Posted in The Soapbox
8 comments
11/9 2010

The Big Leagues: Sports Blogging as Mainstream Media Business

Posted by Will Carroll.

In 1946, Peter Drucker invented the concept of the “company man” within his landmark book The Concept of the Corporation. His call to decentralize – or as he called it, de-federalize – and to give employees more power was seen as anathema by Alfred Sloan, the all-powerful CEO of General Motors. GM was then the most powerful company in the world, challenged only by Hughes Aircraft or perhaps the U.S. government itself. There were no giant banks. The brokerages on Wall Street were still a specialty industry. Japanese and German auto companies were still in rubble for the most part. Sure, there might have been a few more auto makers than just Ford and Chrysler, but names like Studebaker and Hudson weren’t long for the new post-war world.

By 2009, GM was bankrupt and split up. Pontiac and Oldsmobile were gone, consigned to history like Studebaker and the Edsel. While things seem to be turning around, the cyclical problems of manufacturing continue to make GM a company that may end up in that same dustbin, alongside carburetors, vinyl records, and newspapers. Yes, newspapers.

As the daily newspaper has died its slow, screaming death, cut off at the knees and the wallet by digital alternatives, it should seem that as the auto industry once went, there should be the same sort of shift. People didn’t stop buying cars; they stopped buying crappy American gas-guzzlers. People didn’t stop reading the news either; they just shifted from Walter Cronkite to Matt Drudge. The rapid disintermediation made possible by the internet empowered a new wave of writers, people that once held court on corner bars or talk radio and allowed them the same kind of voice. From about 2002 until now, the shift has been rapid, seismic, and continual. Websites and blogs have beaten newspapers for the most part. The gatekeepers were pushed aside, especially as Twitter allowed the athletes and newsmakers to cut out yet another step in the process of getting information from point A to brain B.

What was left behind was money, pure and simple. Newspaper companies worked for years because they had local monopolies that allowed them to consolidate enough money into coverage, putting out teams of writers that were paid for in part by subscriptions and in part by advertisers. The shift to the internet mostly cut out the subscription model. Some larger organizations played with paywalls – and News Corporation is once again doing so on a larger scale – but it was the digital ads pushed by Google that were the fuel.

But find me a blogger and I’ll show you someone who’s likely not getting the same money as someone at a newspaper, even the shells of newspapers that we have today in most markets. Bloggers have every opportunity to become respected and widely read, but few have the chance to put together a package of monetization that would allow them to do this as more than a hobby. Fewer still – in fact, almost none – will be the next Bill Simmons, signing the million dollar deal. Even that wouldn’t be possible if the large organizations that bloggers symbiotically compete with didn’t occasionally reach down and snap someone up.

Still, there’s not many of those. ESPN has brought on several, including Simmons, the proto-blogger and modern fan. John Hollinger and Henry Abbot come to mind, as basketball has shown itself as a bit more forward thinking at the network. For other sports, they’ve raided the remains of the newspaper industry. Will Leitch has made his way from Deadspin to the more well-respected ranks as a sort of modern George Plimpton, showing the way for several others to write books and magazine articles. Again, Simmons remains the ne plus ultra of the bunch, enough so to make me wonder if anyone else can approach Simmons on any front.

Among the rest, we have … well, hope. Several blogger networks have popped up. Jim Bankoff of SportsBlog Nation calls himself a “superman, trying to save sportswriting” with his endeavor, a collection of community-focused multi-sport sites. For every solid writer that SBN has grown or given opportunities to, they have to encounter the sewer-smelling depths of comment sections.  While Bankoff got very angry when I questioned the amount of money that trickled from the ad sales to the writers, he didn’t seem to mind much when one of his sites took to calling me every name in the book. For the record, in a conversation with Bankoff that started off with him asking me whether I was a “birther“, he also did give me enough facts and figures to say that I was wrong in my assessment of the percentage that got to writers, but not for the reasons you’d expect.

Another network, Yardbarker, has recently sold to Fox. Their CEO, Pete Vlastelica, told me in a Twitter conversation that their revenue was split out by page views. Some writers I spoke with from that network agreed, but said that the network’s push to have big name athletes like Donovan McNabb on the network sucked up huge numbers in comparison to their blogs. That’s no surprise, but then again, many of the blogs that Yardbarker was able to start with athletes have, like many blogs, been left orphaned.

ESPN’s stab at this nascent market, Sweet Spot, hasn’t done much for the chances of hitting the big time either. Several members of the network told me that they were not paid and did not share in advertising revenue. All members were happy with the amount of traffic that was driven to them by the arrangement, which reminds us that money isn’t why everyone is in it. Some are happy to have the outlet, to get the respect or lead the discussion. That’s fine, but for an element of the population – myself included – this is our job.

I checked around the Press Coverage water cooler and found that for the most part, no one blogged for a living. Some had found employment due to their blogs and Jamie Mottram has graduated from editing sports blogs to running Yahoo’s blog operation. But here and elsewhere, there are very few people that have made it to “the big leagues” – doing this for a living. Two counter examples live in New York – Matthew Cerrone and Joe Sheehan. Cerrone turned his blog on the Mets into his full-time job, latching on with Mets’ broadcast network SNY to provide content and to help with credentialing. Sheehan, one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus, left after the 2009 season and started his own newsletter mid-way  through the 2010 season. His hope is that subscription revenue for his admittedly niche, high-quality product will be enough to pay his Manhattan rent.

