New Website Of Interest

[50's PONY]

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Posted on Sun, May. 02, 2004



BUSINESS INSIDER
Internet means green for Frogs
By Jeff Caplan
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

The same people who are broadening the reach of college sporting events on television beyond major-conference football and basketball are helping schools such as TCU broaden the reach of their athletic programs on the Internet.

College Sports Television, or CSTV, the first round-the-clock cable network devoted exclusively to televising nearly every men's and women's college sport, debuted in April 2003. One year later, CSTV has expanded to the Web by acquiring Official College Sports Network (OCSN), which has been rebranded as collegesports.com.

Collegesports.com includes a network of 150 institutions, including TCU and UT-Arlington. College- sports.com produces the Web sites of its network schools, providing top-of-the-line technology and resources that allow schools to supply a more sophisticated site to its fans. It provides features such as online ticket purchasing that it would not likely otherwise have the manpower or the resources to produce.

"What they give us is technology to sell tickets, sell merchandise, do fan polls," said Jeff Crane, TCU assistant marketing director. "They help us add these bells and whistles to our site to make it more attractive for people."

The direct link to the school's merchandise is perhaps the greatest benefit. For example, collegesports.com produces special promotions for its members. On the TCU site, you'll find a Mother's Day promotion that will guide you to TCU's merchandise store to purchase gifts.

"They created this Mother's Day promotion to try to boost our sales on our Web site," Crane said. "You really get the sense from their perspective that it's a partnership situation where they want to help us succeed, and that's very important for us. It's very true that we might not have time to create new promotions and do as much on our own as we've been able to do with them as a partner."

The network also gives TCU additional ways to bring in new revenue to the athletic department by allowing the member schools to choose among national advertisers that have agreed to deals with collegesports.com. TCU has the flexibility to accept or decline national advertisers on its site, depending on which advertisers fit within their mission and their community.

Whichever advertisers the school selects to use for its Web site, TCU is compensated based on the traffic its site generates.

"National advertisers just don't have the interest in going to 150 individual schools or to a network that has just six or eight or 10," said Brian Bedol, CSTV president and CEO. "But, when you're able to sell across a network of 150 different schools, what we're able to do is bring in a national advertiser. ... We just bring it in as an opportunity."

There are also other revenue streams that collegesports.com offers such as auctions on eBay in which schools can sell unique memorabilia or other interesting gifts to the highest bidder. TCU recently auctioned a lunch with football coach Gary Patterson for the high bidder and two friends. That sold for $400, money that is split up to eBay, collegesports.com and TCU.

However, the easy access collegesports.com allows for its visitors to find the TCU site is seen as a terrific way for more people, especially those outside of Texas to learn about TCU. Last football season, TCU experienced unprecedented national media attention as it chased a Bowl Championship Series berth, and its Web site evidenced the growing attention with an unprecedented number of page views during and after the season.

"The interesting thing is when we became a part of collegesports.com, it really started to open up our market a little bit wider and our reach becomes that much bigger," Crane said. "We might have people that aren't affiliated with TCU that might just be searching around collegesports.com and find a link to our Web s