Virtual trading goes viral
- Internet message boards have sprung up full of OneSeason traders. Potential uses include third-party applications such as fantasy sports games and pick ’em contests that will be based on traders’ portfolios.
- As with the real stock market, OneSeason has given rise to several entrepreneurial sites that offer everything from applications to help monitor your portfolio to blogs with advice on players to buy and sell.
Fans’ fantasy: Buy virtual piece of favorite athlete
Oneseason.com merges passions of sports and stock trades
Remember when you sat around with your friends, trading baseball cards and haggling over which was worth more: a Mark Mc-Gwire rookie card or a special edition Don Mattingly reprint? That was so ’80s.
The Facebook generation needs collectibles online, not in a plastic wrapper with bubblegum.
Enter Internet startup OneSeason.com, a site where users can purchase shares of their synthetic athletic heroes and trade them in a market very similar to the stock exchange.
“I was looking at the online sports entertainment landscape and I thought that — to put it nicely — it’s not ideal,” said Mike Sroka, CEO of OneSeason and the brains behind it.
Sroka originally came up with the idea about 10 years ago while daydreaming in a high school economics class. He envisioned mashing together his two favorite things — sports and trading. After finally launching the site in October, Sroka learned he wasn’t the only one who shared these passions.
The value of the market quickly soared, forcing Sroka to hold off on a planned marketing campaign. The site physically couldn’t handle the early traffic, and the market value has come back to earth. But Sroka has plans for what OneSeason will become.
“We are just beginning to build out and open up this platform,” Sroka said. “We envision enabling users to manage a stable of players that they use in the applications they want.”
Instead of buying 20 shares of Kobe Bryant at $2.10 a share and watching it go up and down on the ticker, users will use their piece of Kobe in fantasy games, video games, pick ’em games etc. Try doing that with cardboard.