Thanks, FanFeedr
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Partnership Combines Real-Time, Multi-Source Information
Feeds With Sports Coverage For The Serious Fan
New York, NY March 23, 2011 – FanFeedr, the real time personalized sports service that has re-invented the way fans enjoy their favorite teams and players, has announced a partnership with SB Nation, the fastest-growing online sports media company.
Under the new partnership, SB Nation will be using FanFeedr’s Publisher DashboardTM to empower its writers to curate and publish real-time content feeds for its audience. The first product from the FanFeedr collaboration will be a series of digital newsletter products that SB Nation will distribute to fans of the National Football League’s 32 teams. Additional digital products from SB Nation using the FanFeedr Publisher DashboardTM are planned for Major League Baseball and other major sports leagues.
“We’re thrilled to be working with SB Nation to build customer-centric applications that drive value for their audience,” says FanFeedr CEO and Founder Ty Ahmad-Taylor. “FanFeedr and SB Nation are a great match in terms of technology, timeliness and talent. The real winners will be sports fans everywhere, who will be getting the most topical information for their favorite teams, directly into their inbox. FanFeedr is making SB Nation’s amazing sports coverage even better.”
“FanFeedr is a great addition to SB Nation’s arsenal and a real win for our audience,” says SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff. “FanFeedr’s real-time curation of sports news will empower our world class sports editors and experts to produce best-in-class newsletters, starting with all the NFL teams and then expanding to other sports throughout the year. Our audience expects the best in sports coverage from us, FanFeedr lets us deliver it to them practically as the news happens.”
FanFeedr made the product real in a few months, and this is the first product out of the partnership.
FanFeedr’s Publisher DashboardTM allows publishers to view, select and publish real-time feeds of mainstream sports news, blogs, photos, videos, tweets, scores, data, and other information. The FanFeedr API that powers the Publisher DashboardTM, contains content and data from over 8,000 information sources that are matched against more than 55,000 athletes and 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities, across 15 sports.  It is being used by over 500 developers. FanFeedr has revolutionized the sports experience by taking fandom to an entirely new level of access and involvement, available via any PC, tablet or smart phone.
SB Nation is one of the top 10 sports sites in terms of unique visitors and the fastest growing among them, publishing over 300 communities for passionate fans worldwide. SB Nation is the first major sports publisher to harness the power of FanFeedr’s API for real-time sports news aggregation.
For more information on FanFeedr’s publisher, developer, and consumer products, visit www.fanfeedr.com.
ESPN Chattanooga interview with Ty Ahmad-Taylor
We spoke with the ESPN affiliate in Chattanooga about the SuperBowl, and thought you find it of interest.
Thanks, FanFeedr
Feb
07
SuperBowl Interview
We recently spoke with a top-shelf radio station in Salisbury, MD, about the Super Bowl.
My predictions are included.
Check it out here:
FanFeedr radio interview on Clear Channel in Salisbury, MD
Let us know what you think!
Thanks, FanFeedr
We were selected as one of the 10 most promising digital firms by PepsiCo last week, and we wanted to share the great news with you.
The highlights:
- Our entry video is at the top of this post
- The official PepsiCo 10 winners announcement is here
- The Wall Street Journal wrote up the winners here
Kind regards, and thank you for your support, FanFeedr
Over the last two weeks, we have had a slate of good news:
- FanFeedr was selected as one of the PepsiCo10 top emerging startups
- We launched our FanFeedr Pick’Em game directly on Facebook
- We released our Official Redskins Feedr application in partnership with the Washington Redskins
- Verizon is actively promoting our FanFeedr Android application for personalized sports news and information
Additionally, the developers have worked hard (and over weekends) to improve the user experience on FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter for you, our users.
Improvements to FanFeedr.com
- The Associated Press accidentally cut off our photo feed, and that has been restored. Top photos on the site in the last hour are here.
- European football and US football scores, schedules and rosters have been updated
- We made it easier to login and sign-up for the site by creating a new first-time user experience
- We added navigation to the sports in the search bar at the top of every page to make it easier to go to scores, photos and the Hot News
On our Facebook Pick’Em application
- We made it easier and clearer to invite friends to the game
- Fixed some bugs when we published the results of scores
- Added in options with our partner, gWallet, to allow you to get points for free
As always, we appreciate your business, and your feedback, and please let us know if you are missing anything important in the FanFeedr Feedback area.
Thanks, FanFeedr
Aug
17
FanFeedr needs interns!
FanFeedr Internship: Fall 2010
About us
We are a real-time personalized sports feed. Pick your favorite teams and players, and we will give you the most-up-to-date collection of news, video, tweets, scores and information about them. We are indexing over 8,000 sources and matching them against more than 50,000 athletes, 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities across 15 sports. We are looking for people who are passionate about sports and social media.
