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.