14 DAY TRIAL // Officially launched on August 24, 2009, Fanbase is a business venture from Benchmark Capital, founded and supervised by three Internet moguls with prodigious careers. Fanbase wants to be the world's largest web directory for sports information, the perfect place to go searching for any kind of sports trivia.
Designed to be a wiki page, following the example set by Wikipedia with its user-generated content, and by IMDB, an online directory / database where users can find specific information on a certain domain, Fanbase has been online for a couple of months now, but in an unfinished beta development version.
Benchmark Capital went all out for this project, already investing $5 million in a venture that reunited two of the masterminds behind the Epinions project, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia, joined by Prakash Janakiraman, former engineering manager at Google Maps.
The website takes pride in the fact that, from its beta launch and till its official launch, users have already made 60,000 contributions, adding to an astonishing database comprised of over 1,7 million athlete pages, 20,000 team profiles, 23 different sports categories and 500,000 unique visitors.
Fanbase holds precious information from other web resources and almanacs, but relies heavily on user-generated content. Data can be found on any particular sport, professional, college or even amateur. Pages can be created for every person that was a part of a sports team, no matter how long or on what level. Users also have the option to log in by using Facebook authentication credentials, upload videos, photos or articles.
“Anyone can contribute by submitting or editing player and team pages, as well as adding rich content such as photos, videos, articles, and trivia. The company's long-term vision is to be the definitive source of information on every athlete that has ever played sports, from famous to not-so-famous, professional to amateur, and present-day to distant past,” the official press release read.
Future plans to sell merchandise on famous athlete pages are included, visitors being able to purchase a Johnny Unitas throwback jersey directly from his Fanbase profile. A page example for an athlete can be found attached to this article.
