‘Geek Factor’ A Boon For This Web Site

There’s no mystery to the success of one of the Internet’s newest web sites, FANSonly.

The man who runs it calls it “the geek factor.”

“So many people just love their colleges and just love their sports,” said Dick Beedon, president and CEO of University Netcasting in Carlsbad, Calif.

FANSonly, up and running since August at www.fansonly.com, caters to the college sports fan. It is linked to official sites for 20 schools and conferences, including Notre Dame, “and our goal is to have 40 sites on line going into August of next year.”

“The action on our site has almost doubled every month for every school that’s gone on-line with us, as well as for the network itself,” Beedon said. “We had 6,000 or 8,000 visitors last August, and it was up to over a couple hundred thousands in December. We expect to go over 1 million visitors in February.”

Besides links to official school and conference sites, FANSonly provides live chats with such figures as Notre Dame football coach Bob Davie and a mix of news of general interest to college sports fans.

University Netcasting started as a maker of interactive CD-ROMS, specializing in university sports programs.

From that grew the idea of creating and maintaining official web sites for schools, and then the FANSonly umbrella site.