Web Firms Score Big Audience in Sports Fans

In the morning, when Danny Blue looks to satisfy his sports craving, he doesn’t flip through the newspaper or turn on the TV. He logs on to Sooners Illustrated, a Web site devoted to football and other athletic endeavors at the University of Oklahoma.

“I get a Diet Coke, make sure the kids are getting ready for school, and pop in and see if anything is happening,” said Blue, a Web developer for a Texas software company. “I do the same thing around lunchtime and around bedtime. Some days, I’m on there for hours.”

Rivals.com, the Seattle company behind Sooners Illustrated (https://oklahoma.rivals.com), is one of half a dozen online sports firms that are betting on die-hard fans such as Blue to deliver profits that have eluded most other content-oriented Web sites.

These Web firms offer literally hundreds of sites that cover pro and college sports teams. Each serves multitudes of fans hungry for more information than can be squeezed into a local newspaper’s sports section or an hourlong broadcast of ESPN’s SportsCenter.

Some sites have tried to charge fees for in-depth information, but so far they haven’t drawn many buyers. One online sports firm, Broadband Sports in Los Angeles, revealed in its stock prospectus that it lost nearly $10 million on a mere $5.7 million in revenue in the first nine months of 1999.

So most sports-oriented firms give away their content and depend on advertising and electronic commerce--just like legions of other Web sites. Their hope is that the detailed information they provide will eventually translate into profits from subscription fees, syndication or increased advertising and e-commerce.

For some UCLA fans, that detailed information can be found on Bruin Report Online (https://uclarivals.com). About 8,000 visitors a day can check out reports about 100 high school football players that UCLA coaches are scouting and sort them by position, height, speed and whether they’ve visited the Westwood campus. Fanatics can also watch video clips of high school recruits and coaches, read lengthy articles about the players written by the site’s publisher, or chat about their prospects with other fans. And that’s just the coverage of recruiting for the football team.

The new breed of sites has a few things in its favor. General interest sports sites such as ESPN.com (https://espn.go.com), CBS SportsLine (https://cbs.sportsline.com) and CNNSI.com (https://www.cnnsi.com) have already conditioned millions of fans to rely on the Web for the latest news and scores. Highlight reels and locker-room interviews are getting easier to watch online as high-speed Internet connections become common. Plus, sports sites have that valuable quality called stickiness.

“Sports are happening every day,” said Randy Parker, senior product manager with Broadband Sports, which produces in-depth online sports content. “People have a reason to come back daily.”

The newer, specialized sports sites still lag industry leaders. ESPN.com, CBS SportsLine and CNNSI.com attracted between 2 million and 5.3 million visitors apiece in November, according to Web tracker Media Metrix. And the sports channel on America Online’s site garnered an audience of 9.2 million, Media Metrix said.

By comparison, the 68 college athletic sites run by FansOnly Network reached 918,000 Web surfers, and the 500 sites in the Rivals.com network attracted 536,000 visitors, according to Media Metrix. Athlete Direct, Broadband Sports’ flagship site, had 372,000 visitors in December, according to another tracking firm, Nielsen/NetRatings.

But some upstart sites are doing better when it comes to holding on to their audiences. The average Rivals.com visitor spent more than an hour on the site per month, three times as long as the average visitor to ESPN.com, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

RotoNews, another division of Broadband Sports, held its visitors for just under 12 minutes, about the same amount of time as SportsLine, Nielsen/NetRatings said. (In the Media Metrix survey, however, the more established sites still held the edge in stickiness.)

That still hasn’t paved the way to profits, though.

“Arguably you have such an incredibly fanatical fan base that you would assume people would pay for content, but in reality that hasn’t really panned out,” said Patrick Keane, an online analyst for Jupiter Communications in New York.

And their prospects for earning money from subscription services are still a long shot, Keane said. Even top sports sites such as ESPN.com and CBS SportsLine each have fewer than 100,000 customers who pay for premium content such as celebrity columns or in-depth fantasy league games, he said.

FansOnly, which launched in 1996, had to abandon a plan to charge a $30 subscription fee for access to some of its sites. FansOnly, based in Carlsbad, also tried a $50 package that included a college sweatshirt and game tickets, but that fizzled too.

“There’s probably a model that works, but we just haven’t found it yet,” said Jeff Cravens, FansOnly’s vice president and general manager.

Some sites are trying to make money by licensing their content. Broadband Sports, for instance, syndicates its reports on 110 professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey teams and 300 college football and basketball teams to customers such as America Online, Yahoo and Fox Sports Online.

Publishers who produce the individual Rivals.com sites have been collecting a cut of the revenue generated by their sites, mainly from advertising from companies such as Priceline, RealNetworks and Gillette.

Garry Paskwietz has made a full-time job out of running TrojanFootball.com (https://usc.rivals.com). The USC alum now spends his days watching team practices, interviewing players and coaches, and following high school recruits for the few thousand die-hard fans and several thousand more casual supporters who frequent his site.

Likewise, UCLA alum Tracy Pierson makes a living tracking athletes at his alma mater for the Bruin Report Online, which attracts “avid, obsessive fans.” One of their favorite activities is posting comments on the online message boards--either on Bruin Report Online or on TrojanFootball.com.

“They go back and forth and talk trash,” said Pierson, who is based in Thousand Oaks. “There are people who are so obsessed by this, one guy stayed up all night long and posted 250 messages over the course of one night.”