The husband and wife behind BallHype and ShowHype, two Digg clones that focus on baseball and entertainment news, have earned a modest pay day: $3 million from media group Future US. That’s not bad given the two never raised institutional funding since launching the first site (BallHype) in April 2007.
Users of BallHype and ShowHype (which launched in October 2007) vote up their favorite stories, and these stories hit the homepage page as they would on Digg, Reddit, or Mixx. But because these sites must cater to their respective niches, users can also view news from narrow topics, such as particular sports teams and celebrities (for example, you can get the latest dish on Amy Winehouse here).
Frontpages for news on the web generally breaks down into two categories: those created algorithmically, and those created through crowd-sourcing. In the baseball sector, the crowd-sourcing approach appears to be winning – BallHype attracts multitudes more visitors than BallBug, a sister site to Techmeme that surfaces baseball news algorithmically.
The size of this transaction was not formally announced but was made known to us by a source familiar to the deal.
Good for them, I like ballhype a lot.
Where was their source of revenue? There seem to be no ads on the site.
if reddit is open source, why would anyone buy this site?
a payday for a small player, congrats lots – KaChing
@mark
Because of this:
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
congratulations!
wow, I think they could have gotten a lot more. with that kind of traffic from two sites and the right monetization they should have been able to bring in 300-400k a year without a ton of effort and they are still growing.
@Dan
ah, i see. it’s one of those “lose money on every user, but make it up in volume” deals. got it.
The Ballhype technology is awesome, way better than Reddit. With their niche sites growing like crazy (and probably also their ad revenues….yes, they do have ads), Future US was lucky to get them for the price.
Future US will be able to monetize BallHype very easily. With their ad contacts and BallHype’s traffic they will be able to make their money back on this deal quickly. If the founders of BallHype could of waited another year, I believe they could of got 10 million.
I’m not sure that return is so modest by normal startup standards, where *on average* many fail and get a return of zero, and I think even *most* “successful” startups have enough VC obligation that the founders are often left with a few million or so rather than the tens of millions for the founders that many wrongly think follow every startup sale.
TechCrunch should have this number: Founder paydays over 3 million. I bet *that* is a modest number.
Ballhype is a decent site, I’ve liked it for some time. But I think their needs to be more focus on smaller communities and meeting the needs of the users… so I developed http://www.nesblotter.com for New England Sports fans of the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots and Red Sox