Fox Sports decided to run with a story on the popular Matt Leinart Drunk Pictures floating around the internet that originated at The Dirty. Here is the article that Fox Sports has on the subject.

It seems like they should have just reported on the story and linked to the pictures or not put the pictures up at all. We all know there are blogs all over the internet that use photos like this to get attention. In the early days pictures like these propelled Deadspin to the number one blog on the internet. I think its real interesting that there is not an author on the Fox Sports article. It’s almost like some editor desperate for page views wanted to do a story but none of his writers wanted to do it.  Probably because they have integrity.

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: www.cobrabrigade.com

Interview With: Jack Cobra

When did you start Cobra Brigade?

I believe May 12, 2006 was our ‘official launch date’.

What made you start it?

I used to write at another site but left because of a disagreement. I asked a few of my friends (Buck Rampage, Cpt. Morgan and Bruce Paine) who know about certain sports than I do, to come along and help me out. They obliged and we were off and running.

I first started blogging because I would send out these mass emails to friends about the way the Cubs, Bulls and Indiana University were playing…..after awhile, and some good feedback, I figured I had enough to give my opinion to the masses.

The other guys on the site probably started writing because they were tired of me asking them to help out. They are full of information and we’re lucky they take the time out from their busy lives to write.

What is your background?

Um…I’ve always liked to read and write. Other than that, I don’t have any writing experience. Buck (engineer) and I (logistician) are government (civilian) employees. Cpt. Morgan is a Podiatrist in Rhode Island and ran the sports website at the college we attended. Bruce Paine is a stone mason with a History Degree from IU.

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

We blog for fun. The goal of our blog is to make our readers think and keep them entertained. We don’t have any aspirations to do anything but that.

What was your tipping point? What put you on the map?

I had a lot of readers come over from where I used to write, so that was helpful. I think the post that ‘put us on the map’ at Cobra Brigade was probably Paine’s eloquent posts on the IU football program and former IU Football Coach Terry Hoeppner. We provide quality content and that helps out just as much as one post ‘putting us on the map’. We’ve been lucky enough to have been ‘linked to’ by Deadspin enough that new and old readers know what we’re about at this point.

How does the Blog By Fans partnership work? If someone wanted to be apart of the network, what would they have to do?

Um…we all do ‘what we do’. There really aren’t any stipulations other than writing about sports and writing quality posts. If you want to be part of the network you can contact Brian at tryouts@blogsbyfans.com

What type of blogging software do you use?

Movable Type

What ad network(s) do you use?

You’d have to ask Brian, he takes care of all of that.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

Not that much. Since we are all friends we’ve just ‘pooled’ the money and opened up an investing account. I’m not sure what we plan on doing with the small sum later, but maybe we’ll try to help out those less fortunate than us….or just spend it on beer.

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 if we could get an outside consultant to look at our writing and let us know what should be improved, that would be best.

What are some of your favorite sports blogs?

Favorites: Storming the Floor, YAYSports, Moderately Cerebral Bias, StopMikeLupica, Deadspin, The Sports Hernia, The Serious Tip, Epic Carnival and all of the BlogsByFans sites.

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

Drug testing of all bloggers…..

STN’s Take:

We really like Jack’s passion for blogging. You can tell he enjoys the interaction and writing and that’s really all he needs in return. The Blog By Fans Network has attracted some great writers and they have a nice thing going there.

We see that he did a redesign from the time that we interviewed him and now and it looks great. This template could possibly start a new blogging trend at some point. We like that you can click on the different latest stories and the page doesn’t have to refresh. It is just as easy as scrolling down the page but looks better. We would like to see some better design then just the solid black background and the template could look even better.

Website: www.freethefan.com

Interview with: Dan Myers

How many founders does Free the Fan have and what are there names?

Founders: Dan Myers and Derek Tabacco

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

Dan Myers: Worked in television and media industry for the last 10 years. Myers has held roles in both marketing and programming for numerous television networks and studios including Starz Movie Channels, Disney, Warner Bros., HDNet, NBC Sports, SportsNet New York, MSG, and other various regional sports networks. Myers experience in Sports programming and Marketing along with recent work in New Media led him to develop a next generation social network for sports fans.

Derek Tabacco: At LocateStock.com, Tabacco has helped to create a two unique software platforms, The Matador and Equity Finance Exchange Trader. LocateStock.com is one of the world’s first electronic securities lending portals that modernizes and simplifies the Securities Finance Industry. Tabacco has used his technological resources and his love of sports to bring Free The Fan to life.

What does your website do?

