As someone who barely follows professional sports, it always amazes me how knowledgeable and opinionated about sports that ordinary people can be. Bleacher Report is a publishing platform formally launching this week that wants to give a voice and audience to those people who seem to always have an opinion about the current draft, drug scandal, preseason or playoffs.
Bleacher Report is essentially a centralized blogging platform for sports where anyone can sign up and begin writing stories about college and professional sports. It’s not an aggregation service that crawls the web for amateur sports news and editorial, but writers who already run their own blogs can manually choose to feed their stories into Bleacher Report in addition to writing them on-site.
While sports writers could simply sign up for accounts at WordPress or Blogger, they’d do better to publish at Bleacher Report for several reasons. The first and most compelling reason is a better audience. The site attracts sports fans and surfaces the best content to the homepage after assessing several factors such as writer rankings, editor ratings, community ratings, and hits. Readers who like your stuff can become your “fan” and track your work alongside others’ on a special “lineup” page. And articles published to Bleacher Report are categorized into sections like “New York Giants” and “MLB” so your content is found by those interested in just those topics.
Perhaps the most innovative thing about Bleacher Report is its built-in community editing system. Writers who published to Bleacher Report actually give an extensive amount of control over their articles to other members. The community serves as a collective editor that works not only to correct grammatical and spelling errors but to improve the prose more generally. Nothing is strictly out of bounds, including article headlines, but the original writers do have the power to revert changes made by the community. According to the site’s founders, this group editing system has been a very popular feature during the beta period.
Like many sites we see these days, Bleacher Report also integrates typical social networking features. Members have full-blown profiles that list their recent articles alongside bios, fans, and recent activity. And news feeds called “play-by-plays” give you a sense of the activity occurring around the site.
Bleacher Report recently secured Series A funding from Hillsven Capital, Transcoast Capital, and Jakob Lodwick (the founder of Vimeo), among others. I suspect the site will do quite well for itself given the passion of many sports fans and the quality of potential acquirers. Bleacher Report writers should do well for themselves too; we’re told that several have already used the site to launch professional writing careers.
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I am one of those people that love to write about sports even though I don’t know much about them LOL.
I already had this one bookmarked. It’s one of my first stops every morning.
not a bad idea..if they can draw enough traffic to the site it could become pretty useful. they should add some type of forum ala rivals.com. Rivals is the best overall sports community out there…they did a great job building it from the ground up (and combining all of the different communities out there)
I love this idea. I have a few friends that are really into sports writing on blogs and this could really give them a great outlet. I love the web communities that are involved in writing.
So basically..its blogspot + mediawiki?
I had a short look on that. Really interesting! Btw. a video uploading function will attract probably many more user.
Josh -
Not quite. The benefit to the writer over that a blogspot/mediawiki combo is that Bleacher Report collects and organizes similarly themed sports content, providing access to much larger audiences than any blogging platform does. A first time writer can reach an audience of thousands, whereas a blogger on blogspot would be lucky to get a few friends to read their stuff. To the reader, the upside is a centralized and ordered network of great sports content with the best stuff at the top, so they don’t have to search endlessly to find what they’re looking for.
Kaanthan -
Thanks for the feedback. We’ll be adding a video element to the site soon.
Wow! a place to hear the latest news from sports fans. I intend to stop by often and contribute my views on how injury prevention, energy recovery, and mental toughness. any questions about body aches and pain feel free to reach out….
Another UGC site that doesn’t pay the generators. Interesting.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand why people contribute their labors to someone else’s profit with nothing in return. Are there really that many ego driven folks who want to be top on a list?
Yes, I understand you can cross post articles from your sports blog, but still.
The best are the terms of service:
“By posting any User Content, you expressly grant, and you represent and warrant that you have a right to grant, to Bleacher Report a royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, ***perpetual, irrevocable,**** non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, list information regarding, edit, translate, distribute, transmit, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all such User Content and your name, voice, and/or likeness as contained in your User Content, in whole or in part, and in any form, media or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed for use in connection with the Service. ”
God love them.
Perpetual and irrevocable. I loved the part about sublicensable, too.
Sounds a lot like Yardbarker (http://www.yardbarker.com)
Mark … you said:
“Bleacher Report writers should do well for themselves too; we’re told that several have already used the site to launch professional writing careers.”
Here is the info for other readers wanting to know the details:
http://blog.bleacherreport.com/?p=53
I love this website. BR rules.
Check out the Humor Section. They’ve usually got some pretty funny pieces in there.
Nathan … Yardbarker offers a chance at compensation for their contributors through ad sales.
http://yardbarker.com/tools/network_faq
Interesting, glad to see movement in the sports space.
Real sports conversation flows after 2+ beers…figure out a way to get beer flowing directly at the computer screen and you’re golden.
Ohh. OUCH just saw the classmates.com add on the screenshot on techcrunch…do not want to see that.
Yardbarker was acquired weren’t they?
Patrick…not sure I’m seeing eye to eye with you.
