BleacherReport's CEO Brian Grey, and three of the company's co-founders Bryan Goldberg VP of Marketing & Business Operations, Dave Finocchio, VP of Product & Content, and Dave Nemetz, VP of Video and Business Development, during the teams Tuesday morning meeting in San Francisco, Tuesday September 6, 2011. (Maria J. Avila Lopez)
Four years after founding a website where sports fans could talk about their favorite teams, four Menlo School graduates have sold the product, Bleacher Report, for a reported $175 million.
Turner Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Time Warner, on Monday announced that it had purchased the San Francisco-based website for an undisclosed amount. Bloomberg News and Reuters cited unnamed sources in reporting that the price was less than $200 million, and The Wall Street Journal reported the price as "about $175 million."
Requests for comment from the company, its biggest venture capital investor and Turner officials were not returned.
Bleacher Report was launched by four 20-somethings eager to blog about their favorite sports teams and invite others to do the same. The site became a hit thanks to a legion of contributors willing to write about sports for free.
"Most of our contributors aren't professional journalists. They're lawyers by day, Giants fans by night," Chief Executive Brian Grey told this newspaper in an interview last year.
The co-founders -- Dave Finocchio, Bryan Goldberg, Dave Nemetz and Zander Freund -- have worked to professionalize the site in the past few years, pulling in at least $39 million worth of venture capital and hiring executives from larger, more established properties. Grey left Fox Interactive to become CEO.
Bleacher Report ranked ninth in the June comScore rankings of U.S. online sports sites,
with 10.1 million unique visitors. Turner Sports Digital, which includes sites such as NBA.com and NASCAR.com, was sixth, with 14.8 million visitors.Together, the two properties would leap to fourth in comScore's traffic rankings, well ahead of USA Today.
The Sports Business Journal also noted that the reported $175 million purchase price would easily outpace the record $98 million Yahoo (YHOO) paid in 2007 for Rivals.com.
But armchair quarterbacks hoping to parlay their hobbies into millions might want to take a breath, warned Paul Moriarty, an Internet security consultant in San Jose who on the side runs a fan email list and website devoted to the Boston Celtics.
"Ideas are a dime a dozen -- it's the execution," he said. "Having just gone through a failed Silicon Valley startup, it's much harder than it looks."
Hoping to quell criticism of Bleacher Report as a "content farm" with poorly written blog posts, Grey hired a writing coach for contributors, as well as a small group of professional writers.
But, he said in Monday's news release, "Bleacher Report was created to put fans first, and we are excited to integrate our innovative content publishing model" with Turner's portfolio.
The company will remain in San Francisco, according to Monday's announcement. Finocchio, who rounded up his former high school cohorts to start the site, will remain as chief content officer and become a vice president for Turner Sports.
The deal gives Turner Sports a stronger presence in Internet sports journalism, after the company last year handed control of Golf.com and Sports Illustrated's SI.com back to its parent company, Time Warner.
"Bleacher Report is a strategic acquisition that further enhances Turner's portfolio of sports offerings," David Levy, president of sales and sports of Turner Broadcasting, said in the release. He added that the deal "reflects our continuing commitment to bring fans greater content across all screens."
Contact Jeremy C. Owens at jowens@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak. Contact Peter Delevett at pdelevett@mercurynews.com or 408-271-3638; follow him at Twitter.com/mercwiretap.
kobayashi roseanne barr margaret sanger paul george eddie long ufc 143 weigh ins micron ceo
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.