Shannon Terry led the early days of college football recruiting websites. Now the CEO of the 3-year-old recruiting website 247Sports, Terry bought the first version of Rivals.com in 2000 out of bankruptcy. He sold Rivals to Yahoo! in 2007 for $100 million.

He remembers how drama built recruiting websites into a profitable and popular cottage industry. Those news conferences by recruiting choosing from multiple hats were good for business, allowing websites to follow what Terry called "war horses" -- three or four elite prospects at each school whose every little move was documented from junior year until signing day.

Terry looks at the industry today and sees evolving interests from consumers. He believes readers want more coverage about their school and less about the individual recruit.

"I believe the recruiting industry has hit a bubble," Terry said. "To borrow a pop culture term, I think the industry has jumped the shark to a degree. Do you want to sit and watch kids you don't know on TV decide what school they're going to who you don't care about? Is that good TV? Are you interested in a high school player committing and decommitting three times over four months? I don't know that there's the same suspense there used to be that creates entertainment value."

Make no mistake: The recruiting media industry is entertainment and a big business, with major media and shoe apparel companies sticking their toes in the water to varying degrees of success. For more than a decade, information and analysis about where high school students decide to attend college has made a lot of adults money.

About seven years ago, the industry essentially boiled down to Rivals vs. Scout. Today, there's a big four of Rivals (generally considered the industry leader), 247Sports, ESPN and Scout. There's also small blogs, social media, websites that aggregate recruiting information, and more local media companies. That includes AL.com, which devotes more staffers to recruiting than it did a couple years ago and generates high readership for some recruiting stories, particularly those related to Alabama or Auburn.

Scout was recently sold by Fox to the North American Membership Group and will be run by Jim Heckman, who formed Scout in 2001 and founded the original Rivals. It is believed Fox sold Scout for significantly less money than the estimated $60 million sales price when Heckman sold the company in 2005, according to a November 2013 story by allthingsd.com.

"It's correct that being the first to find out where a kid is going to school was interesting when the Internet was all about text over dialogue," Heckman said. "That's about all you could do then so a bunch of us followers jumped in. What we're going to do in the future is give a more enjoyable experience, and I think updates on what kids are thinking is a subset. Right now, there's a lot of oversaturation in the field."

Eric Winter oversees Rivals.com for Yahoo!

Eric Winter, the head of Yahoo-owned Rivals, said the recruiting market is "absolutely not" oversaturated. Recruiting is just one component of many team web sites in addition to covering individual teams.

"Seven years ago the only competition for Rivals.com was Scout.com and to a lesser extent ESPN," Winter said. "Today I believe our biggest competition is search. I don't look at ESPN, I don't look at Scout.com, and I certainly don't look at 247 as true competition. We have a responsibility to our paying subscribers to give more information, more data, more analysis and a great way for fans to communicate."

After once investing into the recruiting website game, ESPN jumped out of it last fall. ESPN's heaviest recruiting coverage tends to come on signing day, when ESPNU will air 11 hours of live content, including 13 live commitment announcements.

"I don't know if it's accurate to say the market is oversaturated," ESPN recruiting analyst Tom Luginbill said. "It should be what Shannon is talking about -- analysis of how the players fit into teams and what it means. I don't think it's changing to that, not as long as you have a headline that says 'So and so player is down to three choices and what are they?'"

'Beholden to subscribers'

This is Luginbill's biggest complaint about recruiting websites. He believes they write stories about a recruits' possible destination a certain way in order to appease the fans spending money on team sites.

"That can be dangerous, and that's one thing I'm really glad we don't do at ESPN," Luginbill said. "We're not going to be beholden to subscribers. How do you appeal to subscribers? You tell them what they want to hear. In my case, I don't care if a recruit commits and signs with Ohio State, or if he commits and signs with Alabama."

Winter, the head of Rivals, said he doesn't believe any recruiting website ranks players or writes stories in a particular way to appease subscribers.

Shannon Terry formed 247Sports in 2010 after selling Rivals to Yahoo! (Photo by Nashville Business Journal)

"Shannon Terry owns the Alabama web site for 247Sports (BamaOnLine.com)," Winter said. "Does Shannon Terry make decisions for 247 because he owns the Alabama web site? I don't believe so, and Shannon is a competitor and also a friend of mine. If I don't believe Shannon Terry is making decisions for a personal web site that he has a stake in, there's no way our team is doing that."

Terry said 247Sports has 70,000 subscribers, compared to around 80,000 for Scout and 200,000 for Rivals. Both Scout and Rivals declined to provide data. In 2006, Rivals claimed to have more than 150,000 subscribers and Scout said it had more than 200,000.

Rivals has more than 160 web sites and 400 message boards, which are a key way to attract readers. About half of the message boards are behind a pay wall. Subscribers pay $99.95 a year or $9.95 a month to join Rivals.

In recent years, Rivals has gone deeper in premium coverage with between 80 to 90 percent of its content now behind a pay wall. Winter has said that Rivals accounts for 25 percent of the revenue for Yahoo! Sports.

