Thanks for your comment. I guess the player associations and alumni associations fit the bill here, but I was thinking more about how to expand this concept online/through social media. Instead of having a group that meets once a year (or however often it really is) and sends out emails occasionally, why not let people be connected 24-7 to get as much out of this as possible…

This is somewhat of an HR project, but couldn’t it also be a way to generate incremental revenue? Leagues could build a site like this and extend sponsorships to it, or even get players to chip in to fund. I would think luxury brands and marketers would pay to have their message in front of wealthy current/former pro athletes. My vision was for something like this to be done at the league level, to involve/connect as many people as possible–instead of having separate efforts for each team.

Thanks for bringing up these interesting points, and thanks for commenting.

I have, however, seen the concept of TEAM “alum programs” brought up in the past, and believe its a great idea.

For corporations it makes sense because talent frequently returns, thus reducing the cost of finding talent.

For teams, it probably makes most sensein soccer or other professional sports that have developmental programs or leagues (perhaps baseball’s minor leagues or NBA’s D-league). It’s hard however for a club (or even a league) to justify initial investment in such an “HR” project, when perhaps the only added benefit would be in the long term: if a star is seeking to end his/her career at a small- or mid-tier team where they began, enter team operations, or give back financially. Even if players did return to work for a club/team/franchise, there would probably be little monetary goodwill by either side at that point. Thus, it would be hard to justify the initial and ongoing ROI past marketing and PR for a club, especially when its likely that players follow coaches more than ownership/managment, and they’ll have likely turned over ago.

I think you are dead on in this post. There needs to be more than the ability to connect, because people already do that on the twin towers (Facebook an Myspace). So there needs to be greater value, or some distinguishing applications which drive users to the site.

If I were going to start a social network I would try to integrate features like delicious and stumbleupon links/bookmarking to draw users in that way. And open up as much content to the public as possible. I don’t like having to sign up and register for an account before I can see what’s going on.

I agree. People are starting them, just to start them.

My biggest gripe so far, is people starting them and not being prepared for traffic. Twitter’s overcapacity issues and issues with other social sites deters me from using them AND signing up for new ones assuming that they will have the same issues.

Keep up the great posts!

Looks like it would come in at #37 above iStadia. Sorry I missed it.

Cheers !!

Sorry I missed you, but according to dnScoop (which of course is the ultimate valuation tool…kidding) thelotd wouldn’t have made the top 50.

Sorry I missed your site. And yeah this was completely for fun and not meant to be a true representation of any site’s real value–just one fun way to compare a bunch of sites.

For example, management team, existing funding, content, users, market size/potential, partnerships, and I could name 100 more factors.

Not to mention the fact that Alexa is not regarded as a reliable source to gauge traffic. Quantcast, Compete, and Comscore are all more reliable. Also…for newer sites, it takes a while for any of those tracking sites to catch up with traffic data.

Our site, http://www.prepchamps.com is ranked 477,655 on Alexa and 59,948 on Quantcast. Quantcast shows that we are attracting 32,000 uniques. In fact, we use several analytic tools, but for simplicity sake, our Google analytics show that we attracted over 75,000 uniques this month. But our site is only 3 months old and we have only been marketing it for 2 month. So those numbers will continue to explode.

But if you do want to use dnScoop, we are valued at $37,183. So we should be #28 on your list. But for the record…our valuation is about 270x higher than that.

But great blog and keep up the good work. You do a great job tracking the sites in the space.