A&M players to get $10K for fan site interview

We are in trouble if this becomes a thing for fan sites, especially if athletes are allowed to now decline interview requests.

Fan site will pay A&M players $10K for interviews

 

This thread being the most recent thread on the J board, right ahead of The Way It Was, is some kind of timing.

 

I think A@M is leading college athletics into the future. Let's say that you are the rights holder for a major college team. You have an interest in getting the best players to go to your media property. So you start paying for players to endorse watching the programming in television. How much is a five star recruit worth to, for example, the Kansas Basketball Network?

 

I'd love to know what the Texas A&M sports information director thinks about this.

 

I’d love to know where this site is getting the money. I remember that quite a few were mom-and-pop shops. Must be part of Rivals or whatever it’s called anymore.

 

I think that headline is a little misleading. I understood this story as a booster with a business paying that 10K. The fan site is just serving as the middle man and putting together the wink-wink interviews. I’d imagine that the fan site either is also getting paid or has an existing relationship with this booster but I don’t know that for sure.

I am not too worried about this becoming a problem for journalists who cover college football.

 

FWIW, there are media outlets that are starting to pay athletes for "exclusive" content. I've one of the large recruiting site affiliates announce they're doing it, along with a popular sub-only Colorado sports blog (along with "exclusive merch") and I swear I saw a major metro announce an exclusive deal with select players of a major college team but when I went back last night looking for a copy of the announcement/tweets regarding it, I couldn't find any and I feel like I'm losing my mind. If I find it, I'll share. Just don't want to name the place and then realize I had made it all up in a dream.

 

I'm a mod on a message board for my alma mater's basketball team. Every couple of years, we'll do a fundraising drive to pay for hosting and what not, and raise a couple hundred. But from that, we have emails from plenty of our users, and *know* that plenty of them have million dollar homes and own businesses and what not. So yeah, I imagine it could easily serve as a middleman of some sorts, as opposed to this being "honest" revenue generated from advertising.

 

Basic: $4.75/month or $50.00/year

Premium: $12.99/month or $140.00/year

Varsity: $25.00/month or $275.00/year

A quick search got me this: As of 2013, there were over 9,500 paying subscribers

 

A quick search no doubt attached to any young collegian in the early Aughts, because back then TexAgs was she shit.

 

I'm pretty familiar with TexAgs and how they operate. For years they don't tout themselves as a media outlet, but they get the best access in a North Korea-like atmosphere. They also are among the profitable content sites in all of college football.

From a media standpoint, this isn't a big deal aside from TexAgs cementing its status as a non-journalism outlet.