Raptors Republic is 14 years old, which might as well be ancient in blog years. The early aughts were the nascent days of the blogosphere, and a time when sports blogs were popping up to cover the things the big broadcasters were not. Raptors Republic brought together the bloggers covering the Toronto Raptors, produced the kind of analysis that was lacking elsewhere, and built a strong fan community from day one. And while other sites have come and gone, Raptors Republic is still growing across their website and social media channels, and still finding new ways to connect with their readership.  

That’s impressive because, while sports loyalty may last forever, publishing is a notoriously mercurial business. Leo Tanaka, one of the co-founders of Raptors Republic, says that they never wanted to put up a paywall, opting instead to keep their content and community open and free, and their comments on. With $RAPS Coin, they’re bringing their audience even more into the fold, by offering the opportunity not only to read and engage with the content being produced, but to mutually benefit from that readership and engagement. And eventually, to have actual ownership in the community.

Below, we talk to Sam about the intensity of Raptors fans, building a new publishing model, and the burgeoning future of crypto and the NBA. 

To start, can you tell me a bit about how Raptors Republic started?

Sports coverage was a lot different in the early 2000s. Beat writers were writing game posts with a couple quotes from the post-game interviews and a couple stats, it was pretty generic. I was a big Raptors fan and I didn’t feel like I was getting good analysis from what was being produced. So I thought, “I'll just write it myself." I started a blog called Raptors Talk, and I started coming across other Raptors blogs, and we all ended up on each other's sites, commenting. One day my now-partner Zafar [Siddiqi] said, "Why don't we just come together? We're all doing about the same thing every day: pre-game, post-game, some analysis, things like that. Why don't we just split up the work and have something that scales a bit?”

That was in 2007, and when a few of us joined up, it was just gangbusters from the first day. We were getting hundreds of comments on every piece, which was a big deal back then. We innovated with a lot of different types of content, not just standard analysis pieces. Then one day, ESPN was building a blog network and they asked us to be part of it. The rest is history. That ESPN network eventually folded, but the people on there became sort of the “who's who” of sports journalism for the NBA. It was a talented group of people.

You’ve cultivated quite a fan community in that time. How has your community evolved?

We operated on a few principles from day one. Our content wasn't gated, it was free. We didn't run ads. And we always had comments turned on for articles, so we would engage with people who commented and posted. Back when we started, there was only Twitter and Facebook. We weren’t big on Facebook, but on Twitter we tried to respond to everybody who responded to us. So we’ve always had an inclusive, free, accessible model where we just speak to the people who speak to us. 

How would you describe the Raptors Republic community to someone outside of it?

I mean, sports fans in general are a bit nutty, so it's a really intense community from a knowledge and participation perspective. People watch a lot of games, they watch a lot of videos, they read a lot, they're well-informed. A lot of conversations are in the minutia of random details, and you can follow the rabbit hole down into a bunch of things. 

Can you talk about your decision to add the community currency to your already pretty large and thriving community? What does this model add, and what are your hopes for it?

You hear a lot about how media is chasing dollars and polarizing people on the political spectrum. It's the same with sports—you see clickbait-y headlines, aggregating pundits, and commentators taking something and blowing it out of context. We’ve avoided doing that. We did turn on ads so that we could pay our writers for their content, but that relationship feels very transactional: I create content, you consume it, I might make some money by putting an ad beside it. 

What I liked about this DAO model is that everybody benefits from the community and from the participation. In the old model, the more my readers and audience participate and engage with my content, the more money I make. The incentives aren't aligned. But when you add a Coin to the equation, everyone can buy the Coin, we give them away to people to incentivize them to come through and participate, and people are free to buy and sell them. Owning the Coin gives you ownership in the community.

So as the community is growing and benefiting from content being produced, from content being engaged with, we can all monetarily benefit from it. In that world, all our incentives are aligned, with respect to how we treat each other, with respect to the content that's being produced, with respect to participation. Because these are all equal parts in the publishing world. If no one's reading and no one's participating, then no one cares and money can't be made and value can't be realized. That was the main driving force behind adding a Coin to our community.

It's an interesting alternative to a more traditional ad-based publishing model.

The other option is gating your content with some sort of subscription, but that reduces your reach—only about 4-10% of your audience will do it. We also didn’t want to go from being an open, ungated content creator to putting a paywall up. It would have felt like we were turning our backs on the people who supported us from day one.

How are you using the $RAPS Coin? What are some of the benefits and rewards?

We’re in the fortunate position of not needing to rely on $RAPS as a means of revenue for Raptors Republic, so everything that we realize in terms of monetary benefit through Rally is 100% allocated for that community. We don't pull out money, any rewards that we've been getting we reinvest back into our Coin. We have some rewards for holding, and we'll be using some of our rewards to fund those. We want to move to full DAO. Everything's going to be up for vote in terms of governance and what to do and how to do it. This is a really new world, generally, and it's super new for me, so I'm learning more than I'm doing right now. 

Is crypto big in sports fans' communities? Have you seen other people doing something similar?

I haven't heard of a publisher like us doing it. About this time last year, a company out of Canada called Dapper Labs launched in partnership with the NBA. They sell NFTs of video clips of plays or players during the season. That has been a really big industry. What I’ve seen is mainly around NFTs and providing that “digital trading card” ownership of sports content. 

Do you have any hopes or hunches about how crypto and NFTs will continue to evolve in the sports world?

A lot of European soccer clubs are jumping on the crypto wagon. Some professional sports players are taking their salaries in Bitcoin or Ethereum. I suspect we're going to see a trend of more organizations, people, players, and the periphery organizations connected to these sports leagues starting to adopt crypto. Everyone's kind of just dipping their feet into it now. 

Are there any projects on the horizon from Raptors Republic that you're excited about? What can your community expect to see from you next?

We have a few cool NFT projects coming out over the next six months that I'm really excited about. We've launched a few fantasy leagues where buy-ins and payouts are based in crypto and our Coin and NFTs. We’re looking forward to having another avenue of attracting people to our community.

We've been actually kicking around the idea of NFT ownership in Raptors Republic. So anyone could buy in and become a partner and owner of Raptors Republic. That would include all of our assets, crypto or not. That's something we're getting a little bit of guidance on, because there's some potential regulatory and legal issues to consider. But when you're part of a community, when you're engaged and you're benefiting from it, I think that also owning part of that community is kind of the next step. It’s a scary but exciting end point to work toward.