FreeTheFan.com is a competitive social community for sports fans. We offer Quick Picks, intuitive fantasy games that eliminate time consuming drafts and trades by enabling users to compete on a level playing field. Free The Fan empowers fans to share their opinions on the hottest topics in sports with videos, blogs and debate topics. Fans compete for prizes by winning Quick Picks games or by scoring participation points in the community.

When did you launch?

March 2007

Has it been easy or hard to build your community?

Our community has been at times easy to build, however maintaining an active audience of users can be difficult. We have enhanced the user experience over time to grow with our audience and their needs. There are basically two types of users, passive and active. Your feature set has to appeal not only to those persons that will try out all the bells and whistles but also to those who just want to stand back and take it all in. Just because someone likes sports doesn’t mean that they will actively upload videos or post a rant about this weekend’s game. You have to find a group of users that will actively contribute to the community then the others will be enticed to drop in to see what’s going on.

What types of marketing do you do?

We create a 30 minute television program on SportsNet NY. In this weekly sports report we cover the greater NY area High School Sports scene, driving young sports fans to our community. We also do SEM through google and yahoo.

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

Our advertising is through ValueClick and Google. We also sell sponsorships of our games and contests, such as with current prize partner, Overstock.com. We are actively building partnerships with other sports websites that would like to utilize our Quick Picks Fantasy platform.

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

Angel

Are you looking for more funding?

Yes, We would like to raise new capital to build out our core infrastructure, further develop our game applications and create partnerships with other sports portals and media companies.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

Quick Picks fantasy games were developed after we launched based upon a problem we wanted to solve in the space. We felt that many people lost interest in fantasy leagues when points got lopsided or injuries decimated teams, so we created a proprietary platform to provide a new form of fantasy gaming. This “social” component of Quick Picks allows users to interact with friends while competing for weekly prizes. It takes just 2:00 minutes to play, but choosing your team is a whole new challenge.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

The mobile space is still largely untapped. The Web 2.0 era has ushered in many new applications, features and communities however this has yet to truly be carried out across multiple devices. Wireless carriers are opening up for more expansion with mobile applications such as the upcoming developer’s kit for Iphone and the Google Android SDK. I think that the question for any technology company is how you can create unique applications that take advantage of the platforms that people use most frequently. I think you will see the simplicity of the web 2.0 user interface be carried out by savvy companies into the mobile and gaming space. We must deliver the experience when the users want it, where they want it. Applications must be tight, intuitive and fun. You are competing for attention with a myriad of other forms of entertainment and distractions.

STN’s Take:

While creating an account with Free the Fan we found the user interface to be very easy to use. We like how it was really simple to build out a profile by just clicking the boxes. The one thing they didn’t have when we set up was a tool that allowed them to invite all our contacts in our email address by typing in our username and password. We really think this is a must have for all social networks. If you get a person that signs up for Free the Fan and is really psyched about it, you need to give the person the tools to reach as many people at once.

The sports social network space is extraordinary crowded space at the moment. We have already covered 9 sports social networks on this site. Like I have said before when a social network is launched it needs a community to launch with it. Friends and family aren’t enough. We like that they are trying to involve the high school aspect as one can see by viewing this video: http://www.freethefan.com/contests. We think this is their best asset and they need to use it to their advantage. They need to market some type of contest and get the word out to the high school players. If they have the money, maybe paying the players a small amount of money to use the site for a month might be a good idea as well.

Source: The Big Lead

In general between November and December overall sports traffic was down due to the holidays or maybe blogs are stealing away traffic.  Nah, its probably the holidays.  The NFL, NBA, and MLB sites where the only ones that had increases and they were pretty modest.  It would be great if we could get our hands on the full report so we could do a more detailed post.  If you are reading this and have access to the Comscore report, send it over.

*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.

When we compare this list from November to December, we think it is much more accurate.  Newcomers to the list are Mets Blog, Awful Announcing, Busted Coverage, Epic Carnival, Minor League Ball, USS Mariner, Fire Joe Morgan, and Blogging the Boys.  Most of these blogs are are established except for Busted Coverage and Epic Carnival which have been launched in the last couple of months.  Busted Coverage really “busted” on the scene with their NCAA tournament for ranking the top sports blog by fan vote and Fire Joe Morgan won.  It will be interesting to see if they can stay on the list.

Sportsnetwork.com has announced its ongoing expansion plans due to its amazing growth in 2007. Their corporate office is located in Hatboro, Pa and they now have affiliate offices located in Los Angeles, London, Stockholm, New Delhi, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro with others to be announced as they head into the first quarter of the new year. “As our client base has increased domestically and internationally,” stated Ken Zajac, Sales Director for TSN, “it has, for obvious reasons, become incumbent upon us to magnify and enhance our efforts on a global basis regarding everything from content to technology.

