(This post originally appeared on The Washington Post)
I spend too much time on Instagram, mostly laughing at funny videos, dog photos and people acting crazy. Recently, another site slipped its way on to my radar and was so compelling that I followed it. Which is exactly what Kevin Durant wanted me to do.
It’s called Overtime and Durant and a few other high-profile investors like venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and former NBA commissioner David Stern have put their money behind the Brooklyn-based start-up. The company recently closed a $9.5 million round of funding and is getting a lot of buzz because of its model.
For starters, Overtime is mostly a basketball site, but it doesn’t focus on the NBA or the NCAA–its content is based on high school basketball. But not the games or scores. Instead, the site shows clips of up-and-coming high school stars dunking, passing, and basically running their opponents ragged on the court (the company is growing its coverage of football and other sports).
Another twist: the content comes from more than 100 of the players’ friends, fans and fellow students, who are paid a few bucks by Overtime and who together submit up to 1,000 short videos a day of which the best are then posted on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media sites. It’s a low-cost, low-maintenance platform with fun content that can be easily viralized. The company makes its money through brand partnerships and sponsorships.
“There’s been this evaporation of a younger sports audience: They’re not watching a three-hour game; they’re watching sports highlights,” Dan Porter, the company’s chief executive told Variety. Porter believes the YouTube and Instagram stars are the new celebrities for teens and that the “old guys calling games and pontificating on television couldn’t be further out of touch from what kids want to watch.”
Popular? Oh yeah. The company’s videos have nearly a billion views so far and are oftentimes shown again on mainstream channels like ESPN and NBC Sports. That’s because, according to Porter, the professional sports market is saturated and looking for new content–and high school sports fills that need. The increasingly popular videos are now making social media stars of the young athletes as well, with some having hundreds of thousands of followers–and burgeoning brands.
The downside? It’s probably only a matter of time before we get the next LaVar Ball.
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