After reeling in the likes of writers Howard Beck, Kevin Ding, Mike Freeman, Jason Cole and Jason King, Bleacher Report saw dividends last week when it announced a new site record with more than 41.6 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore. That marks its second consecutive month of record-setting delivery for the Turner Sports property among multiplatform uniques and was bolstered by the World Cup and NBA news. Its Team Stream mobile app also hit personal bests with 749 million minutes spent, nearly double the usage in May 2014 and 3.3 million uniques.
With more initiatives in the works, Cynopsis Sports asked Dave Finocchio, founder and GM of Bleacher Report, about its growth, talent, use of video and where it will focus its resources in the future.
Finocchio on talent: Bleacher Report is focused on hiring the best talent available to cover the topics where sports fans show the most interest. Does content about those topics perform better with top tier video/writer talent? Absolutely. From our standpoint, we want every piece of content we create to be as productive as possible both from an audience and brand building standpoint. We also want to continue bringing in talent who have unique access and can help B/R tell great stories. In that vein, we’re very excited about adding folks like Jason Cole to our NFL team heading into the upcoming season.
On the rise of mobile video: Mobile-first video is a huge emphasis. We’re focused on a younger demographic than some of the other major players in the space, and young fans want well-produced, high-quality content on their phones. We’re having more and more success with sharable/social video content. We also view video as a great opportunity to shape our brand. In a lot of ways, it has the potential to have a greater impact on how we’re perceived than text content. We’ll be introducing a lot of new, compelling video content and original features this football season.
On areas of growth: Bleacher Report is doing really well on social platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter. Our reach and engagement on both platforms has been terrific, and continues to grow quickly. The B/R voice is really resonating at scale, especially in the 18-34 demo, where our numbers are incredible. Our Team Stream app is the other major growth catalyst. We have some enhancements to the product coming out soon that we’re very excited about. From an event standpoint, the NFL Draft, NBA Finals, World Cup and NBA free agency were all enormous wins. The World Cup, in particular, ignited international growth on Facebook that has actually accelerated since the tournament ended.
On evolution: Bleacher Report is continuing to evolve very quickly, as it always has, and we believe always will. But the goals remain the same we’re dead set on building the next-generation sports brand in the United States. It’s our mission to provide fans of all teams and topics with the best content experiences possible, regardless of what device or platforms they use to consume content. We’re probably still in the 2nd or 3rd inning of our journey, and B/R is going to look a lot different two years from now than it does today. In five to 10 years, even bigger things are possible. I will also say that we’ve seen more growth internationally than we would have anticipated a few years ago, and we’re very focused on expanding that side of our business as well.
