New Media Sport & Community

Selling Sportingo

2009-04-04T22:02:00.003+01:00

It is Saturday night and I wanted to share with all of you the latest news about the sale of our sites, Sportingo, Caughtoffside and Getsport.
In the past few months it become clear that with the current business climate our best chance to succeed would be by joining forces with another company. We are very fortunate to have met the folks at Tixtaq who are building a fantastic business and share a lot of the same values that we at Sportingo do. Combining the audience and platform from our sites with the innovative ticketing information and services at Tixtaq creates a much stronger company.
As much as I am pleased with the outcome of our transaction I am writing this post with mixed feelings. We started Sportingo three years ago. Build a fantastic team and created something new which touched the lives of millions of sport fans around the world and gave hundreds of you the chance to express your passion about sports. As CEO and co-founder I do feel that three years was not enough to reach all of my goals and that I wish I had the opportunity to realize the full dream that drives the process of starting a new venture.

I can’t help but think about what must be going on at Twitter these days. They have build a phenomenal business and it is rumors that after three years are being offered a fantastic amount of money to sell the company. No matter how much money is on the line, I am sure the founders will have some regret if they sell. A part of them would have wished to see the journey through, in a way they would never be able to as part of Google or Microsoft. I don’t know any entrepreneur that started his/ her business simply to make money. Don’t get me wrong, the financial return is very important to all of us, but is never the reason you start your venture. Ventures are created because you just need to make it happen, check what if? Spend sleepless nights trying to figure out how the world should work, or get carried away by someone’s vision or technology.

This urge to figure things out and come up with a new product or service is to my view at the core of any type of new beginnings. For me the sale of Sportingo will close another cycle in my life. I was fortunate to meet and work with extraordinary people during my journey and wanted to thank all of you for your hard work. Oleg, Hadassa, Phil, Donna, Mark A, Mark R, Gabriela, Yaniv, Yoram, Udi, Derek, Mick, Chris, Tal R, Tal B, Nick, Dean, Matt, Dave, Michelle, Avi, Ori, Aya, Ilana, Itzik, Natalie, Uzi, Shai, Boaz and the rest of the people who helped along the way, thank you for your contribution over the past three years.

I will most likely be closing down my blog, if you want to stay in touch or have an interesting opportunity for me to consider you can follow me on Twitter zrozov .

New life

2008-06-13T00:39:00.002+01:00

It has been a very busy week in my life and the life of Sportingo. On Monday night my third son was born. He is a very sweet boy and we now just have to wait until he learns that he is suppose to sleep at night.

On Wednesday we went live with the much anticipated new version of Sportingo. In addition to a brand new design and improvement in functionality we have also introduced the very early stages of what we believe will become a hit service among sport fans Sportingo Buzz. Buzz is a service that aggregates threads from top forums around the web and allows fans to have a look at what other fans are talking about. I have enjoyed finding out what Chelsea fans think about their new manager or tracking the latest conversations about the transfer market.

We also separated our online media guide into a proper site GetSport.tv and have loads more coming on the new site in the next few months.

Site stats

2008-05-30T16:50:00.000+01:00

I have stayed away from the subject of site statistics for some time now but thought there were a few interesting numbers I could share.

Last week I spoke at a seminar about sport rights for my presentation I run a search on the most popular events viewed on our media guide.

The results were fascinating

The most popular event on Whatsonline this year was the Joe Calzaghe fight. Second most popular was the Australian F1 race. The rest of the list is mostly football matches with two surprising entries. At number five cane the IIHF World Championship in Russia and at number nine the European Weightlifting championships. These numbers are far from scientific but show that a niche sport can have a sizeable audience online as they opportunity for watching that sport on TV is limited.

One last statistic I would like to share is that we finally broke the 100,000 daily visitors mark. Congratulations to the team for a marvelous effort, any bets on when we will hit the 1,000,000 mark?

