Remember Ballhype, the sports-oriented Digg clone we’ve profiled a while ago? Although I personally had some reservations about the imageless and generally lackluster design, it seems to be doing really well. They claim a 50% increase in visitors every month, and Alexa’s stats seem to confirm this.

Well, fueled by the growth of Ballhype, the same team decided to create ShowHype - a RSVC (Read Submit Vote Comment) site for gossip and show business. The site is currently in private beta (it launches on Sunday), so you won’t be able to access it just yet, but at least you can see what the same team had done with Ballhype.

ShowHype brings you stories about movies, television, music, celebrities, and other topics in a familiar Digg-like style, with charts and a degree of customization thrown into the mix. Free registration will let you track certain topics, communicate with other users, and track their favorite stories, votes, or comments as well.

However, most importantly, the developers have realized that design is not their strong side, so they’ve outsourced that part of ShowHype, and the result is much better. Images, which are obligatory for this type of site, are included, although I’m betting that they’d have better results with even bigger images. On a side note, Erin Gurney from Ballhype told me that Ballhype is due for a much needed redesign, too.

In all my days of tracking social content sites and Digg clones I’ve seen only a few that will ever amount to anything. It’s hard to decipher the formula which makes such a site successful, and Ballhype - although a solid site - hasn’t really done anything very much out of the ordinary. However, Ballhype’s success so far gives reasons for optimism. We’ll see if ShowHype does that well, too; if it does, then this team might be onto something that others are missing.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 7:41 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.