Website: Sports Mates
Interview With: Blair Cummins
Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?
There are two founders: Richard Austin and myself.
What are your backgrounds and qualifications?
Both Richard and I have been involved with online sports media for a number of years. We were retained by Terra Lycos in 2001 to build the official website of Anna Kournikova and have worked on projects for clients such as Nike/Manchester United and SFX Sports.
Richard was one of the founders of WTAWorld.com (now TennisForum.com) and MensTennisForums.com, the two largest online professional tennis fan communities in the world, and was also hired as a consultant to Rivals.com in its first incarnation to help develop its tennis content channel.
Our full bios are available at http://www.sportsmatesinc.com/about/management.
What does your website do?
SportsMates is a social networking service that is focused on connecting sports fans around their favorite sports, leagues, teams and players. Our social networking platform has the following features:
- Member profiles.
- Internal email.
- Message boards.
- Photo galleries.
- Clubs (including user-created clubs).
- Blog aggregation.
- Link directories.
- Search.
- Live chat.
How have your marketed your site?
We have not engaged in much “traditional” marketing. Instead, we have chosen to recruit or acquire existing online sports communities or properties and to migrate their communities onto SportsMates.
For instance, InfiernoRojo.com is one of the most popular fan sites for the Independiente soccer club in Argentina. When we launched PorDeporte (http://www.pordeporte.com/), our Spanish-language sports social network, we arranged for their 19,000+ member community to move to PorDeporte (http://clubs.pordeporte.com/infiernorojo).
How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?
We generate revenue in three ways:
1. The sale of advertising and sponsorships. Example: K-Swiss is the lead sponsor of Kournikova.com and its community on SportsMates (http://clubs.sportsmates.com/kournikova).
2. Services. Example: We host Gillette’s official community for the Gillette Young Guns NASCAR drivers on SportsMates (http://clubs.sportsmates.com/gilletteyoungguns).
3. We are in the process of finalizing agreements to handle advertising sales and business development for other online sports properties/communities.
In everything we do, our primary goal is to connect advertisers, sponsors and other sports industry players with fans in ways that are meaningful to all parties.
We use Google AdSense in some places and are preparing to fill remnant inventory with ads from one or more ad networks but thus far, we are most interested in dealing directly with advertisers and sponsors so that we can develop campaigns that go beyond the traditional CPM/CPC models.
Funding?
We have been primarily self-funded but did take a small amount of funding from the company’s outside director more than a year ago.
Are you currently looking for funding?
We are currently exploring the possibility of raising capital.
What type(s) of technology do you use?
SportsMates is built on a proprietary social networking platform that we developed from scratch. It is built on PHP and PostgreSQL and we’re using open-source technologies like memcached for performance and scaling.
What is your favorite feature on your website?
The message boards. We became involved with sports media back when the message board was the “social network” and message board communities are still one of the most popular ways sports fans connect and communicate online.
Because of this, we have made a considerable effort to make sure that our message board functionality is second-to-none. You can see the level of customization that we permit on some of the communities I linked to above.
Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?
While I wouldn’t call this a bold prediction, I would note that the business of sport, like so many industries, is going through considerable change. Markets are fragmented and fans are often more difficult to reach and retain. I believe that companies who understand this and who can successfully help entities in the sports industry leverage technology to deal with these changes have the best opportunity for success.
