“Technology is best when it brings people together.”
WordPress’ Founder, Matt Mullenweg, told TechCrunch his underlying philosophy throughout its decade-plus run as a company. Coding is arguably the most indispensable and accessible skill to learn in the 21st century. Yet, for the majority of people, code represents a foreign language they can’t comprehend. The work published on this medium, though, gravitates to any number of communities.
As an open source blogging platform, WordPress serves as a pillar for journalism everywhere. Mullenweg realized early on, when writing the software, the importance to leave this property open for developers. By doing so, WordPress became a gateway for a lot of them to form their own websites as they desire, which, in turn, allowed the opportunity to scale tremendously compared to others.
Currently, WordPress holds nearly 20 percent market share among sites created online. Its adoption rate and rise in prevalence isn’t surprising. Mullenweg has simplified the process and system in which to host content in. Since the difficult part to most would be building a publishing platform to begin with, he has helped facilitate that in a more convenient way and give more time for authors to work on what’s not easy to do as well: the writing.
In sports, the future of journalism is already upon us.
Digital media pervades every aspect of a fan’s life. Whether it’s a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, fans want to consume as much high quality content as possible. There’s never enough. In fact, four of the top 100 most popular sites on the web are sports-focused at the start of November, per Quantcast. And Burst Media’s study from last year states 35 percent of sports fans go online at least once a day–with nearly 67 percent of hard core fans logging on more frequently.
Concurrently, the proliferation of new sports media outlets have emerged. Technology and fandom have collided to spawn greater coverage than yesteryear. The confluence of accessibility, immediacy, and fans’ insatiable need for more content spurs a perfect storm towards disruption.
The old guard of print newspapers have shifted their distribution efforts to digital. During this process, however, they have lost readership to new players in the industry that have made it a point to extend their reach to a broader, yet hyperlocal audience. Bleacher Report and SB Nation represent this new guard and forge ahead with their respective business agendas.
In the case of Bleacher Report, much has been made when Turner Sports acquired them for roughly $200 million last year. They have managed to galvanize an entire litany of fans–both casual and devoted ones–through tailoring stories to their simplified liking, in terms of diction, syntax, and context. SF Weekly chronicled their ascent to dominance, as polarizing as it still is. From the outset, they’ve continued to rely on more than 6,000 contributors–individuals barely being paid–to produce more than 1,000 articles a day. SportsOnEarth said, “it was a reverse engineering enterprise.”
Tech-wise, Bleacher Report has benefited greatly from Turner Sports. Their site’s interface emphasizes images prominently and it’s built on a platform similar to Turner Sports’ other digital assets–like the new redesigned NCAA.com. These facets support and sustain their robust traffic. And they’ve grown exponentially insofar as the crossover to mobile has been tangible enough to align McDonald’s as a launch corporate partner to their Team Stream app, which has branched into fantasy football.
As for SB Nation, this Vox Media-powered entity has created headway in their own right as well. Through their north of 300 sports fans-derived communities, SB Nation’s content caters to affluent millenials. TechCrunch reported that they’ve partnered with BlogTalkRadio in order to provide live podcasts as an alternative to text and video. This distribution expansion stems from incredible resources such as Accel Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, and Khosla Ventures. The influx of capital, manpower, and creative projects to change the perception that media companies can’t scale based on Silicon Valley’s standards.
The technological core around SB Nations lies in its Chorus platform. The rich media visuals instantly jump off the user-facing site. This next-gen software enables them to have a comprehensive content management system unlike what most publications utilize. Some of its key features include holistic forums, an editorial workflow system, and streamlined pages that expedites metadata entry. Revenue capabilities are possible due to the back-end’s functionality towards adjustable ad campaigns that virtually process in the same vein as the content itself.
Nevertheless, as Chris Bosh wrote for Wired: “At this point, learning to code is simply about understanding how the world functions.”
Sports journalism, through the ages, interprets and analyzes a Utopian ideal that’s only grown in importance alongside the latest technological breakthroughs.
With that in mind, FanSided looms as the next big sports media network. They recently eclipsed 10 million monthly uniques, per Google Analytics, thanks to their over 240 sports and entertainment sites supported entirely on WordPress. They’ve grown over 154 percent during the past year; and their recent uptick from this past June onward has them scaling 200 percent over last year. Also, their partnership with Sports Illustrated can be attributed to their success. FanSided’s thousands of app downloads and 40,000 e-mail subscribers doesn’t even stand out as much as their willingness to partner with other startups like Beyond the Box and Fancred.
SportTechie proudly presents an exclusive oral history from the FanSided team that delves into their humbling beginnings, to their rise as a force to be reckoned within the hyper-competitive sports media landscape. The key players telling their story consists of Adam Best, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Zach Best, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Matt Blake, Partner and Chief Product Officer, and Patrick Allen, Vice President of Content.
