Booster Athletes launches as crowdsourcing app for NIL Era
Jeff Clark believes he has created a fix-all for NIL.
The founder and CEO of Booster Athletes, a crowdsourcing app that launched last week, hates the saying that NIL is the “Wild, Wild West.” In his mind, the space is just immature and undeveloped. Enter Booster. The app works on a monthly subscription model, where athletes are financially supported by their fans. Through a user interface inspired by TikTok and Snapchat, athletes share behind-the-scenes content in exchange for monthly or annual payments.
Beyond subscription payments, fans can “boost” their athlete through a supplemental financial reward for their content and engagement on Booster. It’s an unprecedented piece of software in the NIL space. And the Naval Academy graduate believes his app can help the Power Five starting quarterback as much as the Division III swimmer.
“Everybody kind of articulates in NIL is this ‘Wild, Wild West'” Clark told On3 on Tuesday. “It drives me crazy. I don’t really like that moniker. It’s not that it’s just an immature industry. Right? It just got started. So, it’s trying to find its legs. And I think it’s solutions like this that are really going to help the vast majority of kids have success above and beyond the occasional splashy, splashy headline.
How Booster Athletes fits into NIL landscape
Dillon Gabriel, Devin Leary, Jordan Travis, Zach Calzada and Devon Achane are already on the app and producing content. Booster has already partnered with institutions such as North Carolina and UCLA. Ohio State‘s collective, Cohesion, has partnered with the crowdsourcing product to give more than 1,000 Buckeyes student-athletes access. Duke track star Emily Cole, who has upwards of 20 NIL deals, is also an ambassador.
Athletes can download the app on Google Play or the App Store. Users pay a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 or $99 for a year to access an athlete’s content. In less than 10 days since the launch, just under 400 players have been onboarded. The plan is to have nearly 1,000 by the end of this week.
“We had no expectation that it would go this quickly,” Clark said. “There are 50 different schools represented, there are 20 different sports represented. It’s girls, it’s guys, it’s Power Five, it’s Division III. It’s some schools that I had to look up and figure out who they were.”
Booster does take a piece of the profit from the athletes. Clark said the company promises that users are “guaranteed 80% of all the monies that flow through the platform, through subscriptions or boosts.”
The most a user is allowed to give in a boost is $1,000, with an option to send a personal message to the athlete, too. Clark said the company plans to monitor the boost plan and make changes as the app adapts if needed.
Filling a NIL void
In data from Year 1 of NIL, Opendorse shows 76% of athletes on the platform received at least one deal. But 35% of all Division I compensation came from donors, with an average monthly NIL compensation of $1,012. Data from INFLCR showed the median value of all NIL transactions was $53.
There will be more rollouts at schools across the country and plans are in place to partner with collectives.
Clark believes that Booster Athletes provides a way for athletes at every level to access that donor pool. And it provides a direct route to the players for boosters, instead of making contact through third-party collectives.
“One of the reasons we built the technology is that we believe that every single college athlete can build a recurring stream of revenue from their Name, Image and Likeness” he said. “They all come from somewhere, all these student-athletes have an inner circle of fans and supporters. I don’t care if you’re Dillon Gabriel at Oklahoma, or if you’re a rising sophomore cross country runner at a Division III school.”