones a month and we recently got our first non-ad network ad through Vividseats.com.

At first I was pretty pro-active about sending stuff out and trying to get linked to. MLB Trade Rumors supported us early on and it brought a huge influx of people to our site. Aaron Gleeman also wrote us up. But now, I’m at ease about the whole thing. Actually a big turning point was reading something Matt from Metsblog said on this site — that good writing will find an audience. It seems obvious, but it’s very true. Once I got that into my head I stopped worrying about stats and comments and just put the writing out there…hoping it would land somewhere. We’ve grown more since then.

What type(s) of blog platform do you use?

Wordpress

It’s a little corny to say, but I love the blog medium and am glad to be a part of it. I say this with some regret, but I think newspaper journalism is a sinking ship. Most of the people I worked with have had their contracts bought out or have been laid off, some more than once. I think for the immediate future we’ll see a continuation of what’s happening now — newspapers will be bought up and owned by fewer and fewer people, and the quality will continue to decline. Newspapers will be read for nostalgic purposes only, and most writers will become independent publishers. The word blog might go by the wasteside, but it’ll essentially be the same thing.

Sportme, which was previously featured on Sports Tech Now is starting 2008 with an investment out of the VC-fund “Kreativwirtschaft“.  At the end of 2007, business angels, Peter Kabel and Maximilian Thyssen joined the investing team of – Oliver Jung, Mountain Super Angel AG, ECONA and Alexander Artopé as sportme’s newest investors. The above group increased their investment amounts and took IBB in to their investor team to financially hedge sportme in the long term.

IBB provides risk capital to selected young technology companies in Berlin. The risk capital of the sportme investment is obtained by IBB and the VC-fund “Kreativwirtschaft”, which is particularly available for companies located in Berlin.

Sportme is the first company to be supported by the IBB risk capital funds. sportme appears as a young and creative company with the high potential for growth and is therefore a suitable partner for IBB. In order to work closer with its new investor’s sportme has relocated its office from Frankfurt to Berlin.

“We are very pleased to be working with IBB and are energized by their confidence in sportme and its founding team. In addition to expanding the platform and our marketing efforts, sportme will invest the new risk capital in to monetary assessments and commercialization of the platform,“ said Dani Warshager, International Director of sportme.

Website: Cuzoogle

Interview With: Michael Cusden

When did you start your blog?

Cuzoogle originally started in 2006 and have had many face lifts and hosts. It was on msn, then moved to the free wordpress host and as of this year it is on it’s own host.

What made you start it?

Needed a creative outlet and a good way for my friends and family to keep up with me when I moved to the East coast of Canada. It has evolved into and site where I mostly discuss my favourite team, the Raptors.

What is your background?

Canadian, parents are Brits.

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career?

Mostly for fun but it is slowly turning into a career.

What is your goal with this blog?

To keep up to date with marketing trends, improve my writing and grow the blog into something that brings in some money on the side.

What was your tipping point?

Last year some random post I did made it on the front page of Fark and my site exploded, 10k unique hits in one day.

What put you on the map?

The blog has made SI.com’s extra mustard twice and got on the front page of Fark once.

What type of blogging software do you use?

Wordpress

What ad network(s) do you use?

google, kontera, bidvertise, entrecard

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

200$ average

If you could get something for free to help you out with your blog, what would it be? (Ex: design, marketing, ad optimization, etc)

A personalized template

What are some of your favorite blogs?

The Arsenalist, Brahsome, Busted Coverage, Joe Tech, The Dinosity.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

It can only get better.

Website: Sporting Connections

Interview With: Oscar Boult

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

No, I was the only founder of the site. The site was originally launched by a developer in Dec 2006 after 3 months of planning. The developer did a runner when he realised the complexity I was looking for and I lost a fair amount of money. Not to be deterred, I went through 3 more developers and another 6 months of hassle (but fortunately not much more money, I had learnt the hard way) before finding my current developer. The first developer left the site in a basic but disfunctional state up on the internet and over the year I have seen several copycat sites. I officially relaunched it in October of 2007

What is your background and qualifications?

Having travelled the world for over 13 years and participated in so many different sports I have been lucky enough to meet some wonderful people. I noticed that one of the hardest things to do when you are trying to get involved in a sport is meet other like minded people to participate with you and at your level. It occurred to me after driving down to Brisbane for a game of golf with friends down there that it would be wonderful to be able find golf partners up here on the sunshine coast. When I started thinking about how to do that I realised that with all that modern technology out there, there was no way I could just look up someone who was interested in a game of golf…. or tennis, or going kitesurfing etc.!!!