“Further,” he continued, “our depth of coverage is not only going to be escalated but it will be augmented by technology that allows for facile conversion and transition from use of any other existing service seamlessly over a short period of time.”

“The technology employed in this effort,” added Bruce Michaels, Director of Technology for The Sports Network, “is a combination of the efforts of our own staff and that of XML Team, our long time exclusive partner and, easily, the most advanced organization in the nation when it comes to XML and SportsML.”

The Sports Network is the nation’s foremost international real-time sports wire service furnishing a plethora of content on a 24/7 basis using state-of- the-art technology. TSN’s website, www.sportsnetwork.com, contains voluminous proprietary sports news data that is available to its clients as well and includes, but is not limited to, scores, trends, analysis, news, features, statistics, pre and post-game reports, box scores, historical data, and very much more.

Some of The Sports Network clients include:

Google, United Press (UPI), CBS/Viacom, IBS/NBC, EarthLink/PeoplePC, WorldNow, Score Cable Network, Cox Interactive, Tribune Media, McClatchey, Lexis*Nexis, Comtex, Yellow Brix, Sports Network Canada, Westwood One, CanWest Interactive (Canada), Toronto Star, Metro Source, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Learfield Communications, Denver Post, Clear Channel, CableVision (Optimum Online), Armed Forces Radio and TV Network, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC)

As sports become more popular on the internet, demand for content delivery services will constantly expand. Sports websites that can figure out how to create original content around their delivered content will succeed the most. Original content will always be king on the internet.

Website: www.mlbtraderumors.com

Interview With: Tim Dierkes

When did you start MLB Trade Rumors?

November of 2005.

What made you start it?

I had first started a fantasy site, RotoAuthority.com. I found myself equally if not more interested in hot stove info, and it didn’t seem to belong on the fantasy site.

What is your background?

I graduated from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. I worked in search engine marketing from graduation to present.

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

Both, but I am definitely trying to make it a career. My goal is to become a full-time blogger for at least a few years and see where it takes me. It would be cool to accumulate a solid network of inside sources over the next 10-15 years, maybe get a few good exclusives here and there.

What was your tipping point? What put you on the map?

Probably the 2006 July trading deadline, when I took the day off work and covered rumors nonstop. A lot of new readers came to the site and stuck around.

MLB Trade Rumors is a crowded space especially since you are directly competing with the big media guys. How have you been able to separate yourself from the pack?

One thing big media sites seem reluctant to do is link out to other big media sites. I have no such restrictions, so I’m able to aggregate every published rumor out there in one easy-to-read format.

What type of blogging software do you use?

TypePad.

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

It will be gradual, but the Internet will overtake print media as the top medium for sports news in my lifetime. The turnaround for getting news into the newspaper is just too long for people these days. It may be the same journalists breaking the stories, but more and more of them will do so on their blogs minutes after getting the scoop.

STN’s Take:

One can tell by looking at MLB Trade Rumors that Tim is an extraordinarily hard worker. We are really glad we created our STN Top 25 Sports Bloggers List because we didn’t even know about his blog. He does a great job of getting all the information around the web and keeping it up do date on a hourly basis. He briefly mentions that since college he has worked in Search Engine Marketing and it makes sense because every time you search “MLB Trade Rumor” or “San Francisco Trade Rumor” in Google he is either first or second. We would have to say that so far Tim is the #1 free agent at this point in the blogging world. With the kind of traffic and the type of worker he is, a media company would be stupid not to snatch him up. Maybe he has had offers or maybe he just wants to go at it alone.

If one wants to find out info about baseball trade rumors, there is only one place to go, MLB Trade Rumors.

Welcome to Sports Tech Now. We hope you continue to enjoy your stay. Sports Tech Now is a website that brings the business, technology, and the innovation of sport to one site. Our goal is to make Sports Tech Now the number one destination for people looking for new and interesting things in the world of sports online.

For the launch we feature 5 new websites in the sports industry and we were able to track down the founders for interviews.

We are also featuring 2 blogs, and we interviewed the person who had a hand in starting both.

Featured Websites:

Draft Mix
Play Coed
Picktastic
Sports Two
Fan Bunker

Featured Blogs:

With Leather
Kissing Suzy Kolber

Source: (The Big Lead)

Like all ratings and traffic ranking sites numbers like these are not necessarily accurate.  Our goal here is to bring the best numbers possible.  Through our research we find that Comscore seems to be the best with the large sites.  Luckily The Big Lead publishes these numbers because we inquired with Comscore and they said it cost $55,000 a year to have access to these numbers.  If anyone out there has access to these numbers, please help us fill in the blanks.  Eventually our goal is to audit the top sites our self.