"Rivals.com is still No. 1 in its position, not just in digital media, but it is the definitive brand when it comes to college football and college basketball recruiting," Winter said. "We're still the No. 1 destination by far when you compare to any medium for team sites. ... The landscape for us hasn't changed except it's continuing to grow."

CBS owns a minority interest in 247Sports and uses its recruiting content. 247Sports, which started in 2010, is approximately 85 percent free to users, turned profitable last quarter, and has made money three straight months, according to Terry.

"That's right in line with our goals three years ago," he said. "We're probably half the size of Rivals already. We've said screw it, let's just call a spade a spade and commoditize it all."

Tired of the drama of where players are going -- a trend Terry readily acknowledges contributing to for so many years -- 247Sports created "crystal ball" predictions. Different analysts make predictions on where recruits will sign, and 247Sports displays the prediction totals.

"I think what you're going to see in the industry is continued commoditization of the content," Terry said. "I think to some degree the recruiting industry has kind of reached a peak. I think there's going to be less fans hanging on every word of a recruit, and the companies that are going to win are going to best present the information to the users."

Terry said competing websites use platforms that were built 10 years ago and 247Sports is the only one with a mobile site. About 57 percent of the 247Sports audience comes from mobile, including 41 percent from a smart phone, according to Terry.

Heckman wants Scout to modernize itself, particularly on mobile. Rivals plans to relaunch its technology by the end of 2014 for mobile and personal computers.

"Rivals.com has been growing year over year and is run as an independent company inside Yahoo," Winter said. "We're living on an older technology. Once you put a Rolls Royce inside the engine, nothing will stop us."

More recruiting 'experts' than ever before

Mike Farrell, the national recruiting analyst for Rivals, has been in this business since 1998. He considers himself such an old-timer that he acknowledges he's sometimes "that guy who screams at kids for walking on their lawn."

But what he finds today among recruiting reporters and analysts troubles him. He concedes he's not a better evaluator of football talent than coaches, but believes he's done it long enough to accurately compare Terrelle Pryor to Vince Young.

"There are so many unqualified experts in this industry," Farrell said. "You have a lot of young guys jumping into the business and doing it for free, and I think it just bogs down the whole thing. People don't know what to believe. It frustrates you greatly when you put so much into your job and a fan base will believe some guy who created his own blog. They believe an opinion they want."

J.C. Shurburtt, the national recruiting analyst for 247Sports, said the popularity of recruiting won't outpace the number of people trying to become a recruiting analyst. If anything, he said, there won't be enough of the pie to go around.

ESPNU will devote 11 hours to signing day on Wednesday, including live commitment announcements from 13 recruits.

"I already see the money people can command in the business going down because there's more competition, more places to work," Shurburtt said. "When there were two competitors, you could make a nice chunk of change and really not even be good at what you do, to be honest with you. Nowadays, it's a tough deal. People who were once six-figure guys, I'm not sure their future is going to be tied to that type of salary in the next five to six years."

As technology evolves, so does the decision-making on when to run content, much like any segment of the media. The days of holding news about a recruit are gone.

"I remember some kids who committed (years ago) and they asked if we could hold onto it until Monday because they were smart enough to know Saturday isn't a big traffic day," Farrell said. "Nowadays you can't hold onto anything for a minute. There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Some of them good, some of them horrible."

Fans want to know where a recruit is going to school and how highly he's ranked, Farrell said. But more recruiting coverage also means savvier recruits who, in turn, can play the media.

"Last year everybody in the world knew Dee Liner was going to Alabama," Farrell said. "There wasn't one person who felt he wasn't going to flip from Auburn for at least two weeks. He kept saying he was 100 percent. But if you put something out there and say he's flipping to Alabama and then say he's 100 percent to Auburn, you get attacked."

Terry credits ESPN's interest in recruiting as the single biggest event over the past five years to make the industry more mainstream. ESPNU, a relatively new network, needed more news and entertainment so recruiting became an obvious fit.

Luginbill said his approach to covering recruiting for ESPN is actual scouting. He's interested in analyzing the players and how they fit into colleges, based in part on his work as an ESPN analyst during the college season.

ESPN.com still ranks teams and players and provides some information updating the school choices for players. But ESPN doesn't have many team sites.

"ESPN jumped into it and then jumped back and said, 'You know what? This doesn't matter to us, it's 18th on our list,'" Farrell said.

For four straight months, ESPN has held the top spot for total audience in monthly comScore Media Metrics Multi-Platform traffic ratings. ESPN had 64.9 million unique visitors in December. Next were Yahoo Sports-NBC Sports Network (52.9 million), which includes Rivals; and FoxSports.com on MSN (41.8 million), which until recently included Scout.

Those companies, of course, own larger properties than college football recruiting websites. More than ever, Terry said, college football is a 365-day-a-year sport that's being covered year-round way in part through recruiting.

"In the old days, advertisers wanted to equate recruiting as a high school category," he said. "It couldn't be further from the truth. Consumers of recruiting content are college sports fans extending their knowledge."

Now how do you extend that knowledge in an ever-increasing market? That's the question one of the founders of the recruiting industry is asking himself.