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.

Similar to its Team Stream apps, the new section of its homepage offers viewers realtime news on teams and topics from Bleacher Report’s bullpen of unpaid bloggers and professional sportswriters, as well as curated popular news from top sports destinations.

Team Stream allows fans to customize the homepage with content from as many of their favorite teams as they choose, and log in to Facebook to save their team settings so that the news appears every time a user visits the site — but login isn’t required to access team stream. And as an example of Bleacher Report’s somewhat unique approach to sports news, your personalized Team Stream is curated by the site’s editors, rather than by RSS aggregation. It’s all hand-picked.

It’s also interesting to see the site taking a mobile experience and applying it to the desktop in a kind of reverse-publishing initiative. If it works on mobile, why not bring it to the Web?

Bleacher Report’s new homepage will also include a social module that features trending topics on social media networks, enabling fans to quickly share content with their friends, along with beefing up its “Lineup” section, which will now feature national sports stories and video clips to be periodically updated over the course of the day.

The move today becomes yet another example of how publishers are increasingly looking to focus on bringing personalized content to their readers as a way to encourage clicks, repeat visits, and engagement. Bleacher Report may be in the minority when it comes to sports media offering customized content, but this is sure to be just the beginning — after all, the sports team from my area is without a doubt superior to the sports team from your area — and I want to be able to prove that, across platforms.

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.

Now when iPad users visit www.BleacherReport.com, they’ll be directed to a tablet-friendly version of the website with enhanced navigation, full-screen photo viewing and special transition effects in between stories. The site will also support sharing and commenting on its editorial pieces.

Meanwhile, the Team Stream HD app offers a personalized dashboard on the homescreen, with the headlines, top stories and tweets from the teams and topics you’ve deemed your favorites. As on mobile, you’re able to select which teams, athletes and sportswriters you want to follow, including athletes from the NFL, College Football, MLB, NBA, NHL, College Basketball, Soccer, Tennis, Golf, MMA, Boxing, WWE and NASCAR. The new app is nicely laid out, too, with a bit of extra space in between the stories and an easy-to-use UI (user interface).

BleacherReport, which just raised another $22 million this past summer, now includes an editorial team of more than 1,000 featured columnists and 6,000 contributors. Over 1.5 million users subscribe to its personalized email newsletters. And its content is now syndicated to national and regional publishers including USA Today, L.A. Times, Philly.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and Seattle PI.

To grab the new BleacherReport iPad app, head to iTunes here.

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. Oak general partner Fred Harman– an early backer and board member of Federated Media, Huffington Post and Demand Media– will join the board. Considering the latter are two of the only new media companies to have significant exits, that’s a weighty board addition. (Even if you believe one or the other is the media equivalent of the anti-Christ. I should note in some quarters of the sports reporting world, Bleacher Report is equally as polarizing.)

“Sports is a big opportunity and no one has gotten it right yet,” Harman says. “People are clearly as passionate and opinionated as they are in politics, and they are less inhibited to express their opinions. I’d argue Bleacher Report has done a far better job of embracing the capabilities of the online medium than the big sports name brands have.”

Bleacher Report wasn’t planning on raising more money for another six months, but Grey says the company was moving quicker than expected on key traffic and business milestones. Year-over-year page views are up 150%, time on site is up 50% and unique visits are up 75%. He wouldn’t give much detail on revenues, but says in the spring they were already way ahead of plan. Given how robustly the money and valuations are flowing in the Valley, there seemed little reason to wait. “We started to believe we could really build this into a billion dollar company, and we wanted to get aggressive,” Grey says.

The entire sum will go towards building the company, not cashing out early investors. Some of it will be earmarked for expanding the salesforce, reinvesting in the underlying technology of the platform, and increasingly hiring unpaid contributors who bubble up through the system and might otherwise have left for another paid sports reporting job.

But Bleacher Report is also going to look at new opportunities. It recently built a video studio and has been getting more serious about mobile apps. In addition, the company is going to look into expanding into new verticals beyond sports, new products like games or potentially getting more serious about international markets.

The latter seems like the no brainer of the three to me. One thing that transcends cultures, geography and languages is a passion for sports and an endless desire to analyze and second guess teams and managers. Unlike other types of news, it’s inherently subjective: Any seasoned fan can have just as solid of a take on a team as a sports writer or a scout. The themes that make Bleacher Report 7,000 contributors strong in the US, are just as strong among Brazilian soccer devotees and Indian Cricket fanatics. And as populations get more globally spread, sports also have a power to unite a diaspora. Keeping in touch with your home team is almost as comforting as eating your mom’s cooking.

To Harman the most important thing is extending Bleacher Report’s embrace of the real time Web via social media and mobile. Sporting events are one of the only categories in the media world where revenues haven’t been decimated by TV time-shifting, because watching a game as it happens is still such a big part of the experience. “This game will be won or lost by the publisher who can play best to that,” Harman says. “That’s the real bet I’m making with this company.”

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.

Guess who just happened to relocate its headquarters across the street from Sugar, Inc.?

So the inevitable was proposed yesterday: A good old fashioned junior high dance. Ok, that’s my phrase for it. They’re calling it a “mixer.” Essentially the two startups are going on a date. It was suggested and accepted via Twitter, and Eventbrite offered to coordinate the details. We understand dates and themes are in discussion now.

I used to talk to young entrepreneurs who said one of the reasons they relocated to Silicon Valley from LA or New York was because there were no women here to “distract” them. Along with our hopes of greater startup gender equality, it seems that’s destined to change.

