The unpredictable nature of user generated content

As a follow up to my last entry I wanted to share an anecdote of working with user generated articles. If you have been watching the Sportingo site you can see that on average we have been publishing around 7 articles a day in December. But since we depend on submissions from our users this average can have big swings. Tuesday was a slow day with only four new articles. Wednesday morning also started slow but by mid day we already had 11 new articles and tow of our editors out for the day. Our editing system is very fluid as it is difficult for us to predict the amount of work required at any given moment as we therefore have a lot of highly qualified editors that come in and out of the system based on the amount of work we have. Usually this works out very well and it the most efficient way to manage a site of our nature. But some days, it can make it very difficult to keep up with your users. The good thing is that more articles mean more traffic to the site, which should then generate more articles and help building the site. As Stuart Little says there is always a silver lining, just sometimes you need to look harder for it (my cultural references are mostly tied to the stories/ videos my boys are watching that week).

Time people of the Year

Time just announced that the person of the year is You, a generic term which stands for all of us that are taking part in a revolution in the world of media. A change from you the editor deciding what is important to US the users saying what we care about. As the CEO of Sportingo I feel that a bit of this selection is also due to the efforts of the scores of writers that have been publishing their opinions on Sportingo. You are shaping a new agenda in the world of sports, talking about subjects ranging from how did cancer effect Lance Armstrong’s performance, to taking a child to watch their first football match. The numbers of people taking part in participatory media is growing and we are very glad to lead the way for so many talented writers in the world of sports. This is also a good opportunity to highlight the results of our first writer competition and an amusing view of why football is the greatest sport of them all.

Long tail and sport

I just read a very interesting presentation from Bear Sterns about the long tail and media. Worth reviewing, in short the presentation is about how the long tail is becoming more important and over time will be a bigger market then the “big media”. It also states that the big opportunity is to aggregate the long tail and organize it in a way that users can find something useful to them.

I agree with most of what this presentation states and wanted to add a view about the long tail and sports. Most sport fans follow more then one sport team or event, we will typically have a big name team that we follow, it can be a football club, basketball, national team or tennis player. At the same time we also have a local favorite or a more obscure sport which we were introduced to and still have an interest in this is the long tail of sport. Growing up in Israel I was a natural football and basketball fan. In a very early age I was introduced to golf by father and took to the game, for years I would spend all summer at Israel’s one and only golf course and would devour any piece of information I could get about the game. My ex roommate from boarding school remains an avid follower of swimming as he continues to support his University football team. As we add more sports on Sportingo we are noticing that fans want to share their thought on more then one sport. A Westham fan might have a lot to say about cricket or rugby and our own Mark Rivlin who is a passionate Leads fan shares his love for the game of chess. The beauty of the web is how easy it is for a person to find a way to express all of their areas of interest and find easy access to more like minded people. Our goal of for Sportingo to enable sport fans to find more ways to express their full range of interests.

Looking for a few good people

I have been neglecting my blog recently, a combination of travel work and an ambitious attempt at writing an entry on how the TV world will change due to broadband have delayed posting for a while. Sportingo is growing faster then ever, which is very good news (and leaving me with very little sleep) and we are looking for more people to join the team. If you are or know talented hard working people that want to take part in building a great new media company contact me. In particular we are looking to fill a couple of development positions, a manager level business development/ account management position, an entry level marketing position (could also be part time) for work with blogs and forums and a research/ data management person for managing statistics and schedule content from our partners. A perfect command of English is a must French or Spanish a plus.

traffic

We had a very busy week (they all are) and in the past few days have been seeing some good results to some of our articles. A key factor in the fast pace growth in our traffic has been better placement on Goolge news. Over the past two days Ilana’s article about Federer withdrawing from the Paris tournament was the number one result under Roger Federer in Google News. The interesting fact was that most of the new traffic we got was not directly from Google but rather from people reading the article and forwarding the link to other friends or posting it in other sites. I thought it was a very good article and am glad it generated so much interest.

Esnip which is an Israeli web 2.0 company run by a friend recently announced a round of venture funding. Yael their CEO is one of the most savvy CEO’s out there and I wish them best of luck in their continued growth.

