According to Paid Content, Wazoo Sports has raised $2 million dollars to fund their expansion in high school sports broadcasting.  They broadcasted 88 games last year.

WazooSports.com delivers video content to the user over the Internet using the latest in streaming technology, combined with professional broadcasting technology, to ensure a quality Internet broadcast like traditional television broadcasts. Unlike traditional television  and radio, WazooSports.com is expanding the reach of athletics far beyond geographic boundaries, while contributing significantly to local schools and communities.

Previously we did an interview with Tim Dierkes of MLB Trade Rumors and mentioned that his site was the top free agent when it came to independent sports content on the internet. It looks like CBS Sportsline listened to us and has snatched up MLB Trade Rumors and featured them on their site. As you can see here, MLB Trade Rumors is featured on the front page of CBSSportsline’s Baseball Page:

We dropped Tim an email but unfortunately he can’t comment on the deal. Since he can’t, we will speculate. We assume that CBS will pay Tim x amount of dollars to syndicate his content on CBSSportsline. We actually think this is a mistake by CBS not to just to buy out Tim and make him an employee like ESPN did with Henry Abbot and True Hoop. Maybe they tried and Tim wanted too much but with CBS just syndicating his content they are missing out on Tim’s vast amount of readers that come directly to his site.

This is great news for Tim and all bloggers as more and more major media networks snatch up amateur content.  Fox Sports has already done deals with Bleacher Report and Yardbarker as we have previously reported.

Next week, Fox Sports will formally announce that they are featuring Bleacher Report content on their site. This is an outstanding example of “fan journalism” being recognized by mainstream media as a source of quality insight. 
 
Bleacher Report is thrilled that Fox Sports views this fan-generated as strong enough to be positioned alongside that of its star writers such as Ken Rosenthal, Joel Sherman and Jay Glazer.  Bleacher Report articles are already live on the site and have secured prominent placement. Take a look at these links for some examples of the Bleacher Report content featured by Fox Sports:
http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/8205942/These-QBs-have-a-lot-riding-on-their-arms
http://msn.foxsports.com/boxing/story/8206900/Flaws-aplenty-in-MMA’s-network-debut
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/8137630/Time-for-Pats-fans-to-embrace-the-dark-side

This deal with Fox Sports is the first in a series of partnerships Bleacher Report expects to announce as it continues to syndicate its content to other sources and works towards its goal of becoming the “AP of sports editorial.” 
 
Meanwhile, Bleacher Report continues to score impressive milestones.  The site is poised to crack the one million monthly unique visitors mark, with nearly 4,000 writers who have contributed a total of 30,000 original stories since going online in September 2007.

Its pretty amazing that Fox has scored two deals with both Yardbarker and Bleacher Report while no other major sports media network have done anything.  If deals like this can allow Fox to make a move in the Comscore rankings where both ESPN and Yahoo dominate, it will be intersting to see if the other networks follow suit.

Previously we featured Bleacher Report and Interviewed one of the founders, Dave Nemetz.

According to The Sports Dollar Yardbarker has partnered with Fox Sports.  The Partnership will allow Fox Sports to pull sports content from Yardbarker.

This a great move by Fox Sports as they will be able to get a ton of new content at bargain prices.  Bloggers will just be happy to get linked up by a major network.  It will be interesting to see if some other major networks follow suit.  Fox Sports also has a deal with Bleacher Report as well.

After reading a post over at Mashable regarding why more people aren’t using RSS feeds we started thinking about it and they are right. RSS is marketed horribly though we guess no one actually makes money off the RSS brand so that is probably the reason. For those of you that don’t know RSS stands for really simple syndication. Here is some background information and how to use it. RSS can easily save hours a week.

We think for sports fans RSS feeds can be extraordinarily important. For those of us that go to multiple sports websites a day and check up on our teams there is no reason not to subscribe to our teams feed whether it be in Google Reader, Google Homepage, My Yahoo, or the 100s of other readers out there. It is real easy to do and that is why we have decided to change our RSS button to an Easy RSS Button so if you haven’t subscribed to our feed go ahead and do it. We suggest all bloggers explain their RSS feeds and how they work. If you are worried about people not coming to your site just make sure you use a feed that you can monetize like feedburner. Here is ranking of the top 10 feeds in Google Reader for the US and how many subscribers they have.

