Dave’s Football Blog

I have ended my affiliation with AOL Sports today.

I suspect most of you would assume this decision had something to do with this sordid incident, and yes, that played a role. The Fantasy Sports Girl mess was indicative of the mismanagement going on behind the scenes at FanHouse. All the female bloggers we had brought in over the last two years were basically told they didn’t matter, and some people we like were nudged out of their jobs over this “new direction” that the boys at AOL Sports wanted to take — a direction over which we bloggers appeared to have zero say. Plus, that URL switchover to FanHouse.com was buggier than the first release of Windows Vista, and somewhere along the way, FanHouse lost its Google News placement.

For me, though, that’s really only part of the story, and it gets at something that’s been eating at me for a while.

Two weeks ago, before this started shaking out, I had this dream where I was carrying suitcases and duffel bags out to some cars and vans parked against the wall. It was me, a couple of friends and about a dozen NFL players, past and present. I was talking to players, trying to making sure everyone had everything, because we were on a tight deadline, and I put extra gadgets and notebooks and such into some players’ bags because I knew that’s what they needed or what they liked.

Finally, we got everything loaded up, and someone said impatiently, “Okay, let’s go,” because we were running late. A few of us were about to climb into the first car… but just as I was about to get in, I jumped back, slammed the door shut, and put my hands on my head in total panic. A friend looked at me and said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

I literally cried out, “I forgot to pack my own bag!”

I ran away from the cars, desperately trying to get back to my room to get my stuff. That’s when I woke up, and as you might imagine, I felt a distinct urge to do something other than blogging. This would turn out to be the day that Alana Nguyen, a/k/a Miss Gossip, would announce that she was leaving AOL.

The real message of the dream, however, ended up being spelled out by Bethelehem Shoals over at the Sporting Blog:

The other sad truth is that, with one major exception, no one’s getting ahead based on their FanHouse affiliation. Given the number of readers it has, shouldn’t this provide an opportunity to build reputations of their own on a large scale? Let’s put it this way: More doors have opened for me because of FreeDarko, a site with roughly 1/1000th the traffic of FanHouse. Only my friend Michael David Smith, the heart and soul of the NFL operation (and other areas), has really built a brand for himself through this platform. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, had he decided to crank out those same posts on his own, someone would’ve snatched him up sooner rather than later.

In my case, at least, Shoals wrote the truth. I wasn’t making a name for myself by writing for FanHouse anymore. In fact, it felt like my audience was shrinking. Soccer FanHouse got roughly 26,000 page views for the month of July. By comparison, Soccer By Ives got 900,000. I could get more than 26K in a month on my own blog if I tried hard enough. This piece I wrote about why South Americans care so much about Olympic soccer got no traction at all. It probably would have gotten more attention if I had posted it here.

Alas, all I have to show for it is the standard posting fee — which one would-be FanHouser who turned down the gig described as “peanuts” — and a few hundred page views. The more I thought about that, the more I kept coming back to this question: why bust your chops writing for someone else and fitting into their style when you could do just as well with your own site, writing in your own voice?

The answer, of course, is “for the money.” I would probably feel differently about this situation if I had big bills to pay or kids to put through day care. I know I’ll miss getting those extra deposits every month, too. What I miss more, though, was the team atmosphere that Jamie Mottram fostered when he started FanHouse two years ago. We were all like-minded people working together to build something great. To this new management, though, we’re just interchangeable parts — hamsters on their wheel grinding out wire-service-with-snark posts to get them the page views they need to improve their valuation, so that they can unload their content business to Yahoo or Microsoft for the highest possible price.

And I’d much rather pack my own bag.

So I’m going to stop neglecting this blog and move all my NFL and soccer talk back here. I’m not going to worry about competing with myself or the countless other sports blogs out there. I’m just going to try to make this site fun again. Hobbies should be fun, after all; otherwise, why do them?

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