It’s been fun to watch Bleacher Report grow from some random publishing site for amateur sports writers to a full-blown digital sports network backed by $40+ million in venture capital. Today, with 25 million unique visitors per month, Bleacher Report has become the fourth largest sports media property on the Web.
Over the last year or so, the popular sports network has been doubling down on its team-specific coverage, convinced that this has become the preeminent way that fans follow sports. Since January, the startup’s so-called Team Stream apps have lived on iPhone, Android, and the iPad, offering fans personalized dashboards with headlines, top stories, and tweets from their favorite teams. And today, Bleacher Report is bringing Team Stream to its home page. → Read More
Bleacher Report, the popular site for sports fans now boasting 22 million uniques per month, just released its Team Stream app for the iPad. Similar to Team Stream for iPhone and Android smartphones, the new Team Stream HD app features news and analysis and supports push notifications for breaking news.
This is the first tablet-optimized experience from the company, but it’s not the only one: the company is also pushing out an iPad-optimized HTML5 browsing experience, too. → Read More
Bleacher Report may have spent much of its life quietly climbing the rankings of top sports destinations, but it’s not being bashful or patient anymore.
In a little more than a year, it has hired Brian Grey as its new CEO, a guy who used to run two of its four largest competitors, and it has passed Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports in traffic, beefed up its sales staff, starting hiring a professional editorial team and raised a $10 million round of funding.
Today, it’s announcing another cash infusion: A $22 million growth round from Oak Investment Partners, with participation from existing investors Crosslink Capital and Hillsven Capital. → Read More
It’s been well documented that there aren’t as many women working in Silicon Valley and technology companies as we’d all like. Moving the conversation beyond raising awareness about this thing we’re all aware of, Kleiner Perkins’ partner Aileen Lee recently wrote a smart guest post for us arguing the business case for why Valley companies and VCs should be scouting more women. Namely, because they rule social media demographics.
That’s obviously most pronounced at startups designed explicitly for women, like PopSugar which boasts about 90% female employees. It has a pink Twitter feed filled with celebrity names. It’s likely too girly for a lot of girls. (Ahem, me.)
Bleacher Report, on the other hand, is staffed by a combo of jocks and geeks. Hello, day-old pizza and video games. Its offices boast 300-LCD TVs showing sports at all hours of the day. You can’t get much more testosterone-filled. → Read More
Bleacher Report– one of the few new entrants in the sports content category to get significant traction against the portal giants– is continuing to build out its management team, announcing an important new hire today. Rich Calacci joins the company as chief revenue officer. Calacci was most recently senior vice president at CBS Interactive in charge of the sports vertical– one of the big incumbents Bleacher Report passed in traffic last year.
A sharp-talking, uber-connected, always-be-closing sales guru is exactly what Bleacher Report needs at this point. It has done the brutal work of building a content site to critical mass– publishing some 600 pieces of content a day, sending newsletters to more than one million daily subscribers and boasting monthly uniques just shy of 20 million. By mid-May the site was showing its longest ever time-on-site and its lowest ever bounce rate. Quantcast has called it one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, and it has nearly doubled its audience year-over-year, says CEO Brian Grey. → Read More
A while ago I wrote about how neglected the sports vertical was online, given the largest properties are mostly the same portals or online versions of old media sites that were launched in the late 1990s. It turns out another macho-content vertical is even more neglected– cars.
Quietly, a company called HighGear Media is building a pretty impressive business. It’s raised $12 million from top consumer Internet investors Accel and Greylock and the management team is riddled with ex-Yahoos. Similar to Bleacher Report‘s approach with sports, HighGear Media operates 100 different sites, staffed by more than 350 staff and freelance writers from around the world. → Read More
Bleacher Report is going to announce a new $10.5 million round of venture capital this morning and a lot of people reading this will probably say, “Bleacher-who?”
Somehow Bleacher Report has pulled off two things you’re not supposed to be able to pull off in Silicon Valley’s Web scene. The first is keeping a low-profile while growing steadily in users and revenues. The second is building a serious sports challenger to the big portals and legacy news companies. Finally. → Read More
Bleacher Report, a community publishing site for amateur sports writers, has raised $3.5 million in Series B funding from Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford, and SoftTech VC. Other participants in the round include Jacob Lodwick, founder of College Humor and Vimeo.
The extra cash should help the San Francisco-based company retain its 13 employees during a period of flattening online ad expenditures and layoffs in the startup community left and right. Bleacher Report is in a critical growth period having launched formally just this past February. Traffic has grown from 500,000 to over 2 million unique visitors in the last eight months, according to internal metrics. Co-founder David Finocchio says they’ve attracted about 7,500 writers to date, who collectively publish over 400 articles per day. → Read More
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