One more thought about traffic, we all use Alexa to gauge the level of traffic for our websites, and many people have written about how inaccurate it is. The day we went live we got covered by Techcrunch and hit an Alexa ranking of 8,700. Are daily traffic is three times the amount we got from the TechCruch article yet our daily Alexa ranking is at around 40,000. I guess alexa have some work to do in figuring out their ranking system.

Copyrights

The Internet has opened up a lot of issues regarding copyrights, I will not even try to cover this huge subject just attempt to highlight a number of aspects we I recently noticed. Sportingo like many other content sites actively seeks ways to promote its content on third party aggregations sites. Services such as Google News, News Now and many others are a great platform to drive relevant traffic to your articles. The value for the aggregator is getting free content which they can then package and present to a larger audience. One of the issues that we are dealing with is presenting images on these third party aggregation sites. Sportingo licenses images from several sources including Getty Images and Reuters (more on the image licensing business and how it has changed over the past five years in a separate entry), the license allows us to present images in an editorial context. Currently most third party news aggregators do not present images, but rather headlines and in some cases a short insert from our articles. But some of these aggregators are beginning to show images on their sites. This needs opens an interesting licensing issue. Do the news aggregators need to licensee the right to present the image? Do the publisher need to re negotiate the right to present the image on third party aggregation sites? I will be investigating this subject over the next few weeks and promise to update as I learn more about the subject.

Busy week

It has been a very busy week. We had two new team member join. Derek is our new VP of Online Services and Michelle joined as a Marketing Manager. Choosing the right people at such an early stage is crucial for your success. The mantra of every VC is that it is all about the team, the quality of your team and the interaction between team members is probably the second most important factor in the success of a new venture (the first being good luck off course). As CEO I view building the right team as a key aspect of my job, the same as the board should view hiring the right CEO. Getting a great person to join the team is only the first step, you must then be able to clearly define your expectations, set good communications, a way to measure success, and turn this all into a great team. The sport analogy is obvious, I hope that I have more of an effect on the outcome then some coaches. For an interesting article about the role of coaches have a look at Mark's entry on our site.

Sportel

I am on my way back from Sportel. The past few days have been very intense meeting over 30 sport organizations, media companies and teams. It seems that the sport world like most of TV is still trying to figure out the whole new media world. They have built very successful business on selling TV rights and charging advertisers a premium to cover their costs. The Internet is changing a lot of that, the broadcasters that paid hundreds of millions of dollars are afraid that the Internet will cut into their audience while the right holders are trying to figure out the balance between embracing the new medium and protecting their bread and butter TV deals.

I believe that the industry needs to look at new media as a way to increase the contact with the fans and fill a growing appetite for fresh content. TV will never have the time or the resource to show a 4 day golf tournament, they will show highlights and a few hours of life coverage on the weekend. If the right holders provide full coverage of the tournament on the Internet it will only grow the interest in the tournament and the amount of people that will view the live coverage on the TV.

We hope that Sportingo will be able to work with many of these right holders and provide more ways for fans to enjoy their favorite sports.

Interesting traffic statistics

We have been live for just over a month so this might be a bit early to come up with conclusive traffic analysis but with the power of Google analytics I can’t help myself but share some of my insights to date.

80% of the people accessing Sportingo are connected through broadband. This is a very encouraging number as it supports the next stage in our development – streaming of live sport events.

Over 30% of the users are accessing the site using Firefox, this is a much higher number then I ever expected. I wonder if this number will continue to grow or the launch of Microsoft’s Vista will reverse the trend.

English readers spend more time on the site and are more likely to click on a related article then American readers. Since we are targeting European sports this should not be surprising, yet it is a good to see that we are managing to target our core audience.

People surf a lot more during the week, I was very surprised by this stat. Since so much of sport happens over the weekend I expected to see more of our traffic on the weekend. Apparently people log in to read about sport during work hours. Our site typically gets busier as the work day progresses.

The ability to track and analyze makes the Internet such a fascinating medium. I will keep sharing some of the interesting stats that we learn as we continue to grow.

I am off to Sportel tonight and will try sending up daily updates from the show.

Sport movies and tribes

Last night I rented the movie Green Street. If you have not seen it yet I recommend it. The movie follows a firm of fanatic West Ham hooligans through the eyes of an American college student/ journalism major played by Elijah Woods. The part I found so fascinating is the social aspect of being a fan.

