Either way — and this isn’t unique to sports — community-run opinion
sites quickly devolve into message boards. That was true for
Armchair, is true for Bleacher Report, and for many many other sites
(even Digg and reddit)as well. It’s also true for products with
community-run features (typically comments). Check out the comment
threads on Deadspin and you’ll see what I mean.

That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it has to be recognized
and adapted for. Deadspin handles it by subjugating the comments.
Amazin Avenue, the Mets blog community I participate in, subjugates
the community to comments and a subsection, but at times promotes
community content to the main section and highlights the community in
well-promoted open threads.

Or you can get lucky and your community can become a bellweather.
That’s rare but it happens. Digg, reddit, Fark, MetaFilter, etc. all
fit this mold. When this happens, though, I think it’s unsustainable.
(Fark and MeFi are still big, but neither are lynchpins of the web
like they used to be.) As the community becomes more cohesive, it
tosses us ideological/cultural barriers to dissent, and the
community’s impact outside its own walls wanes.

From a business perspective, that’s not necessarily a problem. An
ideologically stats-driven baseball community site (where I fit in)
certainly has the reach and engagement to attract advertisers. But it
has to guide your product development.

In hindsight, how do you think a site like Armchair GM could thrive in today’s environment? I guess biggest comparison is Bleacher Report but not sure how big of a dent or how monetize their network really is at right now . I do like what Bleacher Report is doing which will only get better as they build their brand.

Great to see you talking digital sports again. Us sports geeks miss you!

Thanks for all your comments. Enjoy your feedback and appreciate the thoughts.

When we started ArmchairGM five years ago (wow), there were basically three types of indy sports sites:

1) Reference/encyclopedic sites, like Baseball-Reference, DraftHistory.net, etc.

2) Blogs, which were typically opinion/analysis

3) The occasional blog-as-aggregator/curator, e.g. MLB Trade Rumors, MetsBlog, and in a different vein, Deadspin.

In all three cases, the indy sites were crushing ESPN. Now don’t get me wrong, ESPN still was leading in a few things. They were generating news stories and were authoritative. They had box scores and more importantly, live scores. They had photos. They had Peter Gammons and John Sickles in a world where the vast, vast majority of customers (sports fan) deferred greatly to experts, who we assumed correctly had better access than we.

Nowadays, though, that’s less and less true.

* Most major news dailies have put beat writers on blogging duty, and react quickly to stories about their beat — with ESPN’s local sites entering. The indy aggregators are less important, and entering the space is basically impossible for a new indy site. (NB that the established ones, however, are so well entrenched as to dominate.)

* Sports-Reference is maintaining its SERP dominance but is joined there by ESPN and the leagues. Even black-hat SEO isn’t going to get you in the top 3.

* The opinion market is being destroyed by the mainstreaming of previously “outsider” opinion (especially the reliance on stats), and by the ability for amateurs to find a voice on third-party sites (SB Nation gives some teams’ fans an incredible audience; Twitter is powerful for an increasing number of people; etc.)

Add that to all the things you pointed out, and there’s a big squeeze.

Love that you’re talking about this though. I’d also be happy to help put together a NextNY event with you if you think there would be interest. Sure Kevin would be in as well.

2) I have friends who work at these places and their business model and strategy is alot less imaginative than you think. They are media companies who care about ad sales. My guess is that sponsorship + advertising + member fees and you’re about on target for the big 3.

This post started about how few sports startups are funded but realized i needed to callout the reasons why that is. If that’s improved the funding will be there.

Your example is perfect. Traditional sports is making it so damn hard for a startup to create a fantasy sports company. Yeah, it protects the big players in the short-term but it’s definitely short-sighted and not sustainable if they want a product that keeps up with technology.

1) Defining the size of the market is not clear cut. You mention that there is a $4billion economic impact, but for the life of me I can’t get anywhere remotely close to that number. When we were researching the FSTA data in 2007 it was said that the fantasy market was around $1-2 billion, and even then it was a difficult number to get close to.

2) Related to the above, it was hard to see what the incumbents are getting out of their current fantasy businesses. We derived that CBS, ESPN, and Yahoo! could be making in the range of $100 million a year from their online fantasy products (this is still highly estimated, and probably on the high end) which doesn’t include the content side of the business.

The reason I bring up those two things is that they are major hurdles in receiving funding. And it’s very difficult to build a legitimate fantasy company (that doesn’t steal stats etc…) without funding because of the costs of content and live sports data. I think on the technology end of things we would likely see much more innovation from the startup community if we attacked the issues of access to sports data and its costs so that funding was not such a necessity.