A. Best: My brother and I felt like there wasn’t enough coverage of our favorite team. We wanted to do something about it. The Chiefs didn’t get a lot of coverage in the national media. Herm (we dubbed him “Harm”) Edwards was in the process of destroying the team, yet nobody was covering the Red and Gold on a daily basis. We figured if we couldn’t read about the Chiefs all day every day on ESPN.com, or even at the Kansas City Star, we’d have to write about them ourselves.
Z. Best: It really just started as a stand-alone Chiefs blog. We weren’t really sure how things would go but we had so much success, really overnight, that we thought it would be wise to launch other, similar NFL blogs. We figured if there was such a great need for fan-centric, nonstop Kansas City Chiefs content, what about other teams with passionate fan bases that are typically ignored? What about the Dolphins? What about the Vikings? What about the (post-Elway, pre-Manning) Broncos?
A. Best: Launching on April Fool’s Day was just coincidence, but I think it ended up being the perfect starting place for our origin story. We’re the underdogs. We’re the unfunded mavericks. We’re the darkhorse candidate that’s actually competing. With the success of Bleacher Report and SB Nation, we’ve long been the small startup that nobody has paid much attention to. Part of that is because those guys got a big head start on us, but it is also partly due to the way we run our business. It is no coincidence that our network mascot, Everest, is a yeti. We’ve embraced being on the fringe and being underestimated. We’ve used that attitude as motivation to trust in our model and keep pushing. Now that we’re catching up, I guess you could say we wear it like a badge of honor.
During their inception, FanSided noticed a void in sports team coverage by the online media back in 2007. This realization lead them to create their first blog, Arrowhead Addict.
Z. Best: I don’t think there was much digital media team-by-team coverage back then. You had your odd mom-and-pop blog or forum, sure, but most of the time if you couldn’t get the coverage you wanted from ESPN, the local paper or the team’s official website, you were out of luck. SB Nation was still fairly new at that point, and we saw plenty of opportunity.
A. Best: As fans, we felt we were never getting the real story from local reporters. There were some occasional bright spots. Jason Whitlock was wonderful to have at the Kansas City Star. I think his popularity among Chiefs fans was primarily because he wasn’t afraid to rock the boat. Whitlock wasn’t driven by a worry that he needed to maintain a certain relationship with the Chiefs in order to continue to get access to the team.
We tried to take that attitude to Arrowhead Addict. We wanted to represent the fans first and foremost, while cranking out a ton of insightful, opinionated and sometimes even humorous content. I think that is one of the reasons the site became so popular. We never pulled punches. I think the readers appreciated that about us. Being vocal isn’t always popular, but that is how most fans are. At the end of the day, the site was for them–not the team.
Once Arrowhead Addict established itself, there wasn’t a concrete plan necessarily going forward; rather, a keen opportunistic sense of the sports media landscape as a whole.
A. Best: We didn’t have a set-in-stone master plan from day one, but being opportunistic is a trait that has always been in our DNA. Similar to how we recently saw a great opportunity to expand into pop culture and entertainment topics that are of interest to our current demographic, we went where we saw opportunity. We wanted to know if we could replicate our success at Arrowhead Addict with other NFL team sites.
Z. Best: We accomplished just that, starting with the Dolphins and Vikings. In the next year we’d launch properties for every NFL team. Eventually, we determined that we could do this for every team, sport and major US metropolitan area. We had test sites in different categories, like Kings of Kauffman, Lake Show Life and Sabre Noise. Those experiments all worked. The MLB expansion came next; followed by NHL, NBA and college.
A. Best: Being so lean allows us to quickly pivot, change direction and run through a gaping hole to daylight. Bigger, more traditional companies are more like an Eddie George-type workhorse back. Overpower the competition with brute strength, strictly running North and South, trucking anything in their path. Problem is when that strategy stops working, they aren’t able to shift. We’re more nimble. If we start running right and the hole is closed, we’ll pull a Barry Sanders, bounce things back to the left and run toward daylight.
Z. Best: We’ve done this quite a bit. No matter what the original plan is, we like to pursue wherever we see the most opportunity.
As with any startup, there are challenges along the way. For FanSided, there were many of them, but each served as a learning experience and a stepping stone.
Z. Best: We faced many of the challenges new websites face. We bootstrapped the entire endeavor. We didn’t go out and raise a bunch of money and sell promises to investors we weren’t sure we’d be able to keep. Adam and I come from the “Show Me State”–we took that same approach with our business. If we weren’t making money yet, then we weren’t going to be taking a dime from investors. Further, we wanted to make sure our writers got paid. That meant offering up a revenue share to our editors, even if it meant taking almost all the money out of our own pockets.
