| Website | gosportn.com |
| Blog | blog.gosportn.com |
| @neddesmond | |
| Category | Consumer Web |
| Phone | 301 509 5763 |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 1/09 |
| Description | social media and marketing platform |
Go SPORTn is a boot-strapped media company whose goal is to reinvent enthusiast, niche media by making smart use of the Web and all its attributes.
What we’ve developed with our first launch, GoFISHn, which is aimed at the 30-million consumer, $45 billion sport fishing market, is a social media Web platform that is transferable to many categories.
In many of the so-called “enthusiast” categories, from sport fishing to gardening, online media is still in its infancy, and there have been few successful efforts to exploit all that we know about Facebook, Google, and user behavior online to create a powerful media site that attracts a significant audience and relevant brand advertising.
Sport fishing is a great example. There are 30 million anglers in the US, and they generate 45 billion in annual retail sales. But the biggest media sites in the category reach an audience well short of seven figures. One reason for this shortfall is the widespread failure to build experiences native to the Internet as a medium in its own right, as opposed to adapting media from print or cable.
What we’ve built is media engine that is fundamentally social, and fully open and public.
We begin with the most engaged and committed potential members, the small business owner who, in the case of fishing, makes a living as a guide, or an outfitter or a charter captain. We offer them a dramatically better platform (as opposed to existing, retrograde websites) from which to promote their knowledge and their business – a highly-seo’d self-publishing environment built on a Facebook-like feed architecture and hooked into both Twitter and Facebook. This segment of our membership owns the daily and hourly narrative of the fishing world, and they are critical to our success.
The next tier of our membership is the enthusiast who is not a pro but is engaged enough to create a profile, publish their own ‘fish stories,” and connect to pros as well as fellow anglers.
And the last and broadest tier are the visitors who come from Google and Bing or our fast-growing Facebook Page, to research outings and enjoy fishing chatter.
Core to the consumer experience is ease of use – sign up (native or Facebook) and publishing – reports, images, video, gear reviews, Q&A etc. The architecture’s core is all about SEO and feeds. For the pro, this really means greatly improved discovery (new customers) and connection (existing customers).
To organize the large volume of information that we expect to flow through the site, we provide members with the ability to “favorite,” (or follow) other members feeds, as well as save individual feed posts under a “favorites” tab.
In addition, we make it simple for members to tag new content (gear, technique, species, location) and add a map, where relevant, to make it easy to to locate updates based on their subject matter. We do that through search, and just as important, through a subject-based “encyclopedia” that contains authoritative, licensed content on a huge array of relevant material – plus relevant updates from our membership on the same subject.
We aim to created a big universe of focused, ever advancing, member-generated content, and to attract a very large audience that brands will be eager to address.
Our revenue will come from a combination of display and sponsored link and retail affiliate revenue, plus subscription revenue. We are at work on our follow-up launches in new categories.
| Website | gofishn.com |
| Blog | facebook.com/gofishn |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | December 5, 2009 |
| Tags | gofishn, gosportn, launch, gohuntn |
GoFISHn (Dec. 2009) and GoHUNTn (Jan. 2011) are social media publishing platforms designed to help businesses and enthusiasts in the hunting and fishing world Tell Their Story in ways that help marketing efforts and deepen the connections among sportsmen and women.
The platform underlying these sites was built and designed by Go Sportn Inc., a California and Maryland-based start-up founded by Ned Desmond, former head of the interactive group at Time Inc. with a career in digital media that goes back to the launch of Infoseek in 1996.
Go Sportn’s mission is to re-invent the world of enthusiast media. The company’s aim is to use the media contributions of business and enthusiasts in specific categories to create a highly engaging experience that rivals the old media world of enthusiast magazines and cable channels. Harnessing Google and Facebook to the effort is key to the strategy, as is the ease of publishing and rich context of canonical information built into the platform.
In its first year, GoFISHn reached 485,000 uniques on the Web, and 150,000 fans on Facebook. It’s Facebook posts appeared more than 96 million times in top news feeds. The GoFISHn project has been featured on FOX news, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and the New York Times.
Some of the GoSPORTn platform features: Profiles – angler (for amateurs) and Pro (for business) Self-publishing: status reports, fishing reports, photo galleries, video, maps etc. Tags: We make it easy for user to tag all the content they produce, and GoFISHn uses those tags to organize UGC for search and other uses. Feeds: Twitter and FB enabled for reg and feeds. Maps: All content types have optional map attached, multiple annotated markers. Map Search: We will soon launch a map view of all our data that allows visitors to find members, updates etc. based on a map view. Answers: We have a QA engine that maps all entries to the member’s feed. Gear Reviews: We have a review engine that maps all entries to the member’s feed. Encyclopedia: This is where we organize all the material created on the site in a taxonomy thousands of nodes deep and supplement that with licensed content from authoritative sources, such as state fish and game agencies and Ken Schultz’s Encyclopedia of Fishing. Finishing this section of the site will take several more months.
In March 2012, we executed on a pivot (love saying that) to take the best of the content in 2011 on GoFISHn.com and re-publish it in a a more the more refined, magazine-like presentation of an app for the iPad. We were able to sell some advertising into the app, and we are hoping to see meaningful retail sales @ $4.99 for the content rich tour through the highlights of sportfishing in 2011.
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