Website: Bleacher Report

Interview With: Dave Nemetz

How many founders does Bleacher Report have and what are their names?

Bleacher Report was founded by four diehard sports fans – Bryan Goldberg, Zander Freund, Dave Finocchio and me.

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

We’re four young guys who grew up in Silicon Valley and started Bleacher Report because we’re all sports culture junkies. We would commiserate about how mainstream sports media didn’t have the range or depth of coverage we were looking for and we knew that other diehard fans must be experiencing the same thing. As we scoured the Web for information about our favorite teams, we realized that some of the most insightful writing was coming from fans who know their teams best.

What does your website do?

We’re a community-driven sports network, providing all sports fans one place to create, critique and read compelling coverage on their favorite college and pro teams. Bleacher Report is built on an open, collaborative platform with a peer-editing system that ensures high quality fan-generated coverage, and a community driven by a reputation system that rewards the best contributors with better exposure, inside access, and other perks. We have a kind of “sports bar meets the press box” feel, and feature a lot of great content on a wide variety of topics.

When did you launch?

The site launched in beta in September 2007. It’s been pretty amazing to see the response from the fan community. In a few months, our site traffic has more than tripled. In January, we had 400,000 unique visitors and over 2,000 articles published. The official launch was February 19, 2008.

How have you built your community?

In the first few months, we aggressively targeted independent sport bloggers to invite them to joint the community. We knew that Bleacher Report offered them something compelling – a powerful syndication tool giving access to hundreds of thousands of readers. Bloggers can add their URL to their Bleacher Report profile and their blog posts are instantly published for the built-in readership at our site. We’ve also built a strong base through apps and partnerships on Facebook, as well as by reaching out to college newspaper writers and journalism students. And a large part of our growth has been organic. People are finding the great analysis at our site and passing it along.

The great thing about our community is that it’s addictively engaging. We try to do everything we can to put the writers first, since they make the site what it is. The site as a whole is infused with a spirit of competitive camaraderie that really keeps members engaged. Zander Freund, our Community Director, has done a great job of empowering top members to become Community Leaders and take an active role in shaping the Bleacher Report experience.

What types of marketing do you utilize?

We’re currently focused on developing cross-promotion partnerships with various properties to distribute Bleacher Report content around the web. We also have all the standard viral marketing like social media sharing and widgets.

In reality though, our greatest marketing tool is our content. We’re currently turning out close to 100 quality, edited editorials on a daily basis, and that number is growing rapidly. There are few sports media outlets either on the web or in print that could come close to our level of original editorial content, and it’s that content that has been the most means tool for marketing the site.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

Our business model is primarily ad-based, although we are exploring other streams. We primarily sell our own ads with an emphasis on integrated sponsorships and promotions, but we also utilize a variety of ad networks.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

We just announced a Series A funding led by Hillsven Capital, a partnership of Boris Putanec and Bobby Lent, two former co-founders of Ariba, Inc (NASDAQ: ARBA), in addition to angel investors including several long-time Silicon Valley executives as well as College Humor and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick.

Are you looking for more funding?

Our current capitalization arms us with what we need to continue to grow the site and improve the features and user experience, which is what we are wholly focused on right now.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

My favorite thing about the site is the great content from the Bleacher Report writers. I spend a lot of time reading through the articles and I always find something interesting to pass along to my friends. A cool thing we’ve created for the writers is a Play-by-Play activity log that lets them see exactly how people are reacting to their articles. It shows the writer any comments that are posted on their articles, replies to these comments, new edits to their work from others in the community and any “Fans” that have picked them as a favorite writer.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Bleacher Report is built on a custom platform intended to cater directly to sports fans. We built the site in Ruby on Rails because of the rapid development time it allows for, and we have a five-person development team constantly working on improving the site. Throughout our development, we’ve taken pains to be a sports site first with fans in mind, not just an excuse to turn out the same Web 2.0 concepts with a sports twist. We like to say that we’re a Web 2.0 site for sports fans, not just a sports site for Web 2.0 fans.

You were just written up on TechCrunch, how many visitors did they bring to your site for the day?

Not surprisingly (at least to us), the traffic that TechCrunch sent was in the low thousands. Of course, it’s not about the visitors but the caliber of visitors and the brand awareness, and the TC writeup certainly gets high marks in both of those departments.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

I think the trend we’re seeing a lot of categories and not just in sports is a redefinition of the term “expert”. It used to be that those regarded as sports experts either had to have a job at a national network or major magazine or newspaper, or they had to have played or coached at a high level. But technology has helped to level the playing field and help define a new category of expert—the fan who eats, sleeps, and breathes the game and thus knows their teams best. There’s lots of breadth to the term ‘sports expert’ and Bleacher Report is seeking to enable the people who have achieved that status but haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve

STN’s Take:

Dave and his buddies have a great thing going over at the Bleacher Report. Looks like they have some great Silicon Valley connections and a great management team. We really like what they are doing and 400,000 unique visitors in January is a huge number. They have done a great job blending the blog and social network aspect. When it comes to sports social networks, we believe the blog should be the focal point not the person’s individual page. We like that when we are logged into the front page it shows all our stats. It gives a personal feel but you still get the front page news as well.

We do have one suggestion though. For people that want to import their blogs, they should give two options instead of just one. Right now they ask you to paste code on your site and import your full blog. For someone like me I want the readers coming to my website so I would like to see an option to just put in an RSS feed.

The future of the Bleacher Report really intrigues us. Rarely do you see a website like this backed with venture capital. With the fact that they are backed by angel investors, venture capital, and four founders I really have a hard time seeing this website actually paying off for all these people. They won’t make enough money selling banner advertisements and working with ad networks. The only way they can make it is by selling large sponsorships to large brands. We hope they have a ton of top level ad sales experience or they may need to hire someone that does.