It is another example of our need to find something to identify with, a hero, a group, a leader. A way to define ourselves as part of a special group and to different from others. As an avid sport fan I have a deep feeling about why I am a fan of my team and why I despise the opposing team. As a humanist I find the notion of hating another team or person very problematic.

Shortly after my wife and I moved back to Israel. My favorite team had a basketball game with an opposing team from Greece. The game happened to take place in proximity to the Jewish holiday of Hanukah. I explained to my American wife that this is game has an extra significance at this time of year because the holiday celebrates a struggle between the Jews and the Greek Empire that took place over 2,000 years ago and the Maccabi fans where chanting songs about beating the Greeks. To this date my wife finds it very odd that we would be moved in a basketball game by a battle that took part over 2,000 years ago. If you think about it from a pure logical place she is right. But the passion for sport runs much deeper then any logic.

I guess that is why last week when we had an article criticizing West Ham it only took a few hours for the article to reach a couple of West Ham fan forums and for us to be flooded my angry West Ham fans. The beauty of the site was our ability to offer these same fans a way to respond and within 12 hours we got a submission through one of the fan forums providing an opposing view and backing their team. This is part of what I love about my job, the opportunity to view the controversy and dialog between opposing views. Lets just hope that we can create a world that can leverage this type of dialog on a wider scale.

YouTube and the future of TV

You Tube – what an amazing story, I am sure there are probably thousands of entries about YouTube today and most of them will have a lot more insight then I will. Especially I am not a big YouTube user and usually prefer Metacafe. Video on the web and clearly arrived, be it user generated, sport and funny clips, porn or news. Similar to the growth of music, for the most part it disregards copyright laws. The point at this stage is to figure out what people want, how do they wish to interact with video content and then to build related models to support the creation of excellent content. I believe that biggest threat all thee new services present are to the TV industry and the events that rely on hundreds of millions of TV licensing fees as their main source of revenue. Why would Sky, NBC, ABC or any other major channel pay the billion + fee that the major event holders (be it music or sports) are asking for as the number of people watching these events through their channels is eroding.

I believe that broadband and the web can present a superior viewing experience to some users. It will be up to the rights holders to embrace this new technology and find ways to provide the viewers with a superior user experience so they deiced to view the game through a channel that can generate revenue for the rights holders instead of looking for alternatives.

Next week I will be attending Sportel in Monaco. Sportel is the major conference for buying and selling of sport TV rights. This year the conference is emphasizing new media, how the industry is effected by mobile and Internet broadcasting. I will do my best to update my blog on a daily basis from the show (a better use of my time then visiting the casino)

Organic farming and Internet marketing

I am a novice organic farmer and have learned that it is very difficult to predict how my crops will develop. A few months ago I planted a row of corn, several of the seeds grow fast and in no time offered sweet corn, while others lingered and some did not develop at all. I have no way of figuring out why this happened, they all get a similar amount of water, sunlight and nourishing soil. The same happened with the watermelons I grow earlier in the summer, a few became huge and ended up being very sweet while others remained pink and did not achieve that deep red color of a wonderfully sweet watermelon and ended up as food for the local goats and horses. What does this have to do with new media? Actually I find a similar behavior with the traffic on our site. We see a growing number of visitors but for some reason (which I don’t fully understand yet) some articles are getting hundreds of visits while others linger with little attention from our audience. For my organic gardening I turn o the local framers and seek advice, and once in a while they visit my garden and give me some tips on plant rotation, time of year to plant extra. For web traffic we turn to SEO experts or as I call our expert algorithm influencers. As their job is to influence the all mighty Google algorithm to notice our little site and spread the word. I still can’t fully figure out why so many people preferred the story about Ronaldo to that about Beckham or why the story about the semi finals of the Australian Football League was so much more popular then the report about the finals. I guess that jus like gardening the only way to figure this out is time and a lot of trial and error.