Red Herring

2008-04-21T18:53:00.001+01:00

I am on my way back from the Red Herring Europe conference in Malta. Sportingo was short listed as a finalist at the event which was a nice honor and I got a chance to present the company. Overall the conference did not seem to attract as much as an audience as it did last year. I am not sure if it was due to the location or a change, marketing of the event or a change in the industry. Bret Hoffman the founder of MyDeco gave a very interesting presentation about his new venture and some key learning from his past at Lastminute.com . If he succeeds in his goal MyDeco will become a very important company and the site is worth while visiting although I feel that it still lucks focus and seems to just have to many different features in it.

There seemed to be a lot of companies in the mobile space all talking about better browser experience the shift introduced by the iPhone and social networking. I still find my Blackberry very limiting in surfing the web and that most of my surfing is to find sport scores, weather and check that the Sportingo site has not crushed. There are clear advances in mobile technology which will offer a lot more to users from location based services to better data transfer using Wifi etc I am just still not convinced how quickly they will be adopted by the majority of the market place.

On a separate note we launched a beta of our new site redesign this week. Please visit the site and send us your feedback. We still have a lot of fixing to do but wanted to share it with our audience sooner then later and get feedback on the layout and functionality. More about the beta and site redesign in my next post.

New Partnerships

2008-04-11T10:07:00.001+01:00

In the past few weeks we launched a couple of interesting new partnerships. The first with the BBC which now includes links to What’s Online from its sport pages. The second new partnership is with Virgin Media which now encourages its users to sign up and write about sports through Sportingo. Virgin has been at the forth front on sport and Internet in the past year. They acquired the rights to broadcast highlights of the Premier League over the Internet then introduced a very bold new design to their website. We are very pleased to be associated with Virgin as they lead the way in getting more fan participation on their website.

Israel Web Tour

2008-02-08T13:01:00.000Z

I am at SFO on my back from the Israel Web Tour and wanted to share some observation of the week. The tour brought together 15 “promising” Israeli web start ups for meetings with leading silicon valley companies, investors etc. For me the tour was about evaluating how should Sportingo approach the US market. Since founding the company we have focused on the UK and European markets and in 2008 we are thinking about how to approach the North American market (more on this subject on some future post).
A few observations from the visit. Yahoo Microsoft merger will go on but most people think it will fail and will distract both companies for the next couple of years. I heard some VCs stating they are telling their companies to look at ways to exploit vulnerabilities in both companies since this is the time to make an impact. There is also a feeling this will not be good for the market as it will leave Google as the only real acquisition option for many companies. Lots of question marks about the future of Facebook and the quality of its platform. My view is that if they are able to execute on their vision of a social utility they will prove everyone wrong but this is going to be much harder then building the social network which they have done so well.
As someone who spent four years in the bay area in the 2000-2003 I felt that the tour did not give us enough insight to the true culture of the valley and what it means be a successful entrepreneur building a company in Palo Alto vr Herzeliya. The cultural difference is something that is very hard to understand without spending a lot of time close to it. We all tend to view the world through our own point of view and it is to easy to just “not get” why Myspace, Facebook, twitter etc work so well and claim it is just because we are of a different age group.
The only session which truly addressed the culture of silicon valley was an interview with Sarah Lacy. She is about to publish a book “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” in which she follows some of the top entrepreneurs in the valley of the past 10 years. Her remarks about the industry were insightful and I am sure the book will be a very good read for any entrepreneur around the world who wishes to understand the key drivers for success in the most competitive market in the world.

Thoughts about the Super Bowl

2008-02-05T00:12:00.002Z

I am in California for the Israelweb Tour. In between meetings I wanted to share some thoughts about yesterday’s Super ball. I am not a huge American Football fan and did not watch all of the game but was fortunate enough to watch the four quarter of the game. What I found so fascinating was the pressure and volatility of the game. The two moments which were the most powerful for me in the game illustrate what is so great about sport and why so many of us are passionate about it.
The first was Eli Manning making a great pass that gave him a much needed first down which then lead to the touchdown. The second was the last moment through Tom Brady that almost made an impossible come back and last second touchdown.
What made these two moments so special was how close the were yet ended in completely different results. Manning pass was almost dropped (sorry I could not find the name of the person that caught it) while Brady’s pass was an inch away from being caught. Image how different today’s headlines would read today with only a few inches making the difference between winning or loosing the most watched sport event of the year.