What’s more important here? That there’s an opportunity for marginal (at best) compensation for a select few, or that there’s a real platform where the masses of unrecognized sports experts can find legitimacy and make a name for themselves?
With Bleacher Report’s open platform, I can envision a real community where all teams have regular coverage. If you’re a 49ers fan, a Giants fan, a Warriors fan, a Sharks fan and a Stanford basketball fan, how often can you go to Espn.com or Sports Illustrated and read opinionated content about your favorite teams?
Not very often, right? Instead, you get game recaps and AP coverage.
Sports is the perfect vertical for “citizen journalism.” Think of how many people out there know as much or more about their favorite sports teams than their own jobs. They should have a chance to share their knowledge and insights and have their voice heard by more than just a select few.
Also, Yardbarker is first and foremost a platform for athlete bloggers. They don’t focus on helping amateur sports writers gain credibility in the same way that Bleacher Report does.
Patrick, did you just get paid by TechCrunch for your comments? Part of the enjoyment, time spent, and page views generated by TC are (insightful) comments such as yours. People add to someone else’s bottom line with UGC because they have something to share.
Dave … good points, especially concerning the possible community development.
I am not advocating YB over BR; I simply pointed out YB offers an opportunity for compensation.
Let’s not delude ourselves. BR doesn’t exist to help citizen journalists break into the biz, right? They exist to make money in any way they can, and the “benefits” they offer writers at this time are low cost, easy to produce items. Seriously, I am surprised they didn’t offer free @br email addresses as part of deal.
scratchiti … While I did not get paid for the comments, I am open to offers.
I don’t think you can compare comments with articles, right? It takes me two seconds to talk out of my rear in the comments. An article is at least ten minutes of talking out of my rear. That’s a lot of rear talking without compensation.
Nice layout, great concept… anyone know what technology/platform they used to create it? I’m guessing a lot of custom coding, but wondering what CMS or other software they used as a base (if any).
The site is based on a custom CMS built in Ruby on Rails.
There’s a site based in Israel focused on European sports that has been at this game for a year-and-a-half. I did a little work for them in the beginning, but not for a long time (they thought my American background wasn’t suited to editing content about soccer, i.e. football world-style, cricket, rugby and Formula 1 car racing. Anyway, no bitterness - really - but the last I checked, the site was doing well. Many - if not all of the features of Bleacher Report. It’s called Sportingo.com
Re: Sportingo, their concept shares many themes with Bleacher Report, but their execution is very different. Bleacher Report puts a lot more focus on the power of the community, especially with regard to the article editing process. Sportingo appears to be a closed-loop operation from the looks of it. It will be interesting to see how these differences impact content scalability.
Alan, you are also right that the difference in the sports being covered should lead to very little user overlap. Nobody blames you for your lack of Cricket passion!
Consulted for a digitalsports without getting to deep into it and getting in trouble the CMS those guys built, it seriously trumps anything I’ve ever seen as far as advanced multi-tier content distribution and permission-ing.
http://www.digitalsports.com , check it out the national site is a little lame but when you dig into the communities it is a treasure trove of highschool content.
Obviously this post is professional sports related but it just got me thinking about their system and how they don’t ever get mentioned.
Good guys running a great site. Congrats to all involved!
A few points to mention here:
1. BR looks pretty solid. I’m fairly impressed and will certainly give it a shot. For a similar site visit MVN (Most Valuable Network) at http://www.mvn.com. At MVN, writers get a % of ad revenue on their own blogs and the end goal is to pay contributors (and yes, I do write there).
2. Yardbarker (http://www.yardbarker.com) is a much different type of property and the only comparison is that they are both related to sports. Yardbarker is more akin to Digg with an editorially maintained front page, a proprietary athlete blog network, a fledgling video property, and an aggregated sports blog ad network. (also see Ballhype at http://www.ballhype.com)
For Aussie fans and amateur sports writers, there’s The Roar (www.theroar.com.au).
To add to Dave’s comment below, we find there are hundreds of great sports bloggers with obscure blogger accounts who don’t get the traffic or comments their writing deserves. This is the importance of providing a platform like Bleacher - to bring together the passionate sports fans who know their sports so well, they’re no longer prepared to simply ‘consume’ content.
Sports is, after all, all about the roar of the crowd.
For those who are interested, check out http://www.sportstwo.com for something similar but more sports forum / news related.
How about Fantasy Sports Matrix? (www.fantasysportsmatrix.com)? I seem similarities in terms of the mission/vision but different execution. More focus on the fans’ personality and identity, more sports, more tools (blogs, videos, polls, article submissions).
I’m down with BR’s take on it. That dude Dave pointed it out well. Fans can’t goto the big time sports sites and talk about their team. Personally I think the team’s official forum is the best place to write something but BR is cool too. Only thing is I wouldn’t want to write something about my team and then get ragged on by the community just because they’re fans of another team. As a Raiders fan I’ll stick to the team forums but I appreciate what BR is doing.
I have a contest or sports writing that’s why i want to have a idea about this
journal…….
what can i do about my problem??????????????
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