Start your own sports site?

And people wanting to read about it.

 

I started an online sports site about the local college in November of 07. But I'm lucky and I'm still in college so I have a lot of things that real writers don't. Things like: Time, expendable income, personal relationships with the players, easy access to credentials through student media and so on.

You can make money, just not enough to live. My goal was to make enough money to support my website and my time spent working on it (about 200 bucks a month). It worked, I was making about 300 bucks a month for the first three months but then GoogleAds decided not to pay me (long story).

But I think the key to online only sports sites is college interns. We kids will work for almost nothing just to get experience. 10 bucks per preview 10 bucks per recap, 15 dollars for a feature. Cheap.

If you can do that and get your domain name and online storage (at least 50 Gig for audio/video content) for 15 bucks a month you might be able to get by with a website that only costs you a couple hundred dollars per month to maintain.

Now online-traffic is all about networking and offering people something they can't get with the local newspaper or school athletic site. And I know everyone will cringe at the sound of this, but I'd say start talking to those guys who run message boards. Or even guys who just frequent them. I managed to make "friends" with about 5-10 guys who post on a handful of boards/blogs for athletics at the school and I average about 30,000 hits per month.

The big thing though is offering people something they can't get yet. On my site, I have audio content by way of play-by-play of games, the press conferences and interviews. I have pictures borrowed from the student newspaper and video from youtube (sounds like a cop-out but it works).

As long as you can find an pay-per-view or pay-per-click site (like google or something else) you might be able to break even, but it will take at least 6 months of losing money. Or longer.

Just my two cents.

 

Some of what you suggest would certainly work, but our analysis both times led us to believe that the "soft" stuff was not going to carry us very far over the summer in print, particularly when factoring in the added burden of not being able to distribute the product through regular channels (i.e., dumping it on school doorsteps).

On the other hand, a web-only version could limp along to a certain extent. Assuming I wasn't able to lay off a chunk of the staff or re-task them to other products, I'd use some of the summer capacity to do historical research that could be evergreen content for years to come (On This Day in History, searchable databases of team and individual area and state champs, all-time record books in the major sports, etc.)

 

Niche, niche, niche.

Find the narrowest niche possible in the sports world for your Web site, and gain complete ownership and excellence of coverage in that area.

 

Www.highschoolgirlsfreshmanvolleyball.com

 

Go ahead and laugh at the niche oncept, but John Dye turned his kids' participation in track and field into the country's must-visit H.S. site: Dyestat.com. No football, basketball or cheerleading to be found there, just track and field, 24/7/365.

 

Yeah but it's only useful if you're in Texas, California, or if you have the most elite high school track runners.

I prefer athletic.net. Where coaches can upload their schedules, meets, and team rosters. They also put all of their race results. So a kid can go check his time in every race that season, compare himself to the next opponent etc. It's still in its infancy but pretty cool.

 

from a former coach... athletic.net is great. Great tool, great site.

The niche thing is something I forgot to mention. You need to offer something no one else does to a specific audience.

 

Throw in New York (many elite cross country programs) and now you have three states with a combined 80 million people. That's a hell of a niche to build off of even if you're underestimating interest from the other 47 states -- which you are.

As for Dyestat, they're already providing a lot of statistical info that doesn't require the help of coaches or meet directors.

Don't get me wrong -- athletic.net is terrific, too -- but Dyestat is the prototype to follow for turning a niche into a viable web operation in the spirit of two guys sitting in their garage and launching Apple.

 

$1 million in expenses for the first year? Get serious.

I live in a three-city part of my county, and I've thought of starting an online newspaper. My costs at the onset would be limited to the gas I put in my tank, the cost of server space and my domain name. I might have to spend a few thousand on computers and other equipment.

 

It is a great site, I'm just sort of biased against the site because of its slant to elite runners. There's a lot of good runners out there that don't end up on those sites because they aren't at the Elite Dye State meets with FAT timing systems. Alright. End of rant.

 

I understand completely.