Website: Fanboom

Interview With: Thomas Caporaso

What is your background and qualifications?

I am a seasoned online marketer with loyalty, continuity, subscription and membership experience.  My specialties include online member generation, product development, SEM/SEO, e-commerce, and new partner generation.  I have built programs for many leading brands like AIG, Victoria’s Secret, AAA, Citibank and AOL to help them either acquire, retain, or monetize their customer base.

I am also a passionate sports fan and follow many different teams and sports

What does your website do?

FanBoom puts the power of sports information in your hands. At FanBoom you can track all of your favorite teams, and writers (national and local), read the best of the sports blogs, and interact with robust community of fans of your favorite teams. Our goal is to build a portal of sports information that serve up Your Sports, Your Way, so you won’t have to go anywhere else.

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

Our site currently generates revenue through ads.  We recently signed a deal to be in the Burst Media network.  We are also working with other solo sponsors.

How have your marketed your site?

We have created a blog network (blogs.FanBoom.com) that currently has six different sports (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, nascar, and hockey).  We also posts many of our articles to the large sports focused blog networks.  Many of these posts have generated significant organic traffic for us. Killerstartups.com also did a great review of our site.

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

We recently received a very small round of Angel investment

Are you currently looking for funding?

We are currently looking to help fund our marketing plans.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Ruby on Rails

What is your favorite feature on your website?

My Boom – a very easy point and click menu that allows you to pick your sports and team so you only get the news related to the teams that you want to read about each day.

If you ran Espn, Cbssports, Cnnsi, etc, besides your website what sports website would you acquire?

I would focus on the team specific blogs that are written by passionate fans.  One of our strategies is to build out our blog network by working with these team specific blogs.  We like the angle that a passionate fan writes from which ultimately drives comments and feedback from people who read it. 

That back and forth discussion is what sports is all about.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

Yes – sports news and information will be completely managed by the consumer.  Sports fans don’t want to be spoon fed lots of irrelevant content, they want to have a deep and wide view of the teams that they follow.  We plan to be at the forefront of that conversion and completely hand over the keys to that content to the consumer who can do with it what they want.