A. Best: In the early days, it was trial and error. Some of our sites didn’t rank well, if at all, in Google. It was difficult to bring in traffic, which meant it was hard for editors to make money. Because of that, it was nearly impossible to get dedicated editors. We learned the business as we went and did our best to take care of our stars along the way. Slowly, over time, we began finding more motivated and talented writers who wanted to voice their opinion on their teams. We worked hard to continue expanding our network, while also forging partnerships that would reward our writers with exposure and better traffic. We worked with Yardbarker and Fox Sports early on. CBS and NFL.com shortly after. And so on and so on, eventually leading to our current partnership with Sports Illustrated. It took time, but we leaned on our strongest FanSiders. They helped pave the way. We’ve rewarded many of them with much larger roles in the company.
Their work positioned themselves to take two significant pivots. These junctures poised a transition towards fruition down the line.
Allen: It was a couple of things that happened almost simultaneously. It began with our partnership with Sports Illustrated. Early on, we were able to get a few of our NFL blogs featured on the SI team pages. Those sites had a distinct advantage over our other properties because not only were they being sent a great deal more traffic, they were also the beneficiaries of very high quality links.
In August of 2012, we officially partnered with SI and that is where the traffic explosion we have experienced in the last year began. A big part of this game is getting noticed. We knew that once our content was in front of fans, things would fall into place.
The redesign and relaunch of FanSided.com was also a pivotal step. We had always dabbled in entertainment and pop culture. Our decision to expand into those areas in our coverage at FS.com enabled us to reach an even larger audience. We wanted FanSided.com to be the best site to visit if you were a guy sports fan in between the ages of, say, 18-45. We believe we’ve started to achieve that.
A. Best: Nobody in sports media has the quality, legacy or pedigree that SI brings to the table. You pair their industry-leading journalism and reporting with our forward-thinking curation and prolific content creation, and you have an extremely complementary relationship. Zach and I grew up racing to the mailbox to see if the latest SI had arrived. It’s a dream come true, and we’re happy with what both sides have accomplished during our year or so of working together. We had a lot of options come up during our “free agency” period, but SI stood out as the best option.
Finally, the launching of our new layout, FanSided 4.0, along with our mobile apps and e-mail newsletter. Those tech developments have helped us push our content to more readers than ever before. FanSided’s CPO, Matt Blake, has been so instrumental in taking our company to another level both tech-wise and by making our content more accessible. Without all of those things happening around the same time, I don’t think we’d be where we are today.
Just as important, the FanSided name sheds light on the brand and overall mission they believe in.
A. Best: It was Zach who coined the name. The thinking behind it was that this is a fan-driven product. These sites are written by fanatics for fellow fanatics to consume. It doesn’t mean that we don’t hold ourselves to high standards–we do. Instead, it communicates a message that our editors are just like the folks reading their work. We’re here crying and cheering along with you, rather than sitting up on some media perch at ESPN, ignoring your team and force-feeding you Yankees and Tebow coverage.
Without the fans there would be no sports. There would be no sports media. We wanted to give the most talented, most passionate fans a voice and a platform. I think we’ve achieved that.
Allen: We also realized that fandom goes beyond sports. People love music and entertainment. They are just as passionate about their favorite television shows or movie directors as they are their hometown sports team. We believe everyone is a fan of something. FanSided is all about providing fans with the information and opinions they crave. We now have entertainment properties like FlickSided.com, GameSided.com, HiddenRemote.com and LightlyBuzzed.com. Soon, we’re launching a hip-hop site called RhymeJunkie.com. All of these sites are under the FanSided umbrella. We like to joke that you can get an injury report on Peyton Manning and Robb Stark all in the same place.
Technologically, FanSided’s entire infrastructure has been built off of WordPress. Their 240 site network, impressively, is operated by one full-time developer.
Z. Best: In the early days, building on top of WordPress just made sense. It was just Adam and I running things, and while I can certainly hold my own when it comes to coding, I am more businessman than developer. We knew we would eventually need more help in that area, but we decided to put content and paying our writers at the front of the line. We knew this would slow us down in some areas, but we thought it would be smarter to build ourselves an audience first, based on content, rather than spending a bunch of money we didn’t have on a fancy car we couldn’t drive.
A. Best: Once we felt confident in our creative infrastructure and our revenue, the first thing we did was bring Matt Blake into the fold. Matt had been consulting with us for a while and he was actually instrumental in convincing us to stick with WordPress.
Blake: Running 250+ sites on WordPress isn’t without its challenges, but it gives us an advantage over our competition because we don’t need to have a large development team to build a custom platform for our writers. Instead, we are able to leverage the amazing CMS that WordPress has become today, and focus on developing proprietary plugins and themes on top of it.