Welcome 2008

2008-01-01T09:04:00.000Z

Hello to 2008, want an exciting year for sport ahead of us.

2008 is going to be the biggest year for the online sport market ever, with Euro 2008, Olympic Games and Ryder Cup all taking place this year we can expect the interest is sport to reach new levels. Billions of dollars will be spend by sponsors and advertisers to show their connection with sport and fans will be searching, talking and arguing about sport more then ever.

A key driver to watch for will be the growing availability of legal quality live streaming of sport online. With most of the online users in the Western world connected over broadband the technology is finally available to allow up to consume sport over our computers.

My main prediction for 2008 is that by the end of the year we will be talking more about watching live content online and less about short clips on You Tube and Joost.

Social Giving

2007-12-24T15:09:00.000Z

As this is the season of giving I have been thinking of ways to get us the social media/ citizen journalism/ bloggers more involved in giving back to the world. I realize this sounds bombastic but I do strongly believe there has to be a way to harness the power of the millions of people who blog to support noble causes. Many bloggers have Adsense or similar type of advertising on their pages. My guess is that 90% of the people that have advertising on their pages are making less then $3 a month (if anyone has that stat please forward it to me) and are participating in social media because they want to, and not in hope of making money from their writing. I am sure that some people don’t ever collect the royalty checks from commission junction, Amazon or Google as the amounts are to small. But what if all of this money could be easily donated to support UNICEF or a similar type of an organization. These small amounts could end up making a big difference. For only a few dollars UNICEF in South Africa get children to play with a real football instead of paper tied up in string. In my recent visit to South Africa I met some of the people from UNICEF and am sure that even small amounts of money could make a big difference for their programs.

I believe that best way to make this work is with the commerce platforms. Google Adsense, Commission Junction and the other technology platforms should add an option in the sign up that will allow us to contribute. As a blogger you could set a limit on how much you are willing to give and then have the technology platform collect all of the money on behalf of millions of people and transfer it directly to the charitable cause.

Anyone participating in this program would get a button that would display as part of their Adsense stating that revenue from this advertising will be contributed.

The technology is fairly simple to implement and the benefits to the community are clear.

If anyone of you knows the right person at Google/ Amazon/ Commission Junction or any of the other major blogging platforms please forward them my post and I promise to keep you updated on the progress of my idea.

Socerex

2007-12-18T08:43:00.000Z

This is a post I wrote several weeks about after Soccerex and by mistake was not published. It is a bit out of date but still relevant in many ways.

Soccerex is the largest football related conference in the world and brings together football clubs, associations, and all types of business that surround the beautiful game.

The conference was hosted at a suburb of Johannesburg and hospitality was superb. It seems very important for the South African to show what a great host country they will be for the upcoming World Cup and the amount of security around the event was almost ridicules. I doubt they will be able to have this much security with hundreds of thousands of fans visiting from all over the world in two years. My view is that the World Cup in 2010 will be a success. Visitors will enjoy the fascinating and friendly land of South Africa and unfortunately crime will also be part of the games with a fair share of muggings robbery etc. Hopefully no tourist will loose their life. I am looking forward to the World Cup and to many more visits to South Africa.

For Sportingo the show was another opportunity to advance the cause of social media and sport and expand our partnership base for the fast growing guide What’s Online. We have several new partners (more in a separate entry) and the amount of coverage of the media guide is growing each week. We are considering renaming the service, if you have any ideas please leave a comment on email me.

First Tuesday

2007-11-08T05:18:00.000Z

Tuesday night I was invited to give a short presentation about Sportingo at the First Tuesday event. It was my first time attending a First Tuesday event and I was impressed by the amount of people and interested in still draws 10 years after it started. The subject of the evening was UGC and Jay the VP of Operations from My Space shared some very good insight on the growth of the social media space and My Space view of the world. I particularly liked the way he presented their vision of creating a portal that was based on social interaction. I think that is a very good way of explaining why My Space has been so successful.

All of the ingredients to create My Space have been around for years but it took a lot of hard work and focus to turn it to such a huge success. We can sometimes under estimate how small parts can make a huge difference to the success of a business. The key to succeed with a new venture is truly understanding what the small drivers of success are and then fanatical focus on doing the best job possible in execution. As they say the devil is in the details, the problem is figuring out what is the key functionality that is so important to drive your product success.

