Sportgenic on Monday announced that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding from Adams Street Partners, Louie Partners, KPG Ventures, and Greycroft Partners.
Originally launched in 2005, Sportgenic competes in the highly targeted world of sports advertising. The company is a sports ad network that aims at connecting some of its major clients like Nike and Toyota to sports enthusiasts, across 350 niche sports sites like BMX-Forum.com, CollegeSwimming.com, and Ironman.com. It claims to reach 20 million unique visitors per month across the sites where it places ads. That’s a decent size in the sports category, but doesn’t even crack the top 50 in terms of ad networks as a whole.
With $10 million more in the bank and a handful of new additions — it added two members to its board and a new senior vice president of sales — Sportgenic improving its game. But will sports advertising be enough?
They got more cash rich and extra buzz
That’s alot of money for a sport’s website!
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Sportgenic still can’t get good rates for it’s publishers.
At InGameNow (http://www.ingamenow.com) we use the Yardbarker Network and it works quite well for traffic / advertising.
The place is a total s***show. Did the investors do *any* diligence before signing the checks?
it’s cool.I believe most of the popular ad net have a bright future .
SG,
Nice anonymous comment. Why don’t you provide actual factual proof why SportsGenic is a s*** show instead of railing them anonymously. From what I can see on the outside they seem to be on the right track. There aren’t too many competitors doing what they are doing. The difference in CPMs between what ESPN and other major sports sites versus small sports sites is huge. As one of the commenters said they use Yardbarker but those CPMs are pretty low too. Anything is better then Adsense though which is what most small sports sites use.
This money should allow them to bring in new sales people that can bring on more large brands which will in turn bring in better ad deals.
As a publisher I’m not a big fan of SportGenic and neither are other folks in the action sports publishing industry I’ve spoken with. The guys come across as arrogant while offering CPMs to publishers that are actually lower than those we were seeing with Google Adsense. Of course there’s nothing you can do about this once you’re a SportGenic publisher - they lock everyone in to a 1-year exclusive contract (minimum). No online reporting tools (they tell you at the end of the month how many impressions you received - how 1998 is that?) and the CPMs vary widely from month to month (mine were halved from July to August). Slow payment schedule - sometimes more than 60 days - and they even wired me a lower payment than was due last month (though they quickly fixed the “mistake”). Luckily we are using SportG on a couple of the smaller sites in our network as a trial - they will never sign our big traffic sites. Beware!