Seth Davis Launching Paywalled College Basketball Site

Seth Davis has covered college hoops for media outfits ranging from CBS Sports to Sports Illustrated and The Athletic. Now the veteran reporter is going into business for himself, launching a start-up media company dubbed Hoops HQ.

During an exclusive interview with “Tuned In,” Davis told me he’ll push the proverbial button on his start-up Oct. 28. His new site will go in-depth on both men’s and women’s college basketball. The “No. 1” differentiator for his site will be “access,” according to Davis.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I have a lot of relationships. The people I don’t know are hopefully familiar with my work,” Davis tells me. “We’re not click-baiting; we’re not aggregating. We’re going straight to the news-makers—and talking to coaches and players and covering games. Doing it the old-fashioned way. Little bit of shoe leather goes a long way.”

Davis is partnering with New York media company InsideHook to launch Hoops HQ. It will be financed by billionaire Steven Klinsky of New Mountain Capital. Davis, the author of Wooden: A Coach’s Life, will get an undisclosed amount of equity and serve as cofounder and editor-in-chief.

Davis says his company will also lean heavily in to social media and video. He recruited Slam writer Alex Squadron, author of Life in the G: Minor League Basketball and the Relentless Pursuit of the NBA, as a staff writer. Danny Saied will serve as the social media editor. Davis has also hired award-winning writer/author Lyndsey D’Arcangelo as senior women’s correspondent. 

“Because of my access, I can get coaches on the phone or players on a Zoom and just do a quickie video, that might not warrant an article, but we can put it behind a paywall on the site and also blast it out on social media,” he says. “Our social media strategy is going to be elite—because it has to be. We hired the social media editor before we hired the staff writer.”

Down the road, Davis says he wants to assemble a team of paid contributors, drawing from his many friends in sports media as well as college hoops scribes looking for exposure. Davis eventually wants to add NBA coverage to the platform. 

Unlike most sports media companies, Davis wants to cover college basketball day in and day out, not just during the NCAA’s men’s and women’s March Madness tournaments. He sees a big business opportunity to go in-depth year-round, not just in March. “There’s 48.5 other weeks where there’s a lot to cover. That’s where Hoops HQ will try to own that space.” 

The new site will “100%” be paywalled, according to Davis, at a cost of $4.99/month or $49.99/year. The company will utilize InsideHook’s email list, which he says has 700,000 “hyper-engaged” users, as a funnel to blast out news of the site to potential subscribers.

During his career, Davis has been the definition of a multimedia talent. He will continue to work as a TV analyst for CBS Sports—including what will be his 21st appearance on the annual “Selection Show”—and in addition to SI and The Athletic, wrote for The Messenger, which closed within a year of its launch.

Davis is frank about his unhappy experience at The Messenger, one of the biggest online news busts. Like many of the site’s employees, he was laid off without warning or severance. But he learned the hard way that start-ups need a robust social media presence to break through.

As Davis recalled, “The Messenger had nothing when it came to social media. I was like, ‘Do we even have a Twitter feed?’”