Get paid for creating content and/or driving traffic to the site!
UPDATE 12/27/22 – It’s My Birthday!
I’ve never been one to exploit my birthday. Of course, because of its timing, I’ve really never been able to truly celebrate it like most, especially during the formative school years. It tends to just get lost and forgotten and I’m not the type to want to cry out for attention.
But it’s been a literal HELL of a month and I need some positive energy.
I don’t want to bore anyone with too many details (so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you must), but the Facebook issues this month have been absolutely crushing. Prior to December, we had averaged roughly 3M page views per month since we really started ramping up in July, which was about a 150% increase from the previous 2 years. In December of those previous 2 years, we have driven 4.7M and 5M page views, so it was very reasonable to expect 6M or more this year. But then, out of nowhere, the Facebook issues have limited us at a mere 500k so far – and only 67k over the past 20 days, which have been spent desperately trying to contact support at Facebook to fix the issues, even requiring legal process, because their support is so mind-blowingly inadequate.
Now of course, shame on me for relying on Facebook, but it’s what I’ve spent over 13 years building to over 600k collective followers and capitalizing on to parlay into what we’re trying to build here (no outside investors – yet). For it to be so suddenly and wrongfully impacted at the busiest, most critical time could not have been imagined.
But that brings me to what we’re trying to build here, the Ultimate Football Network.
We want to give everyone a platform where they can read and rate and discuss football content from all the best sources in one place.
We want to give everyone – anyone who wants or needs an opportunity – a platform to create content and get paid a fair share of the revenue it generates – without needing subscribers to pay.
We want to give everyone a platform to share content from and get paid a fair share of the revenue their traffic generates.
And so much more. We have such a long way to go, this is still just a tiny grain of sand in our universe of ideas. But with your support, we will make it a reality. The more support we get, the bigger and faster we can build. We still have a lot of bugs to work out of what we have so far, a lot to streamline and optimize, a lot more infrastructure to build out, and we plan to make this into an app in the offseason.
So for my birthday, I would really love for you to sign up and share with your friends. Bookmark the site, use it often, follow your favorite teams and authors, create and/or share content to bring traffic and get paid, and please let us know what you like and we need to improve.
As cliché as it may sound, I truly am trying to make this site a gift to all.
Thank you for your continued support!
UPDATE 12/17/22 – Hurricane Facebook
This is a tough update. It’s tough to talk/write about struggles – especially struggles that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. I prefer to just stay grinding behind the scenes, but unfortunately sometimes problems hit critical levels and you just need to put it out there. Either simply for transparency, or maybe in the off chance that someone who comes across it might actually be able to help.
Just 3 weeks ago, we were pulling over 1.1 million page views per week, we had a single minute where we pulled 873.
Yesterday, we did 756.. all day.
Over the past 13 years, I have worked like hell to build a significant following on Facebook. That is currently what drives 99% of our traffic here. We are working on more self-sustaining measures, but it takes time and we’re not quite there yet.
Over the past 3 years, Facebook has been destroying it – wrongly.
On the literal morning of College Football’s biggest rivalry day (11/26/22), it happened again.
I don’t want to detail it all here, but I described it in this doc that I’ve sent off to some lawyers, investigative journalists, and others who hopefully may be able to help.
We are still here, still working on developing the site, but this is a major setback at the worst possible time. 1) December and January have been our two biggest months for traffic in past years and instead of profiting from that to fuel our growth and development, we’re losing significant amounts of money, and 2) we’ve had to furlough our social media staff right before Christmas.
We don’t have big investors backing us, this has all been built out of our very modest pockets. It’s pretty difficult, especially mentally.
But here’s how you can help:
Sign up! We have not made a strong push for registrations yet, because there are several things in that area of our development that are still being worked on. But given the current circumstances, we need you to sign up!
Share content! Again, we offer financial incentives for driving traffic to the site!
We will continue working to build the Ultimate Football Network and we thank you for your continued support!
UPDATE 10/20/22 – The Game-Changer! (but still soft opening)
TL,DR – get paid for creating content and/or driving traffic to the site! (so yeah, you’ll hopefully want to read this)
It’s been too long since our last update – website development is painfully slow and expensive. We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have so far, and as we continue to grow, we are able to invest more and more into further development. We have made a lot of significant improvements in the past few weeks, but we still have so far to go. We are still merely a grain of sand in the universe of ideas in my head.