We have distribution channels on the web (FanFeedr.com, Facebook, Twitter) as well as mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android). FanFeedr was also recently selected as a finalist for the PepsiCo10.
Responsibilities
- Maintain our content sources.
- Communicate with over 200,000 users directly on Twitter and Facebook.
- Write about the top stories of the day and sports trends on our blog.
- Help with marketing and other traffic acquisition strategies.
Desired Requirements
- Experience using Microsoft Excel & Word.
- Dynamic writing ability.
- Existing knowledge of social networks (Facebook and Twitter).
- Passion for sports.
Please send a resume and your LinkedIn profile to jobs @ fanfeedr.com.
Thanks, FanFeedr
Excerpted from Venture Beat:
Chasing FanFeedr: Squatter, Eritrea and the missing “e”
I studied Latin for five years in high school. In addition to breeding a fascination with linguistic camera obscuras, it forced me to want to spell words properly – which I can do with varying degrees of success.
So when I started my own company, and found out that FanFeeder.com was taken, I grudgingly went with FanFeedr.com, missing the absent “e†in a way that was disproportionate to its impact . . .
Thanks, FanFeedr
Our friend and advisor Scott Rafer has a short post on why startups shouldn’t focus on SEO or SMO (social media optimization on Twitter and Facebook), but should develop their own independent channels to create customer demand so that they aren’t beholden to a big company that could care less.
This is a post about traffic that I paid for, and the results, and traffic that I didn’t pay for, and the results.
The former: Early on at FanFeedr, I had big-company-itis, and I paid $2,000 for 10 radio spots, or $200/per spot. This was for sports talk radio, obstensibly, but my bookers placed me on shows that had little to do with sports, so I cancelled the contract at the halfway point.
When I did appear on a demographically-accurate radio show, I could see the number of users on the site in real-time, as we use a betaworks‘ portfolio company, Chartbeat, to monitor our real-time traffic flows. This was shortly after our alpha launch, last summer, so any customer was a good customer. This is what we did, across five interviews that averaged eight minutes apiece in markets like Los Angeles, New York, Providence, Hartford: 10 extra visitors to the site. The CPA (cost-per-acquisition) was a highly-absurd $200, regardless of the number of shows, as my $2,000 partial deposit was not refundable.
There is one hurdle in mentioning our site name on radio: it is missing the trailing “e” in FanFeeder, as you would say it naturally, and my efforts to stress that missing “e” did nothing to encourage intrepid radio fans across the country from coming to the site. Since they clearly had no previous exposure to the site, as we had launched a week earlier, this entire strategy was a waste of money.
Then, this Monday, 1 March 2010, I got a message from a producer of ESPN2′s SportsNation that we would be mentioned as one of their “Sites We Like,” as you can see below:
Based on the radio experience, I didn’t expect anything traffic-wise based on 10 seconds of exposure before cutting to a commercial, but they actually showed the site name in a fashion that is clear enough to read. And here are the numbers, based on our appearance at the 33m mark, in the middle of a one-hour show:
1 March 2010 | 04.33p ET (initial broadcast)
- 93 extra site visitors
1 March 2010 | 11.33p ET (repeat)
- 34 extra site visitors
2 March 2010 | 01.33a ET (repeat)
- 37 extra site visitors
Simply put: those incremental 164 visitors came from 10 seconds of television exposure on ESPN2 at odd hours. Those visitors, however, have been more highly engaged, surprisingly, on the site, than traffic that we get from social networks, which tends to be flightier (less time spent per visit) than traffic that we acquire through organic search. Specifically, these new visitors spent 27 seconds longer on the site than traffic from social networks.
Additionally, they engaged with our Pick’Em game at a higher rate than social networks or search engines. The latter makes a lot of sense, as the search engine traffic is much more directed and less around general sports topics of interest than the traffic from social networks. The Pick’Em game (“Who do you think will win, Arsenal or Portsmouth?” (Only the dimmest of bulbs would chose Portsmouth, BTW)) reflects picks, results and badges back on Facebook, and thus is one of the most pandemic (a hyper-form of virality that we just made up) channels that we have for acquiring new customers. This channel is based on prestige, which we have discussed before.
Scott is right in his advocacy for finding other channels for audience development outside of Facebook, Twitter and the search engines, but I cannot begin to suggest that happenstance mentions on television networks are a marketing channel.
But when it does happen, it can provide a nice, small bump for a web site that is seeking a much larger audience. Connecting through video with people who are fanatical about sports has potential as a marketing channel, and the good thing for us is that even if we don’t get the direct traffic, we can power other sites with sports-related goals through our API (which has aggregated news and information as well as the Pick’Em game.)