Which team should I support

2007-11-08T05:09:00.000Z

Last week I published an article on Sportingo asking for suggestions on which team I should support. The response to the article was for the most part very positive in particular by Lyton Orient fans that have been very welcoming.

I wanted to quote a couple of my favorite comments which for me symbolize all that is good about supporting a team

The first by MarkR “great ot see the Os fans rallying to the cause...i was new to london a few years back and because i live in clapton (remember clapton orient?!) i took to following the Os. and i can tell you all, it's the best club in the UK, great supporters (i was there at leeds, amazing), great local pride and this season great football.”

And the second by Steve Jenkins

“Sample a game at Brisbane Road and you will be hooked. So many Orient fans started their support of the mighty O's by paying a casual visit - once you have sampled the real guts and thunder of life in League 1 with the Orient you will be with us always! Leyton Orient have such a proud history and are the second oldest professional league club in London and the oldest London Club in the Football League - check out the O's WW1 history on the club's website or just Google and see for yourself. The Leyton Orient Supporters' Club has over 1400 members and will serve you one of your best pints you will ever have!”

With this type of response I will just have to make to an O’s game and see what is like.

Sportel

2007-10-22T23:01:00.000+01:00

I am on my way back from Sportel. The show is the largest market for sport rights in the world. Media right holders, TV broadcasters and sport organizations all meet to discuss rights. Around these meetings lots of service provides pitch their offering. Sportingo exhibited at the show for the first time and got a very good response from the market. Our push to create the most comprehensive guide for watching sports online is welcomed by an industry that is very fragmented. If you look at the total number of sport events run every week you will realize that even the largest broadcasters such as ESPN, Eurosport or Sky only show a fraction of all the sport out there. Sportingo’s What’s Online is becoming a central place for fans from around the world to find the sport media they are interested in. We will soon be announcing a number of exciting new partners and before the end of year will be realizing a new version of the site that will both improve our platform and the user experience for fans searching for media. We are also looking at localizing the service into additional languages, any suggestions on what should come first? French, Spanish? German? I would appreciate your comments.

More about London

2007-10-12T18:32:00.000+01:00

It has been a month and a half since we relocated to London and I thought I would share some more of my experiences in the city.

It seems that we finally found a place to live, as simple as it sounds finding a place for a family of four is not that simple in this city. With so many neighborhoods to choose from and considerations in finding the right place the search got very complicated. For example I had no idea that we need to register our 3/12 year old to school now or we will not be able to get him into a good school in two years.

Everybody is obsessed with celebrity gossip and sports. The obsession for sport is a good thing for us and I can only appreciate the passion for the game now that I live in London. Once I move into our new home I will write more about this and about the whole process of choosing a team to support.

It seems that the whole media world is centered in London, the access to partners, clients and suppliers it wonderful. In some cases things take longer then I would like the to but that is the nature of working with large media partners.

Everything is so expensive. I am about to sub lease a small office for our London based team ( a basic room with four desks). The price for this room is going to be over 50% more then we pay for a large office that can fit more then 20 people in Israel.

We will be off to Sportel next week. This is the major sport conference of the year in which media right holder, sport federations and media companies all come together. A very intense few days, the only upside is the location in lovely Monte Carlo.

New round of funding

2007-10-02T15:18:00.000+01:00

Today we announced a new round of funding from Ingenious Media. Ingenious is a top UK media investor (and have one of the most amazing offices I have ever visited) and will be helping us grow Sportingo and expand our UK presence. We raised a total of $3.2 million which should give us additional marketing resources and help in continue to develop the site. This is the 12 round of funding I have been involved with since starting my first company in the early 90’s. Every round is different and you end up learning a lot from the process and get ideas on how to improve your business. As a new company that is not profitable yet raising money is a very important event since it shows that the market values what you are trying to achieve. We need to remember that it is just one step that gives us more resources to continue and grow the company.

Thanks to all of the team who worked hard on the deal I would especially like to thank our lawyer Efrat that put in a lot of work (and is due to have a baby any day now) to finalize all the documents.

