There’s only one other group online as obsessive about constant feeds of information aside from Silicon Valley’s power geeks, and that’s sports fans. Geeks have RSS, sports fans have SMS. Tech heads have podcasts to their highlight reels. Fans have even spurred the development of their own kind of virtual world, the $2 billion cottage fantasy sports industry. There are a host of sites helping some 15-18 million fans follow their leagues, including Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, and a host of smaller operations. Fans play on 3 different teams on average.
Atlanta-based ScreamingSports is a new service from FSDashboard creating a social network for fantasy sports fans where they can manage their teams, regardless of where they are hosted. FSDashboard is releasing the site fresh off a $1.25 million round of financing from Mangrove Partners.
ScreamingSports lets you create your own personal fantasy sports profile (blog, pics, friends) and aggregate all of your fantasy sports teams by just dropping in your credentials. You can connect with other players, compete for points, and get updates on general sports news. For your teams, SS will let you know how they’re performing, what games are coming up, as well as last minute game breakers like injuries or expulsion. Any changes you make to you teams in ScreamingSports are reflected in the hosting site and vice versa.
ScreamingSports also adds features some fantasy sites don’t have. You can access your teams from a mobile phone for last minutes tweaks and even automate updates to your teams based on injuries.
We’ve seen a cadre of other startups cater to this crowd for big payoffs in the past. Wikia reportedly purchased ArmchairGM for $2 million. Time and Sports Illustrated acquired FanNation and paid about $25 million for a 40% stake its parent company. Rivals allegedly sold for a whopping $100 million.
Since they depend on third party sites for their users, Screaming Sports stands in a more tenuous spot than these other sites, who went it alone. However, it’s easy to see ScreamingSports launching their own network after reaching a critical mass, similar to Meebo launching their IM network after aggregating the major players.