But, WordPress hasn’t always been a breeze. I remember the days where upgrading WordPress for even a one blog install could be problematic. There were certainly growing pains along the way and there still are, but the WordPress community has done an amazing job building better plugins and a better WordPress core every year. WordPress truly has become state-of-the-art, and I am glad that we hitched our wagon to it.
Throughout their journey, FanSided has remained an independent company. They have passed on external investment entirely due to their steadfast confidence and staying the course to what has taken them this far.
Z. Best: We have always believed that with hard work, we could produce more traffic per dollar spent than any of our competitors and our numbers indicate that we are doing that.
We didn’t set out to shun investors but we wanted to be very careful. We decided to run a lean business and we wanted to make smart decisions when it came to taking on money. It isn’t that we haven’t had offers. We have. But we always tried to take a step back and ask ourselves: “Do we really need this money? Can we do this on our own?”
A. Best: The more we grew, the more we encountered other startups that wanted to partner up with us. Over and over again we would come into contact with companies that had a ton of funding, fancy offices, a dozen employees and a spiffy-looking product that nobody was using. They also weren’t making any money. We just weren’t crazy about taking that risk.
We have always been profitable and the more FanSided grew, the more that we felt that if we were just patient, good things would happen for us and that confidence stems mainly from our belief in our model and our product. We still have an open mind when it comes to raising money, or even potentially being acquired one day. Right now, however, we aren’t hampered by our current resources. We’ve started to scale pretty aggressively in 2013, and we are bullish on where FanSided will be two, three years from now even if we do remain independent and/or unfunded.
Considering that there are competitors in the space, FanSided has ensured their content strategy reflects who they are, seize other verticals that compliments their foundation, while also aligning distribution partnerships with two fellow app startups.
Allen: FanSided has grown into more than just a network of sports sites. While we know that sports will always be at the heart of what we do, we realized that everyone is a fan of something and wanted to make FanSided the one place on the internet where a reader could go to get information and opinions on most all the things that they love. That was the main reason we decided to expand into covering entertainment and lifestyle.
We also recognized that there is a great deal of crossover when it comes to sports and entertainment. When you have LeBron hanging out with Jay-Z, that is something that might interest a Heat fan and a Hip-Hop fan. When you have NFL athletes tweeting pictures of their early copies of Madden 25, that is something that appeals to both NFL fans and gamers. We’ve turned FanSided.com into the place where all of those things come together and we have launched specific sites that can go deeper into covering those areas. A reader can come to FanSided.com and read about which Game of Thrones stars are fans of the Jets. Then he can go to The Jet Press to read about the team, and Hidden Remote to read more about Game of Thrones. I think that is primarily what sets FanSided apart from other sports sites. We have it all covered.
As I recall, and I could be wrong about this, Matt discovered both apps and asked me to reach out to both companies to inquire about possible partnerships. We get a lot of requests from app developers and we usually don’t do much with them because we really want to put our effort into products we believe in and that we think can change the game for sports fans.
Looking into the future, FanSided aims for increased expansion and maintain WordPress as the platform of choice to scale even further.
Blake: WordPress is as good as any CMS out there. Period. When you top their innovation with our own, we are able to move faster and do so for practically pennies on the dollar. Our technology will be as good as anything you see from those companies, and we’re already starting to catch up. We can certainly compete using WP and are extremely confident in this part of our plan.
Do we still need to build out a bigger and better development team to compete? Yes. One full-time developer can’t continue to manage everything in a timely and efficient manner. So our next phase of growth is going to focus on building out a development team, and that will only further help bring our brand to the next level.
A. Best: We’re going to have more sites, more voices and more content than anybody else not only in the digital sports media space, but any property or network competing for the coveted young male demographic. We already have 250 sites featuring 1,600 writers who churn out 21,000 articles a month, and we are just scratching the surface. We’re going to keep on expanding, adding new sites, recruiting new and exciting talent.
We’ll continue to expand our college and local divisions. We’re going to build out soccer. We’re going to provide really specific, fan-oriented content in entertainment and lifestyle categories, too. Just today, we decided on launching a horror site that will cover scary movies, vampires and zombies. We’ll dive into technology and music. We’re looking at minor league and high school sports.
Z. Best: Meanwhile, we’re also going to focus on giving our writers the tools to continue to improve, both from a quality and quantity standpoint. We don’t just want to have the most content out there, but also the most diverse, original content collection.
In the end, our goal is to make FanSided.com and our surrounding network the most comprehensive, customizable web experience for young men. More content, more categories, more creators, more customization. We’re really just getting started.