Looking around the big leagues – the ESPNs, the SIs, the Fox Sports networks, and so on – there seems little opportunity for a call up to the big leagues or at least a spot where the pay matches the work. Bloggers continue to try and find some model that will allow them to monetize their passion, while Facebook and Twitter continue to undermine those very efforts. Bloggers simply don’t have the ability, for the most part, to gain their own advertising revenue without massive scale. Up to viewership of about a million unique visitors – which is above what some cable shows are getting, for comparison – blogs are utterly invisible. It’s easy to get those kind of numbers with pictures of athlete dong (4.6 million views) than it is smart media commentary (26,000 views, even on the same blog after the big story.)

While there may be no “Next Simmons”, there’s likely to be some upward mobility as models coalesce. Not everyone in the blog world wants to be paid and there’s certainly room for hobbyists, but those very people make it more difficult for those trying to do it as a job, to expand the time they can put into their writing to increase the quality or at least the quantity. Whether it’s collectives like SBN or Yardbarker, subscription models like Sheehan’s newsletter, or some future hope like micropayments, mobile applications, or even an acquisition, bloggers are left sweeping up the new media crumbs while the old media dollars continue to stay in much the same places.

(Editor’s note: This post was sent in before the announcement of SB Nation’s new VC windfall. It surely doesn’t change Will’s opinion, but it should be noted in case this sounded like a reaction to that. Also, I’m planning my own response to this, but feel free to leave yours in the comments.)

(Also, we have a water cooler????)

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Posted on November 9, 2010 at 10:30AM

 

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  1. Kyle Scott
    11/9 2010

    Some good points- although I’m not sure anything under a million page views is invisible. Certainly not from an impact standpoint. A number of blogs that receive a lot less than that, mine included, have broken fringe stories that found there way into mainstream media. That doesn’t directly translate into revenue, but it certainly doesn’t make them invisible.

    And I’m not so sure you need a million page views to make real revenue from a blog. Maybe on a large scale, with nationally targeted blogs, where you would have to deal with large advertisers that couldn’t care less about hearing a sales pitch from a relatively small outlet. However, in very defined niches and locals markets, their are many more opportunities. It will be hard to get a large company to listen to a pitch for a $3k ad buy, but you can certainly get a local-medium sized company to listen to a $3k pitch that can help them reach 100k readers a month in their target market. Rinse and repeat that a couple of times and boom, you have a salary.

  2. Press Coverage – DL471: Will Carroll On Blogging For Business, Fire(d) Joe Morgan & NFL Concussions
    11/9 2010

    [...] Will Carroll and I talk about his post from earlier today, including the notion of going from being a full-time online writer to, well, looking for work. We find an interesting parallel to that of Joe Morgan (a lot more on his departure from ESPN too) in that there are only so many jobs out there for people. If you lose the one you have, and all the others are full, how do you get one? [...]

  3. On the DL with Dan Levy » Blog Archive » DL471: Will Carroll On Blogging For Business, Fire(d) Joe Morgan & NFL Concussions
    11/9 2010

    [...] Will Carroll and I talk about his post from earlier today, including the notion of going from being a full-time online writer to, well, looking for work. We find an interesting parallel to that of Joe Morgan (a lot more on his departure from ESPN too) in that there are only so many jobs out there for people. If you lose the one you have, and all the others are full, how do you get one? [...]

  4. Ty
    11/9 2010

    I’m kind of in the middle here. I write my Lions blog as a hobby, and an organic outgrowth of my passion. It satisfies me as a creative outlet, has found me lots of like-minded e-friends, and I’m unquestionably a better writer and a better fan for it. Without exaggeration, I’d do it for free.

    However, I’d be thrilled if I could up the “beer money” compensation to “car payment” levels, given the time and effort I put in. I honestly would do it for free–and on a per-hour basis I practically do. But, given the audience, the enthusiasm of that audience, and the fact that I’m getting beer money as it is . . . it seems like I oughta be able to claw my way up to that next level.

    What nobody seems to be talking about is the lack of agency of the little fish in the fish eats fish eats fish sports blog deals. As Dan wrote earlier, a bunch of “indie” sports blogs are cashing checks with Rupert Murdoch’s signature on them, and nobody asked them if it was cool with them . . .

    @Kyle Scott: actually, you might have my answer. Very interesting.

    Peace
    Ty

  5. Kyle Scott
    11/9 2010

    Ty- I think diversifying is the way to go. Since you’re hyper-local as well, look into some other outlets other than traditional cpm ads. I’m selling tickets, and soon t-shirts on CrossingBroad.com through an affiliate model. It’s not a ton of money, but several small portions that add up. If you can do it in a way that is not annoying- but helpful to your audience, then you get a nice following for a given service, outside of the content. I’m not totally there yet, but there’s potential.

  6. Will Carroll
    11/9 2010

    Great points Kyle. I do think local works better than national at this stage. Either way, the added skill of salesmanship is something that a blogger who wants to do this for living better have, for various reasons.

  7. Kyle Scott
    11/9 2010

    Agreed. At some point you’re going to actually have to talk to people in, ya know, person.

  8. Dooley Womack
    11/9 2010

    Will, I’m not sure why you’re so hung up on comments. Comments are good for bloggers — sense of community drives readership, and drives pageviews. But no one born after 1970 or so seriously thinks that blog comments as opposed to blog content is attributable to the blogger (or the blogger’s parent company’s CEO).

    Dude, Will, where’s the white whale?