Bleacher Report’s sports fan journalism gets $3.5M boost
Bleacher Report, a site for “fan-journalism” about professional sports, has raised $3.5 million in a second round of funding.
I’m not a huge sports guy, but I was pretty impressed by the site when it launched in February. At the time, co-founder Dave Nemetz argued Bleacher Report was very different from the existing discussion forums or promotional blogs for teams and players. The site’s design is quite polished, and the top articles, at least, live up to the “fan journalism” description. Bleacher Report uses an algorithm incorporating a writer’s ratings, an article’s timeliness and the hits generated to determine which pieces get featured prominently.
Looks like some professional sports sites were impressed, too — both Fox Sports and CBS Sports websites feature links to Bleacher Report stories. (The CBS deal was just announced today; as an example, you can see Bleacher Report headlines in a widget on the SportsLine NFL page.)
The site received more than 2 million unique visitors in October, about four times the audience at launch. The San Francisco company will probably have a harder time attracting ad dollars as the economy stumbles, but there’s an opportunity too, Nemetz said — as traditional news organizations cut back, there will be more room for fan journalism to step in and fill the gap.
The funding comes from Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford and SoftTech VC, with additional participation from College Humor founder Jakob Ludwick. Bleacher Report announced a first round in the “single-digit millions” earlier this year.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.