Is Bleacher Report the New New Media Hope? (TCTV)

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy writes for PandoDaily, a news site which she founded. She is also an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008) and “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos... → Learn More

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

TechCrunch is off the market. Huffington Post won’t be the first $1 billion independent new media company. So who else is left to give us hope that blogging can be the savior of declining old media?

It might be Bleacher Report. The sports site is coming off a huge 2010 and a banner January: Unique users grew to nearly 20 million per month, and it’s now the fourth largest sports destination according to comScore, not including roll-up fan sites. In December, the company raised a $10.5 million round of funding, and named a new CEO, Brian Grey, former general manager of Yahoo Sports and former general manager of Fox Sports Interactive– two of the only sports properties that still dwarf Bleacher Report.

Because this is such a sleeper success story we invited Grey into the studio to talk about how the business has continued to grow while so many blogs have stagnated, why sports has been such a neglected vertical and as a Raiders fan what he thinks of Donald Rumsfeld’s bizarre declaration that the team was “evil.”

Video below.


Company: Bleacher Report
Launch Date: 2007
Funding: $40.5M

Bleacher Report (B/R), bleacherreport.com, a division of Turner Sports, is a leading publisher of original and entertaining sports content and one of the fastest growing sports media Web sites in the U.S. Bleacher Report was founded in 2007 by four lifelong fans who’d consumed their fill of bland Internet sports content. Since launching in 2008, B/R’s Web site has grown to an audience of more than 11 million monthly unique visitors. The company’s distinguished editorial team leads more than...

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