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.

According to comScore, Bleacher Report is now the fifth largest single-site sports destination on the Web, but it hasn’t yet had the sales team in place to compete toe-to-toe with the portal giants. Calacci already saw the impact Bleacher Report was making in the market– a big reason he decided to join the company.

Expect the big portals to start making some serious acquisition attempts in this category soon, as they start to realize they can’t keep phoning it in content-wise and count on their home page traffic to keep them on top. That is if they haven’t been making those offers already. Between Bleacher Report and Accel and Khosla Ventures funded SB Nation, this vertical is finally getting interesting.

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.

In January, the network of sites had four million unique visitors– growth of 36% year-over-year. That makes it one of the larger auto content sites, and sub-sites concentrating on green cars, electric cars and family cars are surging between 50% and 110% year-over-year.

CEO Matt Heist stopped by the studio to talk about why this vertical is still so wide open and how auto blogs are different than other content sites.

Video below.

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.

Bleacher Report claims it has 17 million uniques (roughly 70% more than TechCrunch, for perspective) and is ranked by comScore as the fifth largest sports site, after Yahoo, ESPN, Fox Sports, AOL Fanhouse. Quiet Bleacher Report recently passed Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports. It’s the first pure startup to come close since the days when the Web was born. (Some players, like Fantasy Sports Ventures, dispute this because they operate networks of many independent sites, that added together, may rank higher. I am referring to a single destination site, not a collection of sites under one brand or a blog network. You can split hairs, but what matters is how advertisers view it, and advertisers are purchasing from Bleacher Report as if it is one site.)

Let’s face it, a big reason the portals are still so relevant is they lead in mass-appeal content verticals like finance, entertainment and sports. The reliance on that last category is going to change if Bleacher Report keeps blocking-and-tackling (sorry). With the number one player, Yahoo, in damage-control, it’s not exactly investing in the product. (That’s right! More bad news for Yahoo!)

In the last year, Bleacher Report has started getting big sports six-figure ad buys on par with the other big players, by mainstream advertisers like Gilette and Axe. The biggest challenge now is getting in more of those deals and taking down AOL Fanhouse first, and the rest of the top four later. “This company is growing astronomically and it’s just an execution play right now,” says Eric Chin, general partner at Crosslink Capital which lead the round.

That’s a big reason the founders aggressively recruited Brian Grey to be their CEO in July. He was previously the head of Fox Sports Interactive and the first GM of Yahoo! Sports before that. He knows the secrets of two of the top four. Bleacher Report also recently added Associated Content CEO Patrick Keane to its board of directors.

So how has Bleacher Report pulled this kind of growth off when almost no other sports-related startup has? Tons and tons of content for nearly any sports team anyone could care about. They produce more than 500 pieces of content a day, and have more than 1 million aggregate subscribers to their online newsletters tracking some 300 teams. Bleacher Report is different than a portal like Yahoo that aggregates and creates content, fan sites that parrot the message ownership or the league wants fans to hear or ESPN that focuses heavily on big market teams. It’s also different from younger companies that act like blog networks or the Digg-like Yardbarker.

Bleacher Report has 3,000 contributors and 700 featured contributors. Most are everyday sports fans who want a megaphone and people to argue with, but have day jobs and don’t have the time to build a large enough blog to get an audience on their own. Bleacher Report gives them some light editing tips, stats and analysis to provide story ideas and research, and of course distribution. In exchange these writers aren’t running their own blogs, they are writing on Bleacher Report’s blog platform and that gives Bleacher Report one big site to sell — rather than a network of sites– and total flexibility to sell creative the way they want, not in a set designated banner or box.

This round was lead by Crosslink and comes on top of $7.3 million from angels and friends and family and a firm called Hillsvn Ventures. The terms of this deal weren’t disclosed, but we’ve heard that the founders took some money off the table. That’s not a surprise. These three friends started this company back in 2008, paying themselves founders salaries and resisting temptations to sell or take money at an earlier stage. They’ve earned it in a tough category.

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.

Bleacher Report has begun syndicating its amateur content to websites traditionally focused on professional writing, such as CBS Sports and Fox Sports. The screenshot to the left, for example, shows how CBS Sports compliments its own content with that from Bleacher Report. This is similar to the way TechCrunch gets syndicated to the technology section of The Washington Post.

Bleacher Report is also on Meebo’s list of launch partners for Community IM.

SB Nation, a blog network for sports writers, raised a “mid-seven-figure sum of venture capital” yesterday. However, their aggregation model is different from that of Bleacher Report, which is a publishing platform in and of itself.

We called Yardbarker a particularly good, sports-focused Digg clone back when it launched in August 2006. Since then the site has expanded significantly, recruiting athletes as featured writers, kicking off an ad network for sports blogs, and raising a seed round of financing.

Now the company has announced that it has raised $6M in it’s second round. Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round and was joined by returning investors Russ Siegelman, Ronnie Lott, Jarl Mohn, Labrador Ventures, and Baseline Ventures. The size of the first round was not disclosed.

Users can contribute to the main Yardbarker site by submitting and voting on articles, photos, and videos related to sports found across the web. The site has also rounded up 290 sports blogs into its so-called Yardbarker Network (YBN). In exchange for links from the centralized Yardbarker site, these blogs run ad units and other widgets that direct readers back to Yardbarker.

Check out Bleacher Report for another site attempting to build a grassroots community around sports.