If you are like most sports fans, you need to look at a lot
of different web sites everyday to get the news on your favorite teams.
Luckily, one Mets fan decided to do something about it. I’m talking about Dallas DeVries the
co-founder of Sportspyder.com.
That’s right he’s a Mets fan and he’s from Albany! Can’t get much better than that!
If you are not aware of Sportspyder, you need to check it
out. It has the latest news and blog
stories for every possible sport and every possible team you can think of.
Every MLB Team? Check.
NBA? NFL? NHL? Check. Check. Check.
I counted 98 different College Basketball teams, 79 different
College Football teams, MLS soccer, Premier soccer, Boxing, CrossFit, Nascar,
Horse Racing, and more. MMA, WWE, even eSports
and Magic the Gathering!
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!
Still want more? Well for $4 a month or $35 a year
you can view Sportspyder Pro ad free plus customize a feed to track all
your fantasy players.
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
(pre-pandemic). 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. The pandemic has
certainly put a hurting on our site. Traffic is down more than 50% with
none of the bigger sports yet active. Hoping for a strong rebound here
later in the year.”
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: “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.
4 comments:
John, very nice interview with Spyder Man. Good stuff.
Are our articles automatically linked there?
Yes they are Tom as well as just about every Mets related Blog you can imagine.
Probably should have highlighted the Fantasy option more. If you have a Fantasy team they give you tremendous advantage over the other members in your league.
The only fantasy team I have, John, is the one who may play soon in Queens. Playing without fans is kind of a fantasy, one might say.
Thanks for the awesome write up John! The writers here at Mackmets certainly make it my favorite Mets site to visit.
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