John From Albany - In Praise of SportSpyder, an interview with Dallas DeVries, SportSpyder co-founder.

One of the Websites we really like here at Mack’s Mets is SportSpyder.  We use their links to provide you the latest news on the Mets and the rest of MLB. 

But SportSpyder has more than just Baseball.  It has the latest news and blog stories for every possible sport and every possible team you can think of. 

Like more than one team in one sport?  Want all the news from your favorite MLB team, College Team, and NBA team in one place.  Just create a free log in and you can customize your feed to get all your teams on one page…in addition to the related Twitter Feeds! 

But that’s not all and with Fantasy Baseball Leagues starting up, you are going to want to hear about this.  You can customize a feed to track all your fantasy players.  Not sure who to pick for your starting staff?  You can put those players on your SportSpyder list and compare all the notes on each player.  A rival team owner offers you one of his or her “stars” for some of your players?  Maybe there is something they are not telling you – then put them on your SportSpyder team.

For $4 a month or $35 a year you can view SportSpyder Pro and view SportSpyder AD FREE!  Best of all, to sign up for the free trial, unlike other sites, you won’t need to give them a credit card number, just a valid e-mail address. 

Per the site: “SportSpyder was started in Albany, NY by two brothers [Dallas and Derek DeVries] looking for a way to get their sports news faster than anyone else (so we could win at fantasy sports). We've been up and running since January 2004.”

I asked Dallas how he got started:

“Really the inception was in about 2001.  I was frustrated by the number of different sites I needed to go to in order to read Mets news.  There was about 20 different places that wrote about the Mets at that time.  Blogs weren't really a thing.  It was largely the bigger news media outlets.  I think the only Mets fan site I knew of was Mets Online by Bryan Hoch who was served a cease and desist from MLB because he was too popular.   As a hobby I decided it would be fun to build a website that linked to all the Mets news everyday and I was a bit inspired by fark.com which allowed users to submit links everyday.  So I registered metsny.com and built out a PHP website that would allow people to submit Mets news links that I could approve."   

"At the start I manually went in and submitted all the links myself and over time as it got more popular others would help submit links to the point where I didn't have to do much anymore.  At some point I realized I could automate the whole process by crawling and parsing out specific websites and the new Mets articles would show up within minutes of posting.  This was a game changer and I realized I could build out a framework and do this for every team.  In 2003 we started building and released SportSpyder.com and then incorporated in 2004.”

JFA: You both have to be big sports fans to put something like this together.  What are your favorite teams?

DD: I'm a huge Mets fan.  It may sound strange but I don't really have any other favorite teams and my brother is not even a big sports fan.  I do enjoy sports in general and love to take in live games at all levels above high school.  The other thing that played a role in the site development was just to learn new technology as young computer scientists.  It's a lot of fun to solve problems with technology that others find useful and learn new things while doing it.   I've certainly learned a lot more about sports than I ever would have expected.  

JFA: How has the site grown over the years?  Did you always have as many sports or did you start with Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey and grow from there?

DD: “We began with the Mets at metsny.com and then started with all the teams from the MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA when we migrated to SportSpyder.  Next we added college sports and eventually MLS and Premier League.  A few years ago I worked on adding various sports that are not regional based such as tennis, MMA, boxing, golf, Nascar etc.  This hasn't gotten a lot of traction as of yet so I may have to rethink my approach for how to better engage the user with how I present the content.”

“The site has definitely evolved over the years.   There has been a significant shift from almost 100% media based news to a huge amount of fan content.  Sources like the NYPost would write about a few articles for the Mets on any given day and then Metsblog came along and was doing 15 different posts a day.  I had to restructure things to bring them to the users in a more digestible way where they were not overwhelmed by one source.  Twitter has also made a big impact on sports news.   Integrating Twitter was huge for bringing the users the latest information about their team immediately.   Many people don't want to try to figure out how to use Twitter and we curate the sports personalities for you so you can follow along during games, drafts, trade deadlines, free agency and more.”

“Our user growth has been almost completely organic over time.  People found us through word of mouth or stumbled upon us from a search engine.  We started small and have grown to about 20k users per day.  It has been fun to take an idea, turn it into a hobby and grow it into my full time job as of 2.5 years ago.”

JFA: What is the most “exotic” or “niche” sport that you carry?

DD: "It's not really a "sport" but I added "Magic The Gathering" as sort of an eSport only because I like it and I had a framework to easily do it.  I would say MMA but thats' pretty mainstream these days!"

JFA: Do you have plans to add more sports or features in the future?

DD: “My brother is finally joining me full time in 3 weeks so hopefully we can do some really cool things in the upcoming year.” 

“One thing we started looking at building is integrating a sports podcasting aggregation feature.  Podcasts in general have grown so much in the last few years and I have seen an explosion in sports podcasts including the Mets.  We already started a very simplistic integration several months ago but plan on doing a deeper dive in finding all the sports podcasts we can and building some features around it.”

“I'll probably continue to add more college teams that I'm missing as well as some more European soccer leagues/teams.  If there is a strong enough interest in any sport I will look at ways to get it added.”   

“I'm very interested in evolving my current Sport pages like "MLB".  I would actually like to bring back more crowd sourced or curated lists for these sport pages that I could also integrate into my team pages so people can get their favorite team news but also a taste of interesting things happening in the sport.” 

“Of course managing 4500 different new sources and 7000 Twitter sport personalities will continually keep me busy but I'm always trying to think of new things I can do to give users a better experience on how they get their sports news.  Ideally, we can put the same concept to use outside of sports as well.”

Thank you Dallas for your time and thank you Dallas and Derek for one amazing site.  

As I say each day on the Mets Breakfast links:

Want more?  Check out https://sportspyder.com/mlb/new-york-mets/news.