Company: Dobber Sports
Launched: 2005
Sites: DobberHockey.com, DobberBaseball.com

It’s the dream of many a fantasy writer who enters the industry. He (or she) begins simply writing about his favorite sport and eventually fares well enough to go out on his own and launch a site that allows him to do it for a living.

The dream came true for Darryl Dobbs back in 2005.

Dobbs started playing fantasy hockey at age 15 back in 1989. In 2001, the Canadian began writing about the sport of his home country, and from 2002 he was a key component of the fantasy coverage for The Hockey News. By 2005, Dobbs was branching out to his own site, though it wasn’t necessarily by plan.

Dobbs says that THN had to lay off a significant portion of its staff in 2005 because of the NHL lockout than canceled the 2004-05 season. The group that left included the magazine’s webmaster, and the replacement didn’t come with quite the same amount of knowledge his predecessor carried. The interim poster of content didn’t know how to get Dobbs’ player rankings up on the site, so Dobbs began posting them on a separate webpage and linking from his THN offerings.

“Within a month, I was archiving my THN articles on this webpage and occasionally throwing my ‘ramblings’ on it,” Dobbs tells FSB.com, referring to a daily roundup of his hockey observations. “It started growing and Steve Hulford from FSN.ca and PoolExpert.com advised me to get a domain name. I chose DobberHockey.com, and things just really grew from there.”

Dobbs, a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association, estimates that the site cost him a whopping $20 in startup fees — $10 for the domain name and $10 more for the host. In 2006, he launched a redesign of the site (another followed in February 2007), and two months later it became a full-time gig.

“I really kept costs down because I quit my day job between the two re-launches,” Dobbs says. “Because of the passion of this industry, there are a lot of good people willing to help, not for the money, but because they love it. ”

DobberHockey, which generates revenue solely from advertising and sales of its draft kit, supports only Dobbs at this point, and even he hasn’t been sustained by it all along. He says things have been improving on that front, though.

“I still have to freelance on the side — for The Hockey News, Pool Expert and for the Forecaster,” Dobbs says. “With this year’s growth I could probably do away with freelancing now, but I enjoy it. Until this year, I needed the other gigs.”

The site carries a roster of other part-time contributors who produce a range of regular content. The centerpiece remains the player rankings that were once the near-accidental base on which the whole venture was eventually built.

Dobbs posts rankings of the top 300 fantasy hockey players, top 100 goaltenders, top 100 defensemen and top 200 prospects, and he updates each list once a month throughout the year (including the off-season). Other features include the “ramblings” — “haven’t missed a day since it became full time,” Dobbs says — and forums, which Dobbs lauds for the friendly nature of the users. He has also recently lauched DobberBaseball.com and says he’d like to move into golf next and nail down a regular biweekly schedule for his radio show, “Dobber Nation.”

That might not be all that’s in the works, but any other possibilities are known only by one person at this point.

“I have a couple of other thoughts in mind that I’ll keep secret for now,” Dobbs says.