Website:  Yardbarker

Interview With:  Pete Vlastelica, CEO

What is the background of the founders of Yardbarker?

There are 4 of us. The three early founders were myself and two brothers, Jack and Jeff, Kloster. Jack and I met while getting our MBAs at UC Berkeley. Before Berkeley I worked at Disney doing large international content deals, and also at a boutique interactive marketing agency in New York. At Berkeley we wanted to develop a business plan that moved the ball forward in a segment of digital media and we thought sports medias a category was ripe for innovation. We hooked up with our fourth co-founder, Mark Johns, who was the first engineer at Ofoto, which became Kodak Gallery.

Are you Venture backed?

Yes. For the first twelve months we operated on a round of funds raised from friends and family. Then about a year ago we took money from a group of angel investors. This March, we raised capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetsen.

Are you looking at expanding your funding?

Not sure

How many unique visitors are you getting a month?

5 million monthly uniques across the Yardbarker Network.

Is Fox Sports your only content deal? How does it work?

FoxSports.com syndicates articles and videos from the Yardbarker Network. Every publisher in our network has the opportunity to opt-in to this program and take advantage of the extra distribution. The articles that Fox publishes include links back to both Yardbarker and the original article on the publisher’s blog.

How does the Yardbarker Ad Network work?

The publishers in our network assign us the responsibility of representing their sites to brand advertisers. We offer advertisers a very efficient way to reach the large collective audience that hangs out on all the sites in our network. We split the revenue with our publishers and everybody wins.

Was the Yardbaker Ad Network apart of your original business plan?

No, actually it wasn’t. As with most startups, our business model was part of an evolution. . Our site actually started out as something like a “Digg for Sports.” We found that most of the people using it were sports bloggers who were promoting their sites, and it turned out some of the bloggers in this group were looking for a better way to make money from their sites. That was the beginning of the Yardbarker Network.

What is your favorite part about running Yardbarker?

Building the team. We have grown from 5 employees to 20 employees over the past year, and every individual at the company is outstanding. We have been able to build our team while not losing the passion that was there when we started. We’re proud of that.

How have you had so much success with Athlete Bloggers?

We learned that athletes were looking for something like this. There is a new generation of athletes that don’t want to just be quoted in a newspaper article – they want to be able to tell their story on their own terms and connect with fans in an authentic way. We always stress the importance of staying dedicated to their blogs. We tell them that it’s worse to start a blog and then quit than to never blog at all.

Was Greg Oden your first big athlete blogger?

You could say that. John Lackey was our first professional athlete blogger and Chris Henry (the running back for the Titans) was our very first athlete blogger leading up to last year’s NFL Draft.

How are the athletes paid?

We share advertising revenue with our athlete bloggers.

Have advertisers sponsored individual athlete blogs?

Yes, quite a few. Playstation sponsored Carmello Anthony’s blog; 2k Sports sponsored Greg Oden’s Blog, and Modells, a sporting goods company in Boston, sponsored Rajon Rondo’s blog, among others.

What type of technology do you use?

Yardbarker is custom built using Ruby on Rails

Any Bold Predictions for the future of sports and technology?

The definition of a Social Network is going to change – it’s no longer about being on one site where everyone else has to come visit you to hang out. Social functionality will start to spread across the web via a patchwork of sites with like-minded audiences. Widgets will get better. No matter where you are on the web you will feel like you’re in the social environment that you choose to be in. If I want to talk sports, I should be able to do that with my friends whether I’m on ESPN, Facebook, Yardbarker, or some small blog. The web itself is the ultimate social network.

(We had the pleasure of doing this interview over the phone with Pete and we thoroughly enjoyed it.  He seemed to understand his market extremely well and as long as Yardbarker can keep bringing in the advertisers we see them being dominant force in the sports space online)