UPDATE 4/22/23 – Welcome to Football Alliance! (soft launch)

Mike Margittai — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 04:00:00 +0000

Get paid for creating content and/or driving traffic to the site!

My story, Our Story

-Who am I?
-What is Football Alliance? What am I trying to build? And why?
-Media appearances discussing Football Alliance

-Who am I?

Hi, I’m Mike Margittai. I am the Founder of Football Alliance. I obviously love sports, but bigger than that, I love to create and build. I love to innovate. Give me just about any idea, product, or process, and I’m going to try to figure out a better way to do it (annoyingly so, I’m a never-satisfied perfectionist). But most importantly, I want to help people. Because that’s what helps me, gives me purpose, validates my existence.

-What is Football Alliance? What am I trying to build? And why?

Usually, the simplest way I describe what I’m trying to build here to people is “a Facebook for football.” Really just because it’s more like Facebook than any of the other mainstream social media platforms and Facebook is an easily recognizable name and product to associate with. But, my absolute burning hatred for Facebook aside (you’ll understand later, if you don’t already), it is really so much more – and less – I just haven’t figured out the easiest non-Facebook-invoking way to describe that yet – the “elevator pitch” – maybe this writing will help me with that.

What we are working to build is a social and professional platform to benefit all levels of the football industry. Not just the media side, that’s just the tip of the iceberg that we already had experience in and easiest for us to monetize.

At its most basic level, it benefits users by aggregating hundreds of football media sources into one place.

A level deeper, it allows any registered user to create their own content, have a discussion forum, and have a peer review system that helps the consumers know who the best quality content sources are, while also allowing those best sources to benefit from their higher quality rating.

Another level deeper, and a real game-changer, we offer revenue share for contributions that users make to the site. If you generate content that generates revenue for us, you earn a share of that revenue. If you generate any incoming traffic to any content on the site – literally any page or article – that generates revenue, you earn a share of that revenue. And whether anybody believes me or not, I’ve had this idea for 10+ years, even before YouTube started their revenue share program for content creators, I just hadn’t built up the means to put it into action yet. It really stemmed from my experience in affiliate marketing. It’s not the hyper-capitalistic (greedy) business model that most of today’s business people prefer, almost demand. “Why pay for something you can get for free? (or cheaper)?” But my philosophies are more along the lines of everyone getting a “fair and equitable piece of the pie” and “you don’t go broke making a profit” (hopefully). You do need a responsibly sustainable profit margin to maintain and develop a business, but after that, I’d rather undercut my competitors and make it up in volume than try to maximize that margin.

So why? What problem(s) am I trying to solve?

1) To separate, focus, aggregate, and organize.

Facebook is an everything site. Twitter is an everything site. And frankly, they are cluttered, out of order messes. You can have very specific things you “follow,” but because of their insistence on algorithms, you’re still going to get peripheral subjects mixed in. We are a football-focused site. No engagements, no pregnancies, no pets, no politics, just football.

And sports media is usually best consumed in an organized, chronological timeline, not mixed up like chop suey. If you want NFL news, you can go to our NFL page. If you more specifically want AFC East news, you can go to that page. If you want the Dolphins, Florida State, Chicago Bears, Iowa, etc., they all have their individually organized pages. Or you can selectively follow certain authors or categories/teams and see them all together in your custom feed (we will be working on lists that you can organize and turn off or on for your master custom feed). If you want to see what is “trending” (highest activity score/time on site), you can do so, and set to within your desired time period.

2) Trying to change the degrading landscape of sports media.

I hate seeing the direction that corporations are taking sports media – in a couple of key ways. First, you have the dumbing down of society. I’ve seen some “articles” that are literally nothing more than a scroll of photos of team helmets, without even a caption for any further context. Are we pre-schoolers?? Are they catering to a dumber society or are they CAUSING it? Well guess what, on our site, you can rate something like that 1-star and hopefully some day those sources will realize that a 1.7/5 rating on FA is pretty embarrassing and they’ll consider putting out some higher quality content.

While doing this, they are also exploiting a lot of young, eager, new creators who are willing to work for cheap (or free), usually while at the expense of a lot of great, experienced, (deservedly) more-expensive authors. Nothing I hate more than the trifecta of *exploitation of upstarts* at the *expense of deserving vets* in the name of *corporate greed* which leads me to…

3) Advocate for freelance, independence.

I was originally going to combine this with #2, but it’s actually most important so it needed it’s own space. **I want to create the premier outlet for authors to create content about whatever inspires them** not just some quota filling BS their boss is forcing on them. People create better quality product when they are doing something that inspires them. AND to get paid a fair share of revenue generated by that product.

Many are already going the way of Substack and I respect the hell out of that, I’m still just skeptical of how well the subscription model really works. If you are truly paid-sub exclusive, I feel like you’re cutting off 75-90% of your potential audience that isn’t willing or able to pay for content. And if you’re not paid-sub exclusive, how are you making money? But again, I re-emphasize being an advocate for getting fairly compensated for creating content about whatever inspires you!

-What have been the biggest mistakes and setbacks along the way?

We’ve been through a lot to get here, but I know not a lot of people are going to care about our mistakes and setbacks along the way. I still wanted to be transparent about everything (and vent a bit), so I moved them to a separate post. If you’re interested, you can find it here. It might provide value in helping someone else not make the same mistakes. It might help us find someone who can help.

-Media appearances discussing Football Alliance

Appearance on Wingin’ It with Gene Clemons, Dec 27, 2022

Appearance on The Beer & Sports Podcast, April 17, 2023 (with a couple of very distracting technical issues after 18:00 mark)

Appearance on E 10th St Boys Podcast on Fins Talk Sports Network, July 17, 2023

The post UPDATE 4/22/23 – Welcome to Football Alliance! (soft launch) first appeared on Football Alliance (Staging).