1. 1,652,082 subscribers Espn.com: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news

2. 740,632 subscribers Cnnsi.com: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/si_topstories.rss

3. 723,117 subscribers Espn.com – NFL: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nfl/news

4. 639,085 subscribers Espn.com – MLB: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/mlb/news

5. 638,097 subscribers Espn.com – College Football: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/ncf/news

6. 625,727 subscribers Foxsports.com: http://msn.foxsports.com/feedout/syndicatedContent?categoryId=0

7. 582,488 subscribers Espn.com – NBA: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nba/news

8. 514,257 subscribers Espn.com – Mens College Bball: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/ncb/news

9. 118,340 subscribers Espn.com – Bill Simmons: http://sports.espn.go.com/keyword/search?searchString=bill_simmons&feed=rss&src=rss&rT=sports

10. 40,636 subscribers CBSSports.com: http://cbs.sportsline.com/partners/feeds/rss/home_news

AOL has purchased Fleaflicker for an undisclosed amount of money. Fleaflicker had one solo founder, Ori Schwartz, who built the site from the ground up. AOL and Ori have both been tight lipped on the purchase price but according to Roto Nation the price tag easily could of been high six figures or low seven figures.  Its great to see a solo founder with no venture capital or outside investment get a pay day like this.

It will be real interesting to see how AOL can scale the Fleaflicker fantasy platform.  As most people are reporting AOL purely bought the Fleaflicker product for its technology and not its users.  AOL previously was using Fan Ball for its fantasy application so this has to be a huge blow to Fan Ball.

According to Dnxpert, Mike Levy, the founder of Sportsline.com which is now CBS.Sportsline.com is preparing to announce the Open Sports Network.  Straight from the website “At OPEN Sports, we are creating the next generation social powered sports experience that combines social media and community tools with a fantasy sports gaming marketplace and traditional sports content.”

“Our goal is to create your ULTIMATE SPORTS DESTINATION… a place where you can compete against other passionate fans with next generation fantasy games, participate in a new kind of social experience around gameday, get the latest sports news and information from around the web, and become your own sports editor – organizing and seeing only the content that you care about.”

This should be real interesting to see what type of product Mike comes up with here.  He did a great job building Sportsline which was a first generation fantasy site so one can only assume the Open Sports Network will do some amazing things.

This is pure speculation here but I am thinking that much of the same team that built Sportsline is probably building Open Sports Network as we speak.  It has been a while since CBS acquired Sportsline so my guess is Mike’s non compete is about to run out.  I am sure CBS we be keeping an eye out on this one.

According to TechCrunch, Live Current Media has paid $50 million for  the exclusive right to broadcast a new Indian Cricket League’s games online.  Amazingly the Indian Premier League is on track to make $2 billion in its first year of existence.

Live Current Media owns Cricket.com so this is also a play to make Cricket.com the number one destination for Cricket online.  They will be taking Cricinfo.com head on which ESPN purchased earlier this year for $50 million.

It will be interesting to see if Live Current Media can use the Indian Premier League to steal people away from Cricinfo.  Exclusive rights for broadcast of this league should have ESPN worried about their Cricinfo investment.  It would be interesting to know how many people in India visit Cricinfo.com.  We assume it could be a very high percentage.

According to TechCrunch, Yardbarker which is basically turning into one of the largest independent sports social networks on the internet received 6 million in funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and includes investors Russ Siegelman, Ronnie Lott, Jarl Mohn, Labrador Ventures, and Baseline Ventures. 

This should give adverstisers in their network a good boost as they will probably be able to higher more sales people to sell their ads.  They have done a great job of acquiring new general blogs and athlete blogs.  They have also done a great job providing value to their blogs in the network.  It will be interesting to see if they can keep doing this once they have to worry about making a profit.

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.