By NYU Staff

The four founders. From left: Alexander Freund; David Nemetz; David Finocchio; Bryan Goldberg

If there’s anything to be said for sports fans, it’s that they crave sports news. BleacherReport.com, an open-source sports network, is meeting those urges with nearly 500 articles a day. Thousands of these stories’ headlines are then placed on sites like CBSSports.com and SI.com which direct traffic back to its site. Here’s the kicker: all 500 articles-a-day are written not by paid staffers, but by readers, bloggers and professional writers. Of the site’s 22 full-time employees, not one gets paid to write. Still, the content produced draws nearly 4 million unique visitors a month.

Bleacher Report’s community of writers includes some 4,000-20,000 sports fans (the numbers fluctuate monthly) who publish play-by-plays, commentary, and blurbs about their favorite teams and players.

Like this slideshow — “NHL Top 10 Candidates: First-Time 100-Points” by Puckpassion. The writer has posted more than 20 stories on the site and generated hundreds of comments. But read his bio and you’ll see that, as his pseudonym suggests, he simply loves hockey.

Or this one by Chris Oddo, aka The Fan Child. In it the amateur writer releases his frustration about the recent Serena Williams foot-fault debacle. Oddo is simply a fan who watched the tennis star blow-up at the lineswoman with the rest of us. And while thousands of bloggers shared their two-cents on the matter, Oddo joined what is essentially a curated repository for these opinions.

David Nemetz, one of the site’s four founders, says these writers churn out the best sports news. “We can meet the needs of sports fans in local markets with content — all generated by users — they have a hunger for but haven’t had those needs met,” he says.

It provides an appealing backdrop for advertisers too. HBO and Coca-Cola have both featured ads on Bleacher Report. Not bad for a startup founded by four twentysomething sports fans.

For now, Nemetz says the company is focused on growing its content and its business model.  They secured over $3 million in funding from angel investors. They also hired an external CEO last year, Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Disney. Fans are still posting hundreds of stories a day.

More user-generated sites:

CNN’s iReport
NowPublic
ThePortlander.com