Another guy who thinks his site will be bigger than ESPN.com

New Louisville arena chair (edit) thinks iHigh.com is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Over/under on when the website shuts down?

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20101228/FEATURES/312280015

 

Someone is going to be the leader in that market.

iHigh seems like it's got the right idea. A little too busy for my taste, though.

 

His arena is named the fucking KFC Yum! Center. Cannot take him seriously.

 

Reminds me of the guy who told me kickboxing was the sport of the future. I guess he was half-right if you give him credit for MMA.

 

If the site is limited to high school sports, how can it possibly be as big as espn.com?

 

Well, it's pretty dumb to even comment on, but "based on the way we're growing, we'll be as large as ESPN.com in 18 months" is of course the ridiculous notion.

That assumes a new site that attracts a decent number of new readers/users is going to continue that same growth rate unimpeded for 18 months, which is simply silly. It will grow until it has all the people interested in high school sports that it's going to get, and then it will stop growing millions and millions short of ESPN, or any of the other main sports websites for that matter. That's like me starting a site and going from two to four to eight users in a week and saying, "Hey, if it keeps doubling, more people will be using my site than Google in six weeks."

Nice of him to dream big, but that's all it is.

 

Even in high schools, there's Maxpreps as well as ESPNRise, plus dozens of localized boards. It's nice to dream big, but good luck.

 

The guy isn't the arena manager, he's chair of the arena authority and the guy who got the place built. He's also the Host behind Host Communications, so he hasn't fallen off the information turnip truck. No wonder that one of the strongest assets of the site is it giving streaming video and audio from high school games across the country. Maybe two people tune in to West Noble (Indiana) on Friday night, but there are a lot of schools, and those numbers can add up.

Maybe "bigger than ESPN" is a stretch -- OK, it is a stretch -- but no high school site has established itself as a go-to for everything. If Host can do that, then he might be on to something.

 

Pretty much all the schools in our area use MaxPreps to update rosters/schedules/stats/results. Hard to imagine another site coming and overthrowing it at this point.

 

cusack?

 

iHigh has been around for at least 10 years, so it's not anything new. And it's never caught on the way Maxpreps has or even Gannett's highschoolsports.net. There's a new one out there called C2Cschools that some states are using, too. So yeah, uphill battle here.

 

That Schottey hasn't posted here yet is a mystery....