More about how we plan on spending the money and grow the company in my next few posts.

Move to London

2007-09-29T23:49:00.000+01:00

I have not updated my blog for a while and wanted to apologize to my devoted readers (all three of you). In late August I relocated to London with my family and am in the process of opening our local office and getting situated in a new city. This major life change has left me with zero free time and as my blog shows. A few impressions about life in London. It is very expensive, I was told to expect that but it is still even more expensive then you expect.

Pubic transportation does not work for a family with young kids. I don’t know what they were thinking about when building the public transport but it is virtually impossible to get around with young kids and a stroller. Fortunately people are very nice and help you carry the stroller up and down stairs.

It is a great city for kids. If you manage to get from one place to the other it is a fan city for kids. Lot’s of things to do, wonderful parks and the never ending entertainment (ta least for my 2 and 3 year olds) of watching the Queen’s guards.

From a company prospective I am having to adjust to managing the team remotely, skype is very useful and my new blackberry makes it possible to go out to meetings and stay in touch (very useful when our nanny called in sick and my wife was out house hunting so I ended up taking the boys to the park).

There are a number of new partnerships that we have been working on that I would love to share and hope that in the next week I can make them all public knowledge.

Wish me luck in our hunt for a new family home in London.

Moving to London

2007-08-16T21:32:00.000+01:00

It has been a while since I have updated my blog and I hope that I have not lost my few readers. On Monday I will be moving to open our London office. I wanted to write more about my plans for London and our new office but have had so little time in between the growing demands of the site, some of our soon to be announced partnerships and getting ready to move the family over to London. I will do my best to blog some more about the actual moving experience and live in a new city.

2007-07-18T15:26:00.000+01:00

We have reached a new stage in the establishment of Sportingo as equal players in the world of sport media. Sportingo was approved for official press coverage for several prestigious sport events. Through our partnership with FIBA we will be sending a fan on assignment to cover the semi finals and finals of the Americans Basketball Tournament in Las Vegas. For those of you that do not follow basketball this is the tournament which decides which teams qualify to play in the 2008 Olympics. We have launched a contest on Sportingo to determine the best person to cover the event.

For all you rugby fans we are offering a chance to report on the up coming Rugby World Cup in France. I will share some more information about our contest and the experiences of fans that get a chance to be part of the accredited media.

This is a good opportunity to praise the great work by Ed McGrogan who was sent to cover the Fed Cup tie between the US and Russia.

Managing Sport Rights follow up

2007-07-12T07:59:00.000+01:00

A BBC reporter that attended the Sport and Technology Conference just published an interesting overview of the growing controversy about online sport rights. If you read all the way to the end of the article you can read some of what I was said at the conference.

Managing Sport Rights

2007-07-08T15:43:00.000+01:00

A week ago I was invited to participate as a panelist in the Sport and Technology conference in London. The subject of the panel was protecting rights. There was a great panel and a very lively discussion. I think that we need to change the way we look at rights and start talking about managing your rights instead of protecting them. Right prosecution is only a small part of the equation and right holders that will focus on that aspect alone will find that the market has moved and they stay behind. In an economy that has so much to offer the main problem is gaining share of mind, making sure a fan spends time reading an article on Sportingo and not on any other sport site. The same is the case for any right holder, if you don’t’ make content available to your fans and potential fans they will easily find other ways to fill their time and end up spending more time watching another sport. That does not mean that if you own lucrative rights and have signed TV deals for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars you should just put all of you content out for free. It does mean that you need to be a lot more proactive about learning what your fans are interested in and figuring out a new model that can address this emerging need. Make video clips, highlights or archives available and figure out new ways to prove their value.

Assuming that the life time value of a sport fan is in the many thousands of dollars (if anyone has that number please email me) the focus of right holders should be on how do I use new media to acquire more customers so in the longer term I can be more profitable. The value of gaining another 100,000 fans around the globe that will spend the next 50 years following your sport, watching it, buying merchandize, attending events etc is by far larger then any possible loose of revenue in the short term.

My take from the conference was that most media right holders realize that the world is changing and that they have to experiment with new models and ways to enageage fans.

