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

SB Nation Launches New Mobile Sites and Postseason Hub

With more and more sports fans wanting to get updates on the go, on their iPhones, BlackBerries, SideKicks and all other mobile devices, sports sites like ESPN and Yahoo! Sports are having to give extra focus to customizing their sites for these smaller screens. Sports Blogs Nation, a network home to more than 100 sports blogs for all professional teams from the four major sports, dozens of college teams, and other events, recently launched a new initiative that delivers customized mobile sites for all blogs, as well as a new postseason hub, dedicated to the teams in this year's baseball playoffs.

      
The New Mobile Athletics Nation Site
If you're as obsessed with your favorite sports teams as I am, you might find yourself feeling disconnected from the site when you're on the go. But over the last year, the SB Nation technical team updated the foundation of the hundreds of Web logs under their stead, in preparation for taking the day's posts and comments outside of their sites, and new devices and streams. The new foundation allowed users to sign in to all blogs using a shared account, and combines all user comments into a single stream, which hints at future projects. Who knows, maybe even a FriendFeed-like site for sports?

For example, my stream is here: http://www.sbnation.com/users/louismg

      
Fan's Photos and Comments Via Athletics Nation Mobile
If you're at your computer, you can get a sneak preview of SB Nation's new mobile interface by pointing your browser to any of the network's sites, including: http://mobile.athleticsnation.com/ for the Oakland A's, http://mobile.bleedcubbieblue.com/ for the Chicago Cubs, or http://mobile.aroundtheoval.com/ for the Ohio State Buckeyes, for example.


Also new with SB Nation is a new hub dedicated to following the Postseason. The new hub, found here: http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/postseason, has the latest posts from the active teams' blogs, as well as linescores of each game. It's a great one-stop page to get caught up on what the fans of this year's postseason clubs are saying, so check it out.

I had a long conversation yesterday with Trei Brundrett, who is leading the development team at SB Nation, and you can expect many big things coming. But for now, check out the mobile sites and the SB Nation Postseason hub. The official SB Nation blog: Blog Huddle, can be found here: http://blog.sbnation.com/.