Sheep Esports — esports news platform
As lead developer, I built and scaled Sheep Esports, an esports news media that now serves more than 600,000 monthly readers with real-time news, tournament coverage and community features.
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The challenge
Esports news was scattered across dozens of sources, and fans had to jump between sites to follow their games and tournaments. Sheep Esports set out to become the go-to destination: fast, reliable coverage and an engaged community. Performance was critical — traffic spikes by an order of magnitude during major tournaments, and every second of load time costs readers.
Article page design
The article page is the heart of the product. I designed a layout that puts readability first while weaving in comments, reactions and sharing. It is fully responsive and keeps strong Core Web Vitals on mobile, where most of the audience reads.
Audience & growth
The platform grew past 600,000 monthly active users, with around 671K monthly views and 3.1M tracked events. Readers spend over a minute per session on average and keep coming back — a strong signal that speed and content quality pay off.
Tech stack & infrastructure
Sheep Esports runs on a modern, scalable architecture: Next.js for server-side rendering and SEO, Sanity as the headless CMS for the editorial team, Firebase for real-time data and authentication, Vercel for global deployment and Google Cloud for backend services. I also introduced a microservices approach to grow engagement features independently.
On the revenue side, I integrated advertising with Google Ad Manager and worked directly with brands such as Winamax and Holy, optimising ad placements to protect the reading experience while maximising return for advertisers.