Type Private company Founder Chris McCoy | Industry Internet, Sports | |
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Website www.yoursports.com/about Headquarters Sunnyvale, California, United States Founded 2006, Seattle, Washington, United States Profiles | ||
YourSports is a social network and personalized newsfeed for sports. The goal is to be able to tell — at the city, state, country and regional network level — what the community is talking about, which particular teams, issues and pieces of content are most popular and least popular.
Concept
YourSports is attempting to create a social network to allow sports fans to have conversations with their friends and favorite athletes — about any sport, across the world. Users sign in to YourSports via login or Facebook. The latter auto-creates a profile using your name and a photo. From there, you can follow teams, cities, sports media properties, etc., and the content posted to those pages ends up in your news feed. If you become a “fan” of a team, for example, you’ll see content related to that team, and if you become a “foe,” you won’t. The data from these relationships is used to generate fandom rankings across all athletes and sports.
Like Facebook, there’s a “Front Page” or main feed, where you can check out the links to articles people are posting and see notifications from within your network, reading articles newsfeed-style in realtime. You can reply to those articles (and the people posting them), share your replies on Facebook and Twitter and post your own sports-related content to start new conversations.
YourSports is hoping to democratize content distribution in the sense that they want a random fan to be able to get as much distribution to the followers of the San Francisco Giants as the lead sports writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. How much interaction a particular post or link gets based on the number of reposts, shares and reactions, but the real key is that it provides, in theory, a better way to get your content out to the followers of your favorite sports team than Twitter.
Professional athletes can put their sponsorships on their profile to market themselves. For example, Russell Wilson, an investor of YourSports, can put the shoes or jeans he wears on his profile. Fans can buy his products right off of YourSports. Wilson, his sponsors and YourSports all make money off of the transaction.
Besides allowing users to talk about what is currently going on in the sports world, YourSports has one of the largest historic sports databases on the internet. Fans can become a fan, or foe, of past seasons. For example, a Seattle Seahawks fan could be a foe of the 2008 season, when the team finished 4-12. That same fan could be a fan of the 2010 Seahawks season, when they upset the New Orleans Saints in the first round of the playoffs. Fans can connect to all of their favorite sports personalities and teams, all the way down to their past little league teams. On top of those connections, content and commerce can be re-imagined.
YourSports launched their Public Beta during the 2015 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament