SportsBlogs Nation Raises Funding Round to Expand Platform

Long-time readers of louisgray.com know that behind tech, one of my most avid passions is that of sports. Be it baseball, college football, or basketball, I'm a huge fan. I have my team loyalties and want to know all I can about my favorite teams. As part of this sports obsession, I found Web communities like SportsBlogs Nation and Ballhype to help me get the latest and best sports news from fellow fans around the world, as well as engage in community around our shared passion. As I recounted in July, the Ballhype team was acquired by Future US for $3 million, and yesterday, the SportsBlogs Nation team announced they raised a funding round in the single-digit millions of dollars, without more details being disclosed. The funding round was led by Accel Partners, the same team who helped bankroll Facebook, and by Jim Bankoff, former AOL programming chief. The funds will be used to further expand the rapidly growing sports blogs network, and help improve the platform.

Overnight, I connected with SportsBlogs Nation president Tyler Bleszinksi, who I've known through his family of sites since 2005, and consider a personal friend. Below is part of that Q&A done over e-mail:

LG: How large is SportsBlogs Nation today in terms of individual sites and users?

TB: We currently have 152 and we are growing that number weekly. We are very deliberate in our approach in that we only invite the highest quality bloggers, with established track-records, to join our network. Therefore, we will never rush to launch sites just to grow our blog numbers. We don't release any details about our registration base. I can tell you that internal numbers show that we have about 2.5MM people using the sites each month and that we're seen explosive growth across our entire network in all metric categories (in some cases doubling our metrics every six months.)

LG: What is helping to drive the growth of the network?

TB: The growth is likely driven by several factors:

1. positive macro-trends as new people discover and engage with our blogs each day
2. more engagement with our existing users as we add great new writers, features and technology - including our new blogging platform which is a huge success. Just last week for instance, we added two of the top sports bloggers on the web: Jeff Clark/Celticsblog and James Mirtle/From The Rink
3. the declining investment by newspapers and other media in local sports coverage, which makes us the go-to source, particularly for mid and smaller market teams like Oakland for instance
4. the traffic-driving network effect of intelligent cross-promotion across our network and the general sports and blogging ecosystem
5. our team/tribe focus where we enable fans to publish and discuss within specific communities built around their passion.

On that note, one important and overlooked fact is that we are the leading regional independent sports network in many areas. For instance, in the Bay Area we have the top sites (Athletics Nation, McCovey Chronicles, Golden State of Mind, Niners Nation, etc) for just about every team, add it up and we're bigger than just about any other media property focused on Bay Area sports. Same can be said for other markets like Chicago, Texas, etc.

LG: How much funding did you raise, and what will it be used for?

TB: We're not releasing the amount, but we basically went after an amount that would allow us to become the top sports social community on the Internet. We're still cheap, even more so in this economic climate, and running this company on a shoestring, only spending where there is a measurable return.

We plan on using the money to further advance our sports-centric social media and publishing platform, which is already, in my opinion, the best blogging platform ever created for sports publishers, contributors and audiences. We want to iterate on it and continue to invest in advancing an open platform for sports fan activity streams.

It will also allow us to expand our leagues much more quickly by getting more man hours working on bringing the best bloggers on board. Our aim is to truly have the best team blog for every team in every sport and we need our league managers to be spending more time working on bringing the best bloggers in.

The other thing is that it gives us a talent like Jim Bankoff on board. And Bankoff is a supremely skilled executive who is laser-focused on making SportsBlogs Nation a large and profitable business. He knows this space well considering his past experience at AOL. He's already working to bring aboard other executives who will be focusing on business partnerships and generating revenue opportunities.

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I have been an active participant on SportsBlog Nation for the better part of four years now, and have enjoyed the community at sites including Athletics Nation, Sactown Royalty and California Golden Blogs. My user ID can be found here: http://www.sbnation.com/users/louismg.

Also see:
SportsBusiness Journal: Tech Leaders Back Sports Blog Network

Is There Less Funding Or Are Startups Just Cheaper?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)


As an early adopter, I have an interest in startups. As a software developer and a developer of Web sites and services, I have additional interest in funding and the whole entrepreneur idea. Because of this, I tend to read a few "business" blogs as well as the usual technical fare. One of these blogs is A VC. Recently, Fred Wilson started writing a series of posts on the venture fund economics that is amazing. If you are trying your hand at a startup, I highly recommend you start looking at these posts. Just getting a fundamental understanding of the VC process is helpful in determining whether VC funding is worthwhile to your startup. In his Venture Fund Economics post he concludes with a very interesting point:

Some will read this and suggest that our business is all about swinging for the fences. But I don't think so. There are hitters in baseball, the best hitters in fact, that hit balls out of the park when they are just trying to make good contact. That's how you have to do it in the venture business. You try to make 20 great investments and you work with them closely in hopes that four years in you have six or seven that have home run potential, and after ten years, you maybe hit one or two out of the park. If you try to hit every one out of the park day one, you'll strike out way too much and the fund won't work out very well.

I think this logic can also be applied to startups in general. If you always try to do something that will turn out to be a home run, you will strike out too much. In the technology world, a home run would be a Google competitor, an iPhone competitor or even a Facebook competitor.

So, what if you are just trying to make contact? We have already heard in various places that venture funding is hard to get in general, and even harder in today's economy. Is this discouraging startups? Or are the startups focusing on the "major" technical hub cities? Paul Kedrosky must have been thinking this recently when he found that California is not a big entrepreneur state. Granted this is just an analysis using Google Insights for Search, but it does yield some interesting information. I was not enamored with the search terms that Paul used, so I tried a different set (entrepreneur, startup, venture capital and funding) and found some really interesting results.


Google Insight: Entrepreneur, Startup, Venture Capital and Funding
Interestingly enough, entrepreneur is not a big search term compare to startup or funding. Initially I thought this could be due to the generic nature of these terms, but the locations tend to match up with significant technical presences. As you can see from the chart, there is an obvious downward trend for all of the search terms. We can assume that this is due to the economy because if you read TechCrunch, Mashable or ReadWriteWeb, you will see plenty of Web sites getting initial startup coverage. In any economy like the one we are in currently, investments suffer and people invest less. Therefore it is likely that venture capitalists are being much more careful regarding what they invest in. Many people wanting to be an entrepreneur are probably taking less risks as well. So, we could be seeing a rise in startups being a weekend job until revenue or major funding becomes a reality.

However, some of these startups do require some significant money in order to operate on a daily basis because cloud computing is not free. Are people getting more angel funding? Following the same logic as the entrepreneur search, I compared the search terms angel investor and angel funding.


Google Insight: Angel Investor and Angel Funding
Here you can see that angel investor and funding have flat or slightly rising trends. Again there is a definite relation to the major technical locations and the "interest" of searches. Given the trend lines for the "angel" search terms and the comparison to the previously explained trends, it does look like there is more interest in angel funding.

Why would we be seeing this difference in trends, besides the economy? Well, many of the newer web services do not require major hardware infrastructure in order to get started. Cloud computing and even cheap hosting make the hardware investment something that can be put off until there is a true need. Using the cloud is also very cost effective initially because you do not need to hire a server or network administrator. This is all handled for you by the cloud provider. The cloud also gives you the ability to handle spikes in traffic signifcantly better than with a traditional hosting provider. Given these reduced costs, a good round of $100,000 of angel financing could fund a startup for two years. At that point, there could be real revenue being generated or even a venture captial funding round. Money is easier to raise when you are a somewhat proven startup compared to when you first start and only have a few thousand page views per month.

It looks like the combination of the economy, cloud computing and the generally lower technical barrier for new services is creating a new environment for startups. People are finding cheaper ways to get started. Startups are also using the existing information on the web to define more interesting services. So, what is coming next and where do we go from here?