When it comes to being passionate and engaged, nothing — with the possible exception of a religious cult — matches the kind of devotion that sports fans have to their local teams. Those fans are the heart of sports-based media company SB Nation, which just closed a $10.5-million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, along with Accel Partners and Comcast Interactive. Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff says the company plans to spend the money on expanding the network of team-focused and regional blogs, including investing in sales and marketing, and implementing a mobile strategy.
The SB Nation network encompasses blogs that are focused on almost 300 separate brands, including those devoted to individual teams, leagues and sports coverage in a number of cities and major regions. In an interview Monday, Bankoff said the company has more than 400 writers under contract, which makes it a little like AOL’s Patch.com hyper-local news project, but for sports instead of general news. SB Nation also has a proprietary content-management platform that Bankoff said provides bloggers with real-time analytics but also the “deep community and social interaction” that the network sees as a core value.
What eventually became SB Nation grew out of a sports-themed blog called Athletics Nation in Oakland, started by Tyler Bleszinski — who is now the company’s editorial director — and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, better known as the founder of the political commentary blog network called Daily Kos, in 2003. The two developed a broader network of fan-based blogs called SportsBlogs Nation and in 2008 got a round of financing from Accel Partners, Allen & Co. and a number of individual angel investors, and Bankoff joined the company as chief executive.
The idea of topic-focused blogs with real-time content and a passionate readership was a natural for Bankoff — he is a former senior executive at AOL, where he was in charge of developing the blog strategy that led to the creation of the massively successful entertainment blog TMZ, as well as the acquisition of Weblogs Inc., which brought to AOL such leading blogs as Engadget. “I have always believed that online publishing is getting more targeted, more social and more real-time,” Bankoff said. The CEO said that SB Nation’s traffic and readership numbers have tripled in the past year, and that the network now gets about 17 million unique visitors a month.
Bankoff said SB Nation doesn’t believe that targeted niches like sports are only good for readers — advertisers are also interested in the kind of engaged community the network offers, he says. “You can have a much deeper and more focused conversation as a member of these communities,” the SB Nation CEO said, “and that’s what advertisers care about.” Bankoff’s former employer AOL has also been going after the sports-blogging market, building out its FanHouse network by hiring a number of prominent sports journalists, and Yahoo has built up its own sports-oriented media-blogging strategy as well, and is now trying to extend that to news and politics