| Company | Go SPORTn |
| Website | gofishn.com |
| Blog | facebook.com/gofishn |
| @gofishnfeed | |
| Stage | Live |
| Launched | 12/09 |
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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