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.
Congrats, guys!!
I add my blog posts to that site. Will this $$ allow them to share their ad revenue with people who add content to the site?
recession or no recession sports based companies always thrive! Nice job guys!
How come you didn’t blog on this before?
Great news for this good company.
Being a HUGE sports fan and part time sports blogger, this is big news. I am glad that money continues to go into sports articles. I cannot live without them, thats for sure!
Jesse W.
http://www.subprimeblogger.com
Sloppy / misleading re: startup layoffs. You’re linking to a very broad and expansive list of layoffs including companies like Dell and Yahoo but doing so in the context of a reference to startup layoffs. C’mon.. don’t you guys have an editor — or did they get … laid off?
This site is awesome. It’s even led to jobs at sports magazines and sports sites for some of their writers (maybe that’s not a good thing?).
Good to see sports sites continue to thrive! Bleacherreport has done some good things, but still has a long way to go…. Wait until they see what ESPN is going to drop on their face in less than 6 months.
Hopefully they don’t drop Chris Berman and Tom Jackson on Bleacher Report’s face. That’s a lot of weight on a face.
Congrats guys
This is just crazy. What are they going to do with the money apart from hire more exployees. This type of site has to compete with the big boys, and there is no way this amount is actually going to get them anywhere!
Steven Finch
http://crenk.com