As of now, we are running nearly 800 crons (auto-posting system that pulls data from outside sources to curate here) which are producing roughly 3,000 new posts per day. We currently have over 600,000 posts on the site – from major media sources like USA Today, Sports Illustrated, FOX Sports, The Athletic, 247sports, SB Nation, Fansided, etc., as well as several teams’ official accounts, but also several smaller blog sites – and always growing! These crons are running every 5 minutes or less, meaning that within 5 minutes of an article being published to any of these sources (via their accessible data feeds), they are being pulled onto the categorized feeds here on our site.
However, this auto-posting system of all these many mainstream sources is merely the tee to get this big game kicked off. We needed this initial flow of traffic as our foundation to build on.
From the start, we never wanted to be just another one of these standard content-producing sites, with (mostly) under-paid employees given daily/weekly mundane assignments and deadlines to fulfill quotas to survive. I absolutely hate these things about the industry! No, our intention was to build an interface, rather to build THE interface for all who want to create, consume, discuss content in this niche, but vastly popular subject of football.
Think of it like Facebook, but only football content. No engagements, no gender reveals, no political arguments. I mean, all those things are great, right? But Facebook is an anything and everything site, we just want football here.
**Now the real game-changer, we want to share the revenue you help create for the site – pay you for creating content and/or bringing traffic to the site by sharing content (your own or by others) to your friends or followers!
For content creators – no assignments, no deadlines, we want to be the ultimate football freelancer’s platform to write/create about whatever inspires you! You could write one day about prospects for the NFL Draft, then keys to University of Washington’s upcoming game, then power ranking SEC QBs. Then you earn revenue share (commission) as a non-employee affiliate – as of right now, based on the ad partnerships we have, we can afford to pay an RPM of $2 (Revenue per 1000 views). This will go up as our ad deals improve.
To be very upfront, this is unfortunately not a weekly or bi-weekly type paying job, if you’re familiar with the world of affiliate marketing, you typically get paid 30-90 days after the end of each month. We get paid from our ad agencies 60-90 days after the end of each month and we simply do not have enough in the bank *yet* to pay out significant amounts of money before we receive it in, but again, as we continue to grow and that bank hopefully grows, we will do the best we can to pay out sooner.
Also, our publishing tools and article pages are next to get developmental upgrades in the next couple of weeks!
For content distributors (sharing content to bring traffic in) – if you are a registered user and logged in on the site, you can click the share buttons on any page or article on the site and your username is automatically embedded in the UTM attachment to track the traffic your share brings onto the site. Similar to content creators, based on the ad partnerships we have, we can afford to pay an RPM of $2 (Revenue per 1000 views). And again, similarly, this will go up as our ad deals improve.
**You need to be logged in for the share buttons to automatically have your username embedded (or properly attach the UTM with your username, manually). If the username is not included properly in the UTM, we will not get the data to give you the credit for that traffic**
So for example, if you write an article, then share that article to bring in 5,000 page views, you get $10 for the 5,000 page views on your article and another $10 for the 5,000 page views you brought to the site. If your article then gets another 5,000 page views from other sources, you get another $10. Then if you share someone else’s article and bring another 5,000 page views to the site, you get another $10. Hopefully that’s clear enough, but if not, leave a comment! We will be providing a link here to track this data.
To re-share from an earlier update: Signing up is exclusively through connecting your Twitter for right now. It’s extremely quick and simple and only uses the email on your Twitter account, the username, first and last name, and avatar – we have no control allowances over your Twitter account. The purpose is simply for reserving usernames on our platform, so someone can’t just sign up as @PatrickMahomes unless it’s actually Patrick Mahomes. If you have an issue with this – we know some people don’t have or want a Twitter account – just “report an issue” and let us know, we can manually create an account for you.
We hope you’re as excited about this update as we are! We can’t wait to see things continue to grow! As always, thanks for the continued support!
UPDATE 8/28 – We have made significant server upgrades and seem to have fixed the issues from last night. We wish we could be in full launch by now, as we were planning, but August has honestly been a month from hell, thanks to our previous server host (will disclose more when we can). Since the changes we made today, the site is performing significantly better and our traffic is crushing our previous all-time records (600+ page views per minute!). We are so happy to welcome football back and strive to continue to make progress (there are still too many bugs to work out) so we can confidently do a full launch soon! Thank you for your continued support!
