Beverly Hills-based OleOle builds an online football empire
Written on August 28, 2008 – 10:35 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Football in the USBy the headline of this post, you might guess this article concerns the American way of football. But no, I’ll actually discuss the sport to which Americans refer as “soccer”. The sport that their youngsters play. The sport that’s only known for Posh Spice’s boyfriend, David Beckham. But unpopular or not, there IS an US-based company that gets football. OleOle.com is an online football empire that offers fans the ability to share their truth about football, ’cause “nobody knows more what you love about football than yourself”.
OleOle users have a lot of freedom. They can write articles, create team pages, watch and upload videos, check live scores, comment on each other’s pages, join and create groups, and write bio’s for teams and players.
This model seems to work fine, but maybe needs a little refinement. You know, Web 3.0 is coming up so people will sooner or later demand an expert layer. Therefore, the Beverly Hills-based company is acquiring fan blogs. In the last couple of months, OleOle has acquired ArseBlog, The Lord of the Wing (Celtic), Chelseablog, Harry Hotspur, Fans del Real Madrid, Real Madrid Talk and Boca Juniors Fans. Yesterday, the football community added AVFC Blog, fan blog of Aston Villa. Its writer gives an interesting insight in OleOle’s business.
The fast growing football website basically incorporates the blogs. They move the blog to their own servers and put the blogger on the pay roll. Or, like AVFC blogger Damian describes:
On Wednesday night, at about 11pm UK time, the site will be taken off line for a few hours. While it is off line, it will be moved and become part of another site, namely OleOle.
(…)
Well, basically they sort of offered me a job. The job isn’t doing anything that I’m not already doing but the guys at OleOle are actually going to pay me to keep the blog running.
So while OleOle users can still write as much content as they want, official bloggers will function as experts. These US chaps might have found the perfect way to combine community and editorial quality. Not bad, for a bunch of soccer fans.
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