Buying Caughtoffside

2007-06-27T13:32:00.000+01:00

I am very pleased to post about our recent acquisition of Caughtoofside and Chris joining the team and Chief Editor. Caughtoffside were one of Sportingo’s first partners and are a very well respected and successful football blog. Chris who started the blog over a year ago shares our passion for sports and has built a great following of avid fans around the world. Earlier this year Chris quite his day job as an advertising executive to focus on building Caughtoffside. We started our dialog in April and after spending several days together it became clear that we had a lot in common and the way to having Chris join was paved.
Chris will be filling a new position as Chief Editor and will take over responsibly for the content on the site, working with our partners and contributors to improve the quality and depth of Sportingo. For more information you can read Paidcontent’s account of the transaction.

Partnership with FIBA

2007-06-03T07:59:00.001+01:00

Last week we started a new basketball section on Sportingo. The new section is a combination of the increased interest in basketball we get from our writers and a new partnership with singed with FIBA (the world governing body for the game). FIBA recently launched a new website with a massive amount of new content and features. As part of the new launch they were looking for a partner that could help them add quality user generated content to their site. FIBA has traditionally used fan reports to provide articles and statistics so partnering with Sportingo was a natural fit.

The partnership with FIBA adds to our existing relationships with the ITF www.daviscup.com the New Zealand Allblacks and is part of our ongoing effort to help leading sport organizations around the world to add quality user content to their sites. This partnerships affirms the growing importance of UGC to traditional media organizations and I believe that we will see this trend continue to grow as highbred models are developed that integrate social media in a better way to traditional media.

Setting new records

2007-05-18T14:59:00.000+01:00

Today’s post is a bit of aself promotion. Since launching Sportingo we have seen a steady growth rate, in the first month we got excited about any article that got more then 100 views then the bar went up to 1,000 and soon after 5,000. In April we had several articles that got close to 10,000 views but none managed breaking that barrier. In early May one of most proflic writers midnightjester submitted a two part article about how the Spurs can become one of the big four clubs in England the article did very well and reach about 11,000 views within 2 days. Several days later the article got picked up again and this time went through the 15,000 then the 20,000 mark fell and the article now stand on 23,375. The Midnight Jester who has been writing for us over the past few months and is an avid Spurs fans managed creating a nice following on the site and drove a lot more conversations about his team. Incidentally although the Spurs are a London team our writer is based in South Africa proving that great writing and passion for sports are an international skill.
This article success paved the way for other articles to break the 10,000 market with several other reaching very impressive numbers Luke Durkin’s article about Gareth Bale reaching 12,548, Tom Harness article about Xabi Alonso 11,338 Orion Assante piece about Arsenal’s signing for next season at 11,085 plus a lot of very negative response from Arsenal fans around the web.

The articles and authors I mentioned are all great pieces and deserve the attention they got online. I still can’t predict why one article will do so much better then the others, and for each great article that got read by 10,000 viewers we have 5 other articles that are as good and got read by less then 1,000.

Joost

2007-05-07T18:32:00.000+01:00

I have been getting requests from several people for invites to the Joost beta, I am very sorry that I did not respond but I seem to be having some problems with Joost and just can’t seem to be able to access the codes. I promise to send them out once I manage getting them.

A general note about Joost I am less then impressed at this stage, the quality is not as good as I thought it would be and there is not that much to see yet. The people behind Joost are some of the best in the industry so I am sure they will fix it, I guess this is a matter of having setting very high expectations and not delivering on them yet.

Breaking the 10,000 mark

2007-04-29T08:54:00.000+01:00

It has been another record breaking week at Sportingo. In April we had several articles that got a lot of attention and flerted with reaching 10,000 views but all seem to have lost steam after the reached 9,000.

On Friday night the mark was finaly broken by The Midnightjester. His article Arsenal and Liverpool at risk of Spurs decide to muscle in on the top has almost 11,000 views to date and seem to have stirred a lot of reaction from football fans.

Our next goal is to have an article reach 10,000 views in one day, and by end of year I am hoping to see the first article reach the 100,000 mark. Anyone willing to bet on the date for that happening, my personal bet is 15 of November 2007