Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Finocchio recently sat down with Bill Simmons to discuss the way B/R revolutionized sports media. Among the many concepts Finocchio credits for the success of his former company was the idea of “personalizing sports” and short, stackable content — concepts that seem like a no-brainer today.
In the Mar. 20 edition of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Simmons and Finocchio go through Bleacher Report’s history from a college project trying to break through to one of the most impactful sports media companies ever — to a relic of a time of the Internet that has now passed. Finocchio credits B/R’s rise to many factors, like listicles, increasing coverage for events like the NFL Draft, and focusing on audience growth, but maybe most importantly was the idea of “personalizing sports” through the website, app, and newsletters.
Finocchio tells the story of how he would watch SportsCenter and get stuck watching hockey highlights before he could get to basketball or other sports he enjoyed.
“I got a little turned off of hockey after a while…and I was just tired of having to watch hockey highlights for 30 minutes on SportsCenter to get the highlights I wanted,” Finocchio said. “So there was this inefficiency to be able to personalize sports who didn’t want to sit or read through the stuff they didn’t care about. All of a sudden, we had these technologies where we could give people experiences that were all of what they wanted and cut out the stuff they didn’t want as much.”
Another concept that Finocchio credits is the inception of Bleacher Report’s newsletters. The team took top content and content from other sites about a particular topic (Finocchio mentions the Boston Celtics as his example) and combined them into one, easy-to-read message that was delivered right to his readers.
“We were the first media company to really invest in curation,” Finocchio said. “And not curation as people think of it today…we’d have newsletters with links to a couple of articles from Bleacher Report and then we’d round up the best stuff from blogs, ESPN, and newspapers, and we did a really good job providing an experience for people where they could go to one place. We tried to be Google — we’ll be a portal to get you to the places you want to go.”
The former B/R founder mentions that the initial reaction from journalists was incredibly negative. Writers and other media companies accused Finocchio and B/R of stealing their content. The reality told a different story, where B/R newsletters were sending readers to these other sites to read articles and generate traffic. Finocchio says that at B/R‘s peak, it was sending 25 million visits a month.
Finocchio says his overarching goal with Bleacher Report was to circumvent the sports landscape at the time and deliver the a la carte options sports fans are used to these days.
“How do we solve problems for fans and make that experience better in a world where there’d been too much of, ‘God I have to sit through these highlights of stuff I don’t care about,’ or ESPN, because of their TV contracts, covers a bunch of stuff that’s right up my alley. I want what I want.”
