Amid Yahoo’s recent announcement of a strategic shift toward its core consumer products, its sports brands continue to shore up their content and partnerships. Following last October’s live stream of an NFL game, Yahoo Sports has since announced a partnership with the NHL to deliver free, live games to fans, along with on-demand, premium content; made a move into eSports complete with dedicated coverage and a partnership with ESL; and debuted of The Vertical with Woj, the basketball-centric site run by our Yahoo NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski, as well as an exclusive distribution deal with Paul Heyman.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Bob Condor, VP of Yahoo Sports Media, about the slate of initiatives, Yahoo’s role in the sports media spectrum and measuring success.
Condor on the mantra at Yahoo: Our CEO made a point that our strategy moving forward will play on our strengths, which includes sports. Clearly the partnerships we are entering into and the spaces we are entering into are a part of that. We are matching our initiatives with what we do well: great reporting, video offerings, and, of course, fantasy. We’ve been in the sports space for more than a decade and we have always done it as a user first experience. We are basically, day in and day out, trying to answer the questions in the minds of sports fans, and now eSports fans. Just as a great writer will anticipate the questions, we try to do that in sports in that we are trying to hit on the topics that people are talking and wondering about as well as have some fun with the unscripted moments. That philosophy and some great writers have helped Yahoo Sports become what it is today.
On streaming: I think everybody agrees that the NFL game in October was a success for us, particularly the technology behind the stream itself. It was a spectacular effort by our video products group. What we saw was an opportunity to develop that technology and be a destination that people look at and realize that we can drive that quality of video at scale. Along with that, on the content side, we want to be known as a place where you can find live sports action, certainly as much as possible with at least one live game a day, hence the relationship with the NHL and MLB. We are also streaming PGA right now, including a featured holes segment on Thursday and Friday. In eSports, we have done one live event already and with that event, we debuted what we are calling the Cheer Bar, which basically gives fans the opportunity to choose whichever team they are rooting for and identify themselves to their team’s commenters and we see that as something that, as we go, will move over to the pro and college sports that we are streaming live.
On measuring success: For us, we look at user engagement. Of course, the next question is, “What does that mean?” In 2016, we want to be really smart about how we look at user engagement and how it relates to daily average users and content. These days, we also want to take a look at our social media impressions and where else it is being talked about, shared and consumed. Clearly with all these initiative, you want to feel good coming out of the game and everything we’ve seen so far has shown a strong start.
On moving into eSports: It was a natural fit for us and for sports, it was a natural extension. In addition to our live stream capabilities and our reporting that make this an area we could naturally move into, we saw it as a growth area. It is something audiences are excited about. There are no pretentions on my part of us moving into gaming and being the top space in three weeks or anything. We want to be responsive and we want to understand the kind of content that people are looking for. We have many more chapters to write, but if we stay responsive to the eSports audience, I think we can bring our brand of reporting and content creation to the space that we are known for. Of course, it is no secret that we want to be involved with live events when we can and use our technology to grow the sport.
On verticals and The Vertical: There is nobody like Woj out there in any sports space. We thought it was time to bring that our in a more visible fashion and it was very important to Adrian and myself to have a team that works with Woj to help break news and analysis. We really feel good about the strength and breadth of that team. We feel The Vertical has a lot of depth and people are responding to that. He was a natural place for us to start. We are definitely open to other ideals for that format, and we’ll be doing another Olympic vertical, but we want to make sure they would be a natural fit.