The site is a culmination of my desire to provide a place where people can get together online for the purpose of getting out and being active; sport is the great equaliser, there is no requirement for conversation or getting to know someone immediately when playing a sport, friendships are built through a mutual enjoyment of whatever activity is chosen… hence the party line “Building friendships through sport”.

My background was as a personal trainer and gym instructor before moving into IT project management. I have no qualifications or idea regarding websites and other than designing the entire site and coming up with the idea, my developer does all the work.

What does your website do?

It is a free community site that lets you search sports profiles of the people around you and worldwide who are interested in joining you to play sports of every kind; you are also able to find training partners, sports teams (or add your own team and look for team mates) or sports communities, coaches and personal trainers. Once you have a team registered you can add team mates to your online team and players from all around the world and locally can find you easily. You are able to use an online notice board for your team members to communicate and as the team manager can email all team members via your team message system. The site also allows you to add sports events for free so people can join you for things like a game of football down the local park. The featured team for the month gives a good indication of how it works: http://www.sportingconnections.com/component/option,com_teams/task,teamhome/access,1/id,204/Itemid,57/

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

I don’t currently generate any revenue. I am waiting until I hit 5000 users before using any revenue makers

How have your marketed your site?

I have been in the local papers and been contacting sports clubs and sports societies on the internet and by phone and just cold calling

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

All self funded

What type(s) of technology do you use?

We use Joomla

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

I think that sport is moving the same way as everything else nowadays….to the internet! I feel that in the future joining clubs and meeting people for sport will be mainly done via the internet

*Kissing Suzy Kolber is hosted at kissmesuzy.blogspot.com and Kissingsuzykolber.net. Most of their traffic goes to the blogspot address so we used that address for stats. The same is true for Awful Announcing.

As you will notice in January we had a spot for Absolute Unique Visitors but this month we don’t.  Thank you to the people that sent their analytics screen shot but at this point we just don’t have time to send out emails and try to collect the data on a monthly basis. We will try to do it for the year end though.

Now on to the numbers.  The biggest number that jumps out to us is With Leather’s rise from 98987 uniques to 262323 this month.  That is quite a jump though we aren’t ready to crown them the top spot because Deadspin over all still gets more unique monthly visitors.

As always please inform us if you think you should be on the list.  For the Bloggers on the list grab this badge, link to the post, and put it up on your site to show your readers where you stand:

Website: Will Carroll Archives on Baseball Prospectus

Interview With: Will Carroll

When did you start writing?

2002.

When did you start writing for Baseball Prospectus?

Started at BP in 2003.

Have you thought about starting your own injury site separate of Baseball Prospectus?

No.

How have you been so successful gaining contacts in baseball?

I have a unique niche. I get to tell the story of the Athletic Trainers and doctors, people that work hard, have a huge impact on the game, but don’t get noticed. A high ranking executive at ESPN told me he didn’t think anyone cared about injuries aside from “play/won’t play” but I think people are just like teams. They want more, better, quicker information to make their own decisions.

Have you ever thought about going back to school and getting yourself a doctorate to shut up all the people that say you are not a real doctor when in reality you probably know these injuries better then 99% of the doctors out there?

Ha, no. I’m just a reporter. When I want a medical opinion, I’ll call one of the top docs in the world and see what they think.

How many different mainstream press outlets have you written for?

Wow, not sure. ESPN, SI, Fox, New York Times, Slate, and a ton of web sites.

Give us one player in baseball that is injured right now that will out perform his projections:

Jason Giambi

Give us one player in baseball that is injured right now that will under perform his projections:

BJ Ryan

What advice do you have for aspiring writers and bloggers out there?

Write a lot and find your own unique niche. And don’t write about injuries.

STN’s Take:

You have to like Will. He is a straight shooter and gets right to the point. For those of you that are really into fantasy baseball or like to know what is going on with every player on your team’s injury status, Will is a must read. His injury information is second to none. We have been reading him for 3 years and have used his info to make trades knowing that a player may be more or less injured then people think. His info is also good at the beginning of the season. He gives everyone a red light, yellow light, or green light. We use this information during our fantasy baseball draft to make a choice if two players are pretty close and we aren’t sure which one to pick.

Will’s information is so good we are surprised he is still writing for Baseball Prospectus full time and not a major media outlet…