Sports Blogging Entering the Big Time - With a Price

Content it king. Cash is King Kong.

Conflatulations to the SportsBlogs Nation aka SB Nation, I read today they SB Nation has secured a quote mid seven figures unquote round of venture financing from technology leaders and luminaries such as former AOL executive and current Washington Capitals hockey owner Ted Leonsis and Accel Partners, one of the original backers of Facebook.

With this money I assume SB Nation will market their services to higher end corporate advertisers, online and with that kind of money probably also in the traditional media, magazines and the sides of buses. With that kind of money, mid seven figures means three to seven million dollars, they can afford to upgrade talent at the low end, with more an 150 network affiliate blogs all levels of talent and eyeballs are no doubt represented. I would not be surprised to see in key markets top bloggers cross over as featured contributors to tradmed outlets, newspapers, radio, local TV. Rather than pay someone to generate stuff they can just get paid by SB Nation to contribute pre vetted content. It's the new pay to play.

Not familiar with SB Nation? It is the network of sports blogs conceived by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos fame, like Daily Kos itself all the SB Nation blogs are community sites with front pages and the ability for users to create accounts and post user generated blogs within blogs, the best of which can be posted to the front page. All SB Nation blogs have a similar look and feel, Curly R's best friend Hogs Haven, along with Bleeding Green Nation, Behind the Steel Curtain, Daily Norseman, are all SB Nation blogs, and so on for every NFL team. SB Nation also covers NBA, NHL, MLB, boxing, mixed martial arts, auto racing, college sports, etc etc and so on and so forth.

Regardless of quality, when an SB Nation blog enters your market there is a good chance it will become the top dog. Each member blog has the network support of every other property, meaning they can leverage the main metrics for blog success, and that is links from other blogs and media sites.

Under the current arrangement, SB Nation owns the graphics and site infrastructure, the writing and the internet addresses, while the equity partners (the writers and owners of the sites) share in ad revenue with the network. I have it on good confidence from multiple sources that SB Nation is a great network and does not burden its site owners.

But here is the thing, these guys do not own their own writing. All writing is property of the network. Maybe that does not matter, maybe these guys just want to write and will give up ownership for the perch or for the chance to get paid or earn a quote real gig unquote with a tradmed outlet. Maybe knowing there is ultimately someone else controlling the editorial content is not a problem.

Think about it, our friends Jason La Canfora at the Washington Post and that shit disturber Ryan O'Halloran at the Washington Times do not own their own writing, that I know of. They toil for premiere outlets, publish daily and then move on. They get a salary and their success is determined as much by their ability as it is by their employer and what that employer and content owner deems they are worth.

So the network model, surrendering ownership for a cut is one way to do it, not the way Curly R is doing it, at least not right now. Like 99.9% of the other sports blogs out there, Curly R has no revenue, no ads, no business relationships and no editorial limits.

The development of this blog has been 100% organic, I put it out there and you found me, there has been no marketing and everyone that links to me does it based on the quality of the writing and not on any other factor.

Monetizing this thing was never a goal of Curly R, and now that the number of daily visitors numbers in the hundreds, monetizing is still not a primary goal. I get multiple unsolicited offers a week to run ads on Curly R and I have not engaged any of them. As a side note to any of you out there that are asking, my apologies for failing to respond, I am not ready to engage on advertising and have not put the effort into a form letter response, I owe every one of you a note.

That said, why would I ever surrender ownership of my work? Maybe my mind would change if ESPN offered me a column or NBC asked me to do a regular spot, but neither of those is happening any time soon.

No, the model for success for an independent blog like this one is to negotiate my own ads and rates, to plug into a blog ad network or solicit local advertising, after all despite the nation wide footprint of displaced Redskins fans ultimately the largest audience for Redskins news is here in Washington, I have thought often about running only advertising local to Alexandria and the Washington area, maybe 20 to 40 percent of Curly R traffic is local, trending to 40 to 60 percent over the next two years.

Sports blogging is moving into a new era, putting even more pressure on the traditional media to cope, cooperate or prepare to lose more eyeballs. And as sports blogging, loosely and generally defined as unaffiliated individuals sitting down in front of computers and through the use of low cost technologies placing their writing, opinions and analysis on sporting topics in direct competition with established media outlets and their associated professionals and experts, moves into the mainstream, along come the challenges of the mainstream: content, control, tone, topicality, ownership.

The money is following the demand and everybody's got to serve somebody.


SBNation logo from here.