Yahoo launched a sports business content hub last week, just a few weeks after The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones announced they would debut a vertical focused on the sports economy this summer.
These verticals spotlight the economics behind sports, such as sports media rights negotiations, investment in sports, ownership structures, valuations and betting and prediction markets. Though niche publishers like Front Office Sports and Sportico have covered this space for years, major news and business publishers are now investing in covering the business side of sports to try to reach a valuable audience, according to four media buyers Digiday spoke with for this story.
It may not be a complete white space, but sports business is an area where large publishers may be able to grab the attention of a professional audience interested in sports – and a new mix of advertisers, they said.
“Sports viewership and attention is at the highest levels we’ve seen. The Super Bowl is setting records for audiences, NBA ratings are accelerating, even the MLB is gaining ground after years of difficulty,” said Harry Browne, vp of TV, audio & display innovation at media agency Tinuiti. “I’m not sure this represents a true white space opportunity – platforms like ESPN and The Athletic have had this beat for a while – but insofar as it helps retain audiences who are already on places like Yahoo and WSJ, it helps keep those platforms relevant in the evolving media landscape.”
Adam Schwartz, svp of integrated investment, sports at media agency Horizon Media, said there was no shortage of daily sports news outside of the actual live games being played in stadiums and arenas – and it’s not just business professionals interested in sports financials.
“Fans have become more curious about the machinery behind the game that powers their favorite teams, players and leagues. There hasn’t been a ton of offerings that served that need for the financially curious fan, that maybe isn’t a serious investor or working in the sports business world. So while the traditional sports media landscape is incredibly crowded with various highlights, scores and fantasy options, the mechanics of the sports business industry has been underserved,” Schwartz said.
Yahoo’s sports business hub brings together its Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance news and analysis, along with syndicated content from sports business publishers, including Front Office Sports, Sportico, Sports Business Journal, Awful Announcing, Barrett Media, JohnWallStreet, Sports Business Radio and The 4th Quarter.
Ryan Spoon, president of Yahoo Media Group, told Digiday that partnering with other publishers to feed the new sports business hub was a way to satisfy interest in this fast-moving space.
More than 100 million people in the U.S. visit Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance each month, according to Spoon. The sports business hub is the first collaboration from the two verticals (Yahoo Finance launched a content hub for cryptocurrency content last November, with a dozen publisher partners). The hub will also include original content: Dylan Dittrich, author of “Sneakonomic Growth,” will author a sports business newsletter, and Shlomo Sprung, a former staff writer at Boardroom, is joining Yahoo as a contributing writer.
Launching a sports content vertical “can’t just necessarily be score aggregation or hot takes, because a lot of that is just being consumed upfront and being managed through outlets like Google results. People are looking for that next layer of analysis,” said Luke Fowler, senior media buyer at KSM, a media agency based in Chicago.
Spoon declined to disclose how advertising revenue from the sports business hub is split between Yahoo and the other publishers.
“We all have shared incentives for this to grow. All the models are predicated on traffic and sharing of business,” Spoon said. “In addition to branding and traffic and so forth, there is shared economics.”
The sports business hub publishers will get their content and branding distributed on Yahoo’s large platform, with the idea that links to their sites could help drive some of that traffic back to their properties, Spoon said.
Spoon dismissed concerns that industry-wide challenges around content discovery and declining search traffic make it a difficult environment to launch a new vertical.
“Frankly, I’m not worried about where traffic comes from right now on this. I’m worried about building a great destination that satisfies a desire for this type of content, and I think the rest will take care of itself. And we’re fortunate that we also know that this will get placed at the intersection of two really significant properties with some really significant partners,” Spooner said. “If you are high-quality and unique and on time, you will persist.”
Tinuiti’s Browne agreed that Yahoo’s sports business content hub syndicating content from other publishers could be attractive to some advertisers, especially B2B brands.
“One of the biggest pressures in media right now is audience fragmentation, with few platforms holding a critical mass of audiences on their own. To the extent that content aggregation means that audiences can be more consistently reached in one place, that could be valuable for advertisers looking to bolster reach and manage frequency efficiently,” he said.
