FanIQ, a sports site that focuses more on entertaining its users than bogging them down with the stats and opinion pieces found on the likes of ESPN, has had a landmark year. The site launched in 2006, but hasn’t really hit its stride until now: since January, the site has grown by over 2000%, recently hitting as many as 2.4 million unique users and 1.5 million registered members. These figures pale in comparison to the larger sports sites and popular fantasy leagues, but the rate of growth is very impressive nonetheless.
FanIQ differentiates itself from other sports sites by offering a set of casual games and community features alongside more traditional sports headlines. To encourage participation, the site has a points system that rewards users who write blog posts and play the site’s integrated trivia game. These points are just for show (though CEO Ty Shay says that many users are still intensely competitive about them), but in the future the site will offer virtual goods and other rewards in exchange for points.
The site has raised around $3-5 million in funding (the exact amount was not disclosed), with investors including Vantage Point Ventures, Peter Thiel, Paul Martino, Keith Rabois, and Jeff Fluhr. Other startups in this space include Open Sports (which has a similar web portal) and Watercooler and Citizen Sports, both of which design sports oriented applications for social networks.
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Ummm, who gives a crap?
Ummm, 2.4 Million Sports Fans….Who gives a crap about u?
I thought this looked familiar:
http://mashable.com/2007/03/14/faniq/
Note the comments.
What is the source for that traffic chart? They’re own directly measured Quantcast figures say 1M and Compete says 500K. What a fluff piece!
I run a sports news aggregator site and I never heard of this site other than from mashable and tc. I crawl thousands of sports blogs and have never seen mention of this site, just seems a little hard to believe those metrics. Just my 2 cents.
What sports news aggregator do you run? Hard to believe your 2 cents w/o a URL.
Well I’m not trying to linkbait here. Big kudos to them if they do have that kind of traffic, I applaud their success. Being someone fairly immersed in the world of online sports it just seemed a little far fetched to me, I guess those numbers seem pretty big to me. 2.4 million uniques a month is pretty massive.
@Billy:
So you find it easy to believe given the numbers we can verify with quatcast, alexa, and compete?
Some guy has to link to his site in order to be believable? You are a joke and should stick to shilling on mashable.
Ted, I think he was responding to me not the author. Looking at compete/alexa i guess its probably accurate. I was mostly surprised by my ignorance of their popularity I think
Sports = Huge
The graph spike can be explained by one thing: the start of the NFL season. NFL dominates the space. It’s an extremely seasonal market though.
Their lead item today is a repackaged SI.com “feature” about hockey goalie masks from about a month ago. Not exactly intriguing.
Alexa and compete under report sports sites. We’re seeing them report about 10% of our true traffic numbers (we’re also a sports site). My guess is the category doesn’t fit well with the alexa/ compete demo.
Agreed, I find that compete has our site at about 20% of its real numbers. If faniq is also at 20% it matches up with the numbers reported by TC
Lotta loose talk around here. Alexa, isn’t perfect but faniq ranks and reaches substantially higher than deadspin, bleacherreport, yardbarker, SportsbyBrooks, The BigLead, KissingSuzyKolber, WithLeather, etc. FanIQ has been in the top 20 of BallHype for a long time. If you actually read the site, NFL is only a small part of their play. Don’t know what stones some of you guys have been hiding under. If you personally don’t use Google, do you assume it doesn’t exist?
Sport can make any person Healthy
the only reason fan iq has jumped up its membership is only because fan iq steals people’s email contacts once they join and without permission, spams all their email contacts, saying “private message waiting for you from your friend.”
Once you select on it, you have to join to see the private message and once you join, it sends emails to all your friends on your email list over and over again.
fan iq needs to be stopped
I am a member and FanIQ never spammed my contacts. So what’s up with that??
Cool sports site.
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