247 Sports
247 Sports is an up and coming college football and college basketball recruiting powerhouse. 247 Sports will be the premier website for up-to-date college basketball recruiting information and college football recruiting information. The current heavyweights, Scout, Rivals, and ESPN, are not keeping up with the changing times and 247 Sports plans to fix that. 247 Sports hopes to capture the college football recruiting bases and the college basketball recruiting bases around the nation that are currently being fed sub-standard or out-dated content on these previously mentioned “legacy recruiting sites.”
ESPN, Rivals, which is owned by Yahoo, and Scout, which is owned by Fox, have all failed to build a website that is designed not only for publishers and advertisers, but specifically designed for the visitors and subscribers as well. 247 Sports is aiming to have information up (I hope it is obvious) 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They are aiming to combine top local content and forming a new community that is intertwined with various media technology and social networks.
24/7 Sports
It is hard to review the site yet as the site is only partially up and not fully functional yet. Once the site has been completed in its entirety I plan to put up a more detailed review on the website. What we can review though is the past and current landscape of college recruiting as well as the current networks that 247 Sports will be competing against for market share. We can also take a look at how these other website have failed to advance with the times and how they have failed to keep providing a quality user experience.
One of the biggest complaints in the college football recruiting industry and the college basketball recruiting industry is the lack of coverage in certain areas which then leads to not only a lack of quality recruiting information but inaccurate information or untimely information as well. These websites are also sitting on outdated platforms and failing to integrate new forms of social media and commentary. Rivals and Scout are both extremely outdated and so many new advances in technology like programming languages, various web apps, and media sources have failed to be implemented. ESPN has horrible article commenting, lacks quality message boards, and severely lacks that community feeling. ESPN is also notorious for bumping up the rankings of recruits or over covering recruits and players from their favored conferences (contracts anyone?). ESPN football recruiting loves to ooze over the SEC and ESPN basketball recruiting loves to ooze over the Big East and the ACC. All three of these “legacy recruiting sites” have various problems and issues that 247 Sports hopes to rectify.
247 Sports Recruiting
College recruiting in general needs a site with major upgrades in: the quality of their message boards, the accuracy of their recruiting databases, the implementation of Google maps, quality commenting, high quality streaming videos, easily accessible mobile apps, live recruiting chats, customized widgets, local content that is easy to find and pulled directly from local blogs and forums, Twitter and Facebook integration, easy social sharing opportunities, and even the simple things like user friendly interfaces and easily accessible local information.
On some of the “legacy recruiting sites” it can be infuriating to try to do something as simple as search for a new recruit or even having up-to-date, correct information. 247 Sports is hoping to fix these issues and provide the best college football recruiting and college basketball recruiting website with the highest quality content. It is too early to tell if 247 Sports will be able to take over this niche and finally have the quality material that users are craving or if it has bright hopes fails to follow through with proper implementation. I for one have extremely high hopes that 247 Sports not only improves the college football recruiting landscape and college basketball recruiting landscape, but that it could very well corner the market and set the new standard for a recruiting website.