EP Premium – a new beginning
When Johan Nilsson registered www.eliteprospects.com in his dorm room in Kalmar, Sweden back in 1999, he probably didn’t envision himself serving millions of hockey fans around the world two decades later. Like many other teenagers from his generation, he just happened to have a lot of spare time on his hands, to go with a huge passion for hockey and a newfound interest in HTML programming.
Funny things can happen when you let your hobbies spin out of control.
What started out as a fanzine-type news website providing a small circle of hockey nerds with game summaries, profiles and scouting reports, eventually snowballed into a stats database of quite some magnitude. A Wikipedia of hockey, if you will, Johan’s little hobby generated 258 million page views last year. More than 100 EP Staff from all over the world help make EP a little bit better every day. Johan is still at the helm of things, of course.
Today, Eliteprospects.com has profiles on more than 625,000 players from hundreds of leagues and tens of thousands of teams. Over two million users stop by our website every month for all kinds of purposes.
We serve hockey fans looking for more intel on that unknown Norwegian kid their team just drafted. We serve students at Harvard who might want to find out who coached the 1954 Boston Bruins for an essay on old-time hockey. We’re there to help the reporter who needs to know who played backup goalie for the 1979 Peterborough Petes, or who scored the most points for England in the second division World Championships in 1995. (It was Rick LaFerriere and David Longstaff).
For whatever reason Eliteprospects.com helps make your life easier, more productive or a wee bit more fun – we thank you all for stopping by. It’s been a great ride serving you.
Up until now, the constantly ongoing improvement of Eliteprospects was always funded by advertisement. Last month, we finally launched our new responsive, mobile-friendly platform. Now, we’re taking things a few steps further.
EP Premium will be available as of June 18th, and marks the first subscription-based service provided by Eliteprospects.
Don’t worry. This doesn’t mean we’ll put our data behind a paywall – most things will be just like before. Our premium service looks to cater to those who really live, breathe and eat hockey. Being it hard-nosed hockey fans, hobby scouts, media representatives, team executives, agents, players, clubs: EP Premium will have features you’re all going to like.
EP Premium will be ad-free and offer a faster, sleeker way to browse and search Eliteprospects.com. You can bookmark players and set up watch-lists for players or prospects you wish to follow. You’ll be able to receive notifications for trades and transactions from certain teams and leagues, as well as post comments on player profiles. Active players can make themselves available for teams to contact, clubs can request to contact players. Teams, clubs and coaches can put together tonight’s line-ups and present to fans via social media, e-mail or team websites.
Why not put together your dream line-up or roster for the upcoming season and let your friends know how you’d dress your favorite team? Maybe even the coach or GM will take note and make some calls to add the players you’d like to see in your team’s colors?
Oh, there’s more.
You can now customize how player stats tables are presented. You can generate fancy-looking hockey stats cards, verify your own player profile page and interact with all the other hockey fans who choose to sign up to EP Premium.
One thing you won’t be able to do just yet is access our media section. What?
Well, you may have noticed that we started writing some articles just before the World Juniors. We received a lot of appreciative feedback, thank you! This planted some seeds in a jar, stuff grew and we’re now ready to plow an entire field. Plans for a very ambitious news coverage are cultivating in our office as we speak.
We’re currently on a mission to recruit some of the most dedicated prospects writers out there – and we look to launch an extensive collection of high-quality content as part of EP Premium before the end of this year. We know you like our stats, but we also want to become the best place for good reads and cool features on everything prospects. Our editorial team will serve you national team tournament coverage, draft analysis and rankings, up-close NHL prospects coverage and the best storylines and features from junior and college hockey from all around the world.
Launching a first version of EP Premium as a subscription service will require us to keep improving at a much higher pace. We have a long list of potential partnerships, extended features, functionality prototypes and user perks we look to continously add. In addition to our own list, we welcome you all – paying customers, avid users or casual googlers – to let us know what else we could do to provide a better experience.
The possibilities are endless. You may even be able to play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam.
How much, you might ask?
EP Premium starts at the price of a small cheese pizza per month, but it’s up to you how much you want to pay.
Check it out!
We’re now live: https://www.eliteprospects.com/get-premium
– Johan Nilsson and Peter Sibner with staff, Eliteprospects.com