Mercury, ‘The College Sports Company,’ is building a new-age sports media company leveraging the recent NCAA ruling allowing college athletes to monetize their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). Mercury partners with brand-name Universities and elite college athletes to create high-quality content and one-of-a-kind experiences that fans can’t get anywhere else (like running routes for star quarterback Cade Klubnik at Clemson, or playing HORSE with the KU basketball team). Mercury is focused on owning distribution in the collegiate and NIL space, and packaging athlete content and access for brands and sponsors entering the industry. The company already has partnerships with Penn State, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Clemson, UCF and Villanova, and over 100 athletes signed to NIL deals. Mercury is seeing rapid growth, with 20 million video views and 40 million impressions per month, hosting the Spring Game for Oklahoma Football last month, and upcoming partnerships with conferences and more brand-name schools.
Recent progress includes:
– Just signed Penn State (to go along with Kansas, Kentucky, Clemson, Oklahoma, Villanova), announcing partnership shortly.
– Negotiating a media/content deal with the Big 12 conference, have inbound demand from two other conferences.
– Launching weekly NFL show in July with Miami Dolphins running back Raheem Mostert, and 2 weekly college football shows with leading Heisman candidates.
– 40 million impressions monthly across all platforms/shows, 20 million video views monthly.
– Just brought in Rob Petrausch from Facebook – led a team there responsible for $200M in annual ad/media sales. Prior to that was founding CRO of UrbanDaddy, scaling them from $0 to $70M in revenue.
– Learfield, Playfly, Van Wagner, large industry players starting to take serious notice. Negotiating rev-share/sponsorship partnering with Learfield to align our incentives.