Background
Spartz was born in Louisiana Porte, Indiana to Tom and Maggi Spartz.
Spartz was born in Louisiana Porte, Indiana to Tom and Maggi Spartz.
University of Notre Dame.
He is the oldest of three brothers. Spartz has subsequently attributed some of his entrepreneurial success to reading these short biographies. MuggleNet
Using the WYSIWYG site-building tool Homestead, Spartz founded MuggleNet, a Harry Potter news website and forum, in 1999, at the age of twelve.
In fall 2006, while a junior at Notre Dame, Emerson co-authored a book, MuggleNet.com"s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7, which speculated on plot elements of the final Harry Potter book to be released in July 2007.
The book remained on the New York Times Children"s Bestseller List for six months, peaking in the number two position and selling 350,000 copies. In June 2007, Spartz went on a tour with Ben Schoen, another MuggleNet staff member, to promote their work.
In 2009, Emerson Spartz and Ben Schoen wrote another book, MuggleNet.com"s Harry Potter Should Have Died: Controversial Views From The #1 Fan Site. By 2007, Spartz was receiving a six-figure income for running MuggleNet and had recruited six paid and 120 volunteer staff to the site.
Spartz has retained ownership of the site but has been less actively involved in its administration since 2008.
In 2015, he stated, "As I became less motivated by my passion for the books, I got obsessed with the entrepreneurial side of, the game of maximizing patterns and seeing how big my reach could get."
Spartz Media
In 2009, Spartz launched Spartz Media, a company that automates the discovery and reproduction of viral web content across thirty aggregator websites. In May 2009, Spartz and Gaby Montero founded GivesMeHope, a website where contributors share answers to the question "what gives you hope?" in the form of anonymous anecdotes. The site was created in response to FMyLife.
In January 2010, Spartz launched Object Management Group Facts.
In 2012, OMGFacts.com received 30 million monthly page views, and had 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. Spartz has launched at least thirty websites under the Spartz Media brand, all of which primarily rely on social media sites for web traffic.
Because these sites have increasingly operated by republishing previously developed viral content, Spartz"s content strategy has been characterized as arbitrage, and has been criticized for failing to license or provide attribution for copyrighted media. In 2014, the company launched Dose.com.
In 2015, the company changed its name to Dose and raised $25 million in venture financing, bringing its total capital raised to $34.5 million.