Super Bowl buzz on Facebook

Bambi Francisco Roizen · January 30, 2009 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/68e

Watercooler brings fans together ahead of the big game this Sunday

Long ago, pre-Internet, the office pool for the Super Bowl was probably one of the few times a year that die-hard football fans could get fellow colleagues to show some game-time spirit. These days, there's no reason to keep your rabid excitement to yourself. 

Through app maker Watercooler, you can join a growing fan base on most social networks. On the Pittsburgh Steelers Fan page on Facebook, the Steelers have a fan base of 276,000 vs 21,000 fans for the Arizona Cardinals.

On Sunday, the Steelers will take to field against the Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII. The game airs 6:25pm EST on NBC. It will be the Steelers seventh championship appearance vs the Cardinal's first Super Bowl in history.

The odds are in favor of the Steelers, whose fan base - if tickets sales are any measure - will dominate the stadium, much like they dominate Facebook. According to StubHub, 22 percent of tickets purchased on its Web site have been from Pennsylvania, while 8 percent were bought from Arizona (home of the Cardinals). 

There's no shortage of trivia and games on the social network to keep the passion and momentum accelerating, right up until game day. Thanks to Watercooler, fans can brush up on trivia questions, like "What coach led the 2005 Steelers to win the Super Bowl?" Or, you can join a virtual wave, like this one:

You can compete against other fans with your favorite photos showing your support and passion. 

Here's one I thought was cute.

The fan application by Watercooler, a maker of social applications to create fan bases around sports teams and shows, is one of 800 applications.

In this video clip of my interview with Kevin Chou, CEO and founder of Watercooler, Chou gives me a tour of the fan application on Facebook.

According to Chou, Watercooler's 800 applications generate 8 million monthly visitors and 300 million pageviews. He says that advertisers pay on average about $15 CPM and some of the fan pages around certain tournaments and big games can sell for $250,000.

Watch this snippet with Chou. We'll post the entire interview in the coming weeks. 

 

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Bambi Francisco Roizen

Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.

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Kabam

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Description

Kabam is an interactive entertainment company leading the next wave in social gaming, developing and publishing massively multiplayer social games (MMSG’s), including the popular and critically praised title Kingdoms of Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis. Our studios focus on combining the best elements of traditional and social gaming to appeal to a growing audience of players looking for deeper, more engaging social games. The first wave of Kabam’s new games for Facebook and leading media sites have been widely recognized for their depth of play and social interaction.

Kabam started out as Watercooler, whose aim was to make connecting with your friends, family, and other fans of your favorite TV shows or Sports teams more compelling than ever before. By bringing fan communities into the context of your social network, Watercooler enables more engaging sports and TV fan experiences. Fans are able to access Watercooler's FanSection and TVLoop communities no matter where they are on the web: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, MyYahoo, and TVLoop.com.  Over 35 million sports and TV fans have joined Watercooler's fan applications  making it the largest online fan community.

Company History
Kabam was founded by a team of social networking and community software professionals in Mountain View, CA, in 2006. The company has raised a Series A round of financing from Canaan Partners of Menlo Park, CA.

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Kevin Chou

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