EMERGENCY UPDATE 8/27 – Our cron app that feeds content from all the various sites crashed at 7:44pm et, which of course being a Saturday night with several games in action happens to not only be the worst time to stop working, but also the worst time to get someone to fix the issue. We apologize and are hopeful to get it back up and running ASAP! (Morning update – it started working again at 1:42 am et, caught up on hundreds of posts that were missed in the 6 hours it was down, then proceeded to go down again at 5:54am et)
UPDATE 7/7/22 – I need to do an update (actually a full republish… soon), but things have been so crazy busy. We went from doing 1-million page views in May to 2-million in June and now on pace for 4-million so far, just a few days into July. Not too bad for a soft opening during the offseason with a lot of bumps in the road to overcome!
We have been constantly evolving the server situation – each time we upgraded, we maxed it out again – so we are in the process of migrating to an entirely new host which will be significantly better for site performance and easier to scale as we continue to grow.
We are currently running over 600 crons (auto-posting system that pulls data from outside sources to curate here) which are producing over 2,000 new posts per day. We currently have over 400,000 posts on the site – from major media sources like USA Today, Sports Illustrated, The Athletic, 247sports, SB Nation, Fansided, etc., as well as several teams’ official accounts, but also several smaller blog sites – and always growing!
**BUT, we are also open for (and encouraging) users to generate their own articles! Hit that “new post” button and write about whatever inspires you. We will be publishing our terms of use and code of conduct soon, but basically, just don’t be flagrant/disrespectful in your posts or comments.
We will also be compensating users for their contributions to the site. We are still setting up the backend infrastructure for this, but you will earn points for contributions – each post, comment, rating you make, each user you recruit, as well as the number of views your posts generate and even how many inbound visits you generate from using those “share” buttons, which have a tracking attachment with your username. These points will then essentially be rewarded with a share of the monthly revenue that is generated by the site. We are hopeful to have this system functional by September, but we quite honestly have a lot of work to do.
In closing, for this update, we would love for you to sign up. Signing up is exclusively through connecting your Twitter for right now. It’s extremely quick and simple and only uses the email on your Twitter account, the username, first and last name, and avatar – we have no control allowances over your Twitter account. The purpose is simply for reserving usernames on our platform, so someone can’t just sign up as @PatrickMahomes unless it’s actually Patrick Mahomes. If you have an issue with this – we know some people don’t have or want a Twitter account – just “report an issue” and let us know, we can manually create an account for you.
Also, we would love to get your feedback! About anything, good or bad! We want to make this the absolute best place on the internet, so let us know what you think we could do to get there. You can comment directly to this post, or again, use the “report an issue” page.
Again, thanks for the continued support!
UPDATE 5/29/22 4:34 pm et – today we surpassed a half million page views in just our first month. We have upgraded our server capacity and are continually making tweaks to upgrade our product in every way possible. We thank you so much for the support we have received so far and look forward to continuing to grow with you into the future!
UPDATE 5/23/22 5:46 pm et – Baker Mayfield post went viral and overloaded our servers earlier today. It has been off-and-on at best for the past 3 hours. We are working to increase our capacity.
UPDATE 5/19/22 8:37pm et – we did what was supposed to be a simple server handoff today and it only resulted in the site being down (or off and on, at best) for several hours this afternoon as the DNS servers reset. Unfortunately, it had to be done eventually, but it obviously turned out worse than expected. Growing pains. Related: if anyone knows a good therapist, I’m in the market.
UPDATE 5/18/22 11pm et – the page views counter has crashed due to volume. We are working to fix, as it will affect the trending formula. Better than the whole server crashing, but still inconvenient.
Happy NFL Draft Day! And welcome to the “soft” opening of our new football platform, Football Alliance.
It’s a crazy busy day with the draft, obviously, so I will keep this short and sweet for now – our objective in creating this platform is to be a one-stop shop for all football fans – to consolidate as much football content as possible in one place.
What you see now is about 0.0001% of the vision – still a little below the bare-minimum we were comfortable to launch with – but at a certain point, you just have to jump and see if you can fly. We hope you will join us to help it grow to fulfill the full vision, even if we crash the servers tonight!
There will be a lot more info coming soon, as we use the rest of the off-season to build up more and more of the back-end infrastructure and launch some ideas that we hope will revolutionize the industry, from the inside out.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, etc., please feel free to contact us here in the comments or “report an issue”
Thank you in advance for the support! Let’s take over the world!