New media

New media what is it about
I have been dealing with new media since 1993. This is not a typo or my dyslexia acting out but a realization of how long I have been in this industry. To anyone who can remember a world before the web the early 90’s brought the first wave of multimedia due to the availability of CD-ROM on every home computer. Interactivity meant providing the user with a menu to choose from. While user generated content was a letter (real paper not email) to your customer support staff. At the time the technology provides the ability to hyperlink from one article to the other and create easily accessible links to related content and media. We spend countless hours to decide what was the most important function on the main menu through which the user could navigate through the site. There was no ability to personalize or get any type of real time feedback about your product. Going live in beta was unthinkable and costs Disney millions due to bugs in CD-ROM products that had to be recalled. But the single most important difference between the mid 90’s and today was the place the user or consumer took in the process. You guessed who the user was and what he/she would do. Asking them or getting any real feedback was impossible and the product designers and editors thought they know more then any user about the respective subject, user experience or functionality. When developing Olympic Gold (a 100 year history of the Olympic Games) we had about a dozen editors on staff with another 20 or so experts contributing in their area of experience. At Sportingo we have about half a dozen editors and potential of tens of millions of experts that can contribute from their knowledge and experience. The beauty is that the wisdom of tens of millions of avid sport fans around the world is greater then that of any editorial team you could put together. Instead of guessing what users what you can ask them, or better yet analyze how they use your site and change it accordingly.
This new approach has its share of pitfalls including abuse of the system, consistency of the content, determining quality, fact checking etc. Yet with all its shortcoming it has the potential of creating a much more compelling experience then ever before.
More on how we can cut down on the possible abuse of an open system in my next posting.

Going Beta

The web 2.0 world has brought with it the idea that in order to stay competitive you must release in beta. If you wait until your product/ service are fully developed you are going live to late is the view. The problem with this view is that you end up launching a product that is not fully featured then end up having to double your efforts as you manage the day to day of the new service while continuing to develop the full service/ product.

It is a crucial point to figure out when is the right time to launch and make sure you have enough value to offer. On the other hand going live gives you invaluable feedback about the service and you start to learn more about your service then ever before. For example, I tend to navigate through Sportingo by subject. I go to a specific section of interest and hardly ever use the Article feature on our site which gathers together all the different articles on the site.

We are now learning that more and more of our users actually prefer to click on the Article section and navigate their way to specific articles that way. This changes the whole layout of the article section as it was intended to be more of an archive then the main place for people to search for content and requires us to redesign this section.

An important lesson to anyone building a website never expect other users to behalf the way you do. We are all individuals and have our own preferences. A good site lets different people use it in different ways to find what they want and does not require everyone to do the same.

So did we launch at the right time? Were we do early? Although I am not pleased with parts of the site I believe we made the right decision to launch. It provides us with better feedback on the site use and has opened up a number of partnership opportunities. My conclusion launch as early as you can add value to an important part of your target market. BUT be prepared to the operational requirements of going live and treat your beta site as the website that the whole world will see.

Hello world

Hello world,

This is my first blog entry, for the past year I have been an obsessive reader of blogs and an occasional commentator but I have resisted the plunge into the midst of writing. I guess that as a CEO of a new media/ internet/ web 2.0 start up I am obliged to share my thoughts with the world. Let me start with a world of caution I am dyslectic if a word has more then 3 letters I will most likely misspell it. Fortunately the spell checkers catch most of my mistake but not all of them.

• So if a word makes no sense then I am making no sense
• I was writing at 5:30 in the morning after giving my baby boy his morning bottle
• The spell checker changed what I meant and I did not catch it
  

I am the CEO and co founder of Sportingo a new fan generated news and community sport site (more about the company later), father of Liam and Elay, husband to Lisa, serial entrepreneur and lately amateur organic farmer.

I started my first company in 1993, long before the Internet craze. At the time I was a history student at Tel Aviv University and some friends of mine where digitizing dental magazines onto CD-ROM. I was fascinated with what the CD enabled and started thinking of how this new media could be applicable. That brought o the founding of Sport Electronic Archiving (SEA for short) which focused on creating sport related new media products. We licensed rights from leading sport organizations such as the International Olympic Committee, the NBA and others and created interactive sport encyclopedias about sport.

My business partner and I took the company public in London in 1996 and then saw our whole market change with the growth of the web. I moved on to co found Manna which developed a real time personalization engine, idealive an attempt to create a market place for developing. funding and distributing media. I moved on to work with several other technology companies both as an executive and consultant and earlier this year teamed up with Tal Barnoach my partner from SEA days to start Sportingo.

I will not go into to many details about Sportingo today you can read what Techcrunch thought about us TechCrunch. What I will go into in this blog are my thought about the Internet how it is changing media and my general experience as an entrepreneur and CEO.