It took ESPN’s end-of-year review of worst moments in sports to introduce me to this concept:
HireAFan.com is exactly as is seems, you pay for a fan to cheer for your team for a specific game. In return for your fan purchase, you will receive advertising on this site, as well as a photograph of your fan in front of a television set during the game. If you’re lucky and the fan is local, it may even be a picture of the fan at a live game. It’s that simple.
According to the site, the idea came about after the World Cup of Soccer 2006. Jeff Bowser auctioned off his sports loyalty on eBay, eventually rooting for Serbia and getting paid about $15 to do so. Currently, the site supports sponsorship of fans for NFL and NHL games, with NBA and MLB to follow soon. Sponsors pay $20 and the fan gets $5, provided they post the requisite picture and game description on the site. The fan registration form requires a PayPal ID (“If you want to be paid”) and a working email.
Even as hard up for cash as I am, there is no way I’d sell my fan loyalty in this way (definitely not for this price, which is well below minimum wage for a 2-3 hour game). Quite the contrary, I have been pruning back my fantasy sports participation — I still play, but in a less obsessive manner — to help bolster my IRL team loyalties. I don’t miss a Chicago Bears game, whenever they are on locally, and I pay attention primarily to the other Chicago sports clubs. One of the sad byproducts of fantasy sports is the muddlement of fan loyalty, although I don’t know if sports marketers like Pat Coyle view that as a bad thing.
If any fan can be bought, then there is a market within a market to improve a team’s share of the consumption. Fan loyalty becomes more about the sport and less about the team, but team’s are no longer limited to regional impact. HireAFan isn’t selling fan loyalty so much as it is advertising on a web site. And cheaply. If Pat convinces the Colts to invest 20,000 to buy the services of a thousand fans during a big game, they get the post-game buzz of a surge of photos and game descriptions but the larger payoff might come if any of those fans learn enough about the Indianapolis franchise to eventually buy their merchandise.
