Jim Bankoff was brought into SB Nation as CEO in conjunction with their last round of funding in hopes of leveraging his rich web experience (formally of AOL) to gain better exposure and traction with advertisers, investors, web users, etc.
Yesterday saw the first fruits of Bankoff’s efforts with a pretty sweetheart deal with Yahoo Sports.
“Relevant pages of Yahoo Sports will now feature contextual links to specific SB Nation communities. Many other pages of Yahoo Sports will feature SB Nation content and links. The great news is that more sports fans will be introduced to SB Nation sites. There are now close to 200 different sports communities for Yahoo users to discover. Each is led by bloggers who are first and foremost passionate fans. Part of what makes our network so special is that each SB Nation site has its own URL, name and colors as well as its own community guidelines and expectations. Some are more serious, some more irreverent, but they all share a common goal of nurturing strong and focused conversations around a common interest.”
You can check out what this looks like on Yahoo team pages below. The links to SB Nations’s content is towards the bottom, on the left.
This is a huge win for SB Nation, as the inbound links alone should substantially grow their page views, unique visitors, and community size over the next couple of years. SB Nation actually has a similar deal with Glam’s men channel, Brash.com , but this obviously is a much bigger win for them.
My question is what is in this for Yahoo? It does improve the attractiveness of going to Yahoo Sports over someone like ESPN, but its pretty well known that a one way traffic exchange is not ideal for both parties.
Will SB Nation start linking to Yahoo box scores and roster pages? Or is this just a foreplay for Yahoo to take on SB Nation’s ad sales. Currently SB Nation is partnered with Federated Media, but with Federated losing a lot of key publishers of late (GigaOm, TechCrunch, Bleacher Report) there is certainly cause for speculation that this deal is part of something bigger.
Regardless this is a validation of sports 2.0 and another feather in the hat of the revered Mr. Bankoff.
