My last job at Yardbarker, combined two of my biggest passions in Sports and Social Media. I am currently looking for a job in the same vain and know some perspective employers will be stopping by BenKoo.com and thought this would be a good arena to voice my thoughts on the Blogosphere. Below I focus on traditional media, but hope in the coming weeks I can do 3-4 more of these. Traditional Media From the onset of the blogging phenomena that started take root at the beginning of this century, most traditional media outlets viewed blogs as an alternative or competitor to their content. Television shows now have cast members maintain blogs on the shows micro sites, radio shows have blogs with embedded clips and commentary, and newspapers have combated the loss of their relevance by letting many writers start more casual and interactive blogs on newspaper websites.
However the one medium that seemed most adverse to embracing blogs was oddly the larger destination sites and portals who were afraid of losing their online audience to that of an upstart blog. The blogging trend picked up much momentum in terms of amount of blogs and the audiences they attracted as people enjoyed the fresh crop of voices on the net. Blogs could be about anything and everything, were not limited by the editorial and publishing process of a larger site, and could take liberty with language, biases, as well as media posting of copyrighted images and video. All of these factors made blogs seemingly more cutting edge, progressive, and flat out interesting compared to the content proliferated by the traditional media players. Oddly enough it was AOL, who was the first traditional online media entity to really embrace the blogging trend by acquiring Weblogs for $ 25 million in 2005. Weblogs was started by tech entrepreneur Jason Calacinis and grew to become the first enterprise blogging company with over 50 blogs in the network. Weblogs was funded partly by Mark Cuban whose personal blog was part of the network until recently.
Weblogs before the acquisition was able to make moderate revenue utilizing Google Ad sense as networks sites grew larger audiences or were shutdown due to a lack of audience. Weblogs sites to this day are some of the most popular blogs on the web although some of the contracted writers had their compensation cut back this past summer. Following the success of Weblogs, AOL launched FanHouse in an effort to to get the online sports fan away from Yahoo, ESPN, and other large sports web properties. AOL hired prominent blogger and podcaster Jaime Mottram to run the new blog hub.
Jaime’s mission was to recruit as many good bloggers as possible to write on FanHouse for modest compensation (10-20 bucks a post usually). Jaime succeeded in getting a pretty stellar team of bloggers in the FanHouse stable which led to Fanhouse ascending the ranks as the most trafficked sports blog. Jaime’s efforts at Fanhouse also had a Bill Walsh coaching tree effect, as many of the people he brought in at FanHouse were later promoted to head efforts at other traditional media companies. Included in this bunch is his brother Chris who heads the Sporting News’ blogging initiatives, John Ness who heads a similar effort for NBC Universal, and Alana Nguyen later joined Yardbarker after doing some work with Ball Hype and Yahoo. The deceitfuls of Mottram never recreated the success of FanHouse as SportingNews audience is still relatively small compared to other large sport entities and the NBC Universal blogging initiative has yet to really had its impact felt in the blogosphere (most likely because they won’t hire me). Jaime left AOL for Yahoo over a year ago and has been doing some phenomenal things there. As for Fanhouse its been a bumpy ride. Reported friction between the FanHouse group and the larger AOL Sports group seemed to coincide with Jaime leaving, and the departure of his deceitfuls didn’t help. This past summer with AOL cutting back on their focus on blogs, a shit storm of controversy arose when FanHouse partnered up with Fantasy Sports Girl featured below. While the videos did draw attention, the loyal FanHouse contributors and community thought it was a ridiculous attempt that was not inline with the FanHouse audience or mission. While Fanhouse has fallen in terms of audience and prestige in the blogosphere, its importance can be shown as AOL recently rebranded AOL Sports to FanHouse as well as spending some significant coin to get Jay Marrioti to contribute to the site.
Jaime left AOL and started up with Yahoo to build the most successful and well integrated and conceptualized blogging initiatives on the web. He has attracted some of the best bloggers on the web and given them much freedom to do their thing. The biggest piece of the success of Y Sports blogs hinges on the fact that Yahoo.com promotes the blogs top headlines on an almost daily basis giving the blogs millions of views on a weekly basis. The content is great, the layouts are simple and clean, and the promotion is top knotch, making Y sports Blogs the most successful blog iniaitive on the web imo.
For the most part Google and Microsoft stayed out of the forray although Microsoft did hire Robert Scoble and Google did acquire blogging software Blogger.
But what about the likes of sports giants, ESPN and Sports Illustrated?
Sports Illustrated has not really entered the blogging space although they have a very popular part of their website called Extra Mustard which links to some of the hottest stories of the day, most of which are blogs.
ESPN is another story. While they did have some features and columns that were titled as blogs, most of them really didn’t fit the label. ESPN the Magazine did launch a blog section that is pretty legit, albeit nobody goes to the site and most people hate ESPN the Magazine as an entity.
This past summer ESPN made a big fuss about starting their own network of blogs on ESPN.COM covering both pro and college football. While the content from these 15 or so writers is quite good and well promoted, there is one problem……They aren’t really blogs at all.
The “blogs” are almost 100% reporting with no commentary and analysis. There is no casualness or humor in the writings and all the hired “bloggers” are former newspaper writers who follow the basic AP article structure. While I read them quite often as they are heavily featured on ESPN.COM, the fact that these pieces are somehow classified as blogs is complete BS.
This leaves with the big announcement ESPN dropped today, and something I was privy to for quite awhile.
ESPN today launched the NBA True Hoop Blog network, a collection of team focused NBA blogs that are not hosted on ESPN.COM. These blogs are legit in every sense and is a step away from the strategy of ESPN focusing content and initiatives on ESPN.COM.
Kudos to Henry Abbot for quarterbacking the initiative. The sites seem to all be built on WordPress and have similar layouts including a nav bar featured below. Some of the sites look pretty rough around the edges , but I am sure a year from now this will be a much well rounded product.
While this outlines some of the strategies implored by traditional media, it should also be noted that traditional media have also invested into blogs rather then launching their own blog strategy. Below are a couple of examples.
– Automatic which backs wordpress.com raised 29 million dollars mainly backed by the New York Times.
– USA Today invested an indisclosed amount in Fantasy Sports Ventures, a company that sells ads on sports sites including blogs
– Fox has acquired a bunch of different online properties, many of which dabble with blogs but are not really blog centric.
So there you have it. Traditional media has slowly been embracing the concept of blogs in many different ways. AOL tested the waters first but Yahoo has stolen the show.
Still though mainstream media is still looking for ways to better capitalize on the blog movement and even when they do bring mainstream blogs under their umbrellas, a lot of the audience never moves over often staying away from mainstream web properties out of habit.
