Bleacher Report — the sports blog started by four co-founders out of San Francisco — started off as just a few guys blogging about their opinions in American sports. It was criticised for its views and opinions by many, but still quickly managed to climb its way to the top to become one of the biggest sports sites on the web today. Eventually selling to Turner Broadcasting for a reported 175 million in cold hard cash. So, was it worth it?
It sounds like a lot of money to hand over to four lads with no journalism experience what-so-ever but many people don’t realize how big some one of these website are and how much money they actually produce.
Figures for Bleacher Report before the sale have it earning of 30 million dollars in revenue for 2011 and that figure is more than triple what Bleacher Report made for 2010. Still, earning 10 million in revenue in 2010 is very high, and if its earning that much now why sell?
It seems like a great buy for Turner Broadcasting with the way the web is continually growing and the authority that Bleacher Report has built-in Google is so strong you can’t attempt to look a sporting name or issue up without Bleacher Report getting top position in search results.
It’s always hard to put an exact figure on a sites stats because unless you’re the site admin there is no real accurate tool out there to measure by, however with the knowledge that I do have I can take a fairly good estimation and say they must have close to or even over 20 million reader per month.
There’s always some uncertainty with websites and their future especially with Google changing their algorithms every year – still, with those figures, Google changes or no Google changes this site would still be highly profitable and trends only have it going up.
It really makes you wonder why they sold. Was their tech knowledge not up to par with their sporting knowledge? It’s a great site that has a firm grip around a very popular and strong niche.
If I was generating over 30 million in revenue a year I wouldn’t sell the whole thing for 170 million, would you? I hope the four lads have other ambitions in life they plan on chasing or else before too long they just might wish they could write another article.