SB Nation

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SB Nation
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Screenshot
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Screenshot of SB Nation's Homepage
Web address www.sbnation.com
Commercial? No
Type of site
 Sports news
Registration Optional (required for comments/posting)
Available in English
Owner Vox Media
Launched 31 March 2005; 19 years ago (2005-03-31)
Alexa rank
 Increase 769 (As of January 2015)[1]
Current status Active

SB Nation (Sports Blog Nation)[2] is a sports news website owned and operated by Vox Media (formerly SportsBlogs, Inc.). Established in 2005, the site comprises 309 blogs covering individual professional and college sports teams, and other sports-oriented topics. The site operates from Vox’s offices just off Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, as well as Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. [3]

SB Nation currently has content-sharing partnerships with Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, USA Today, Comcast and the National Hockey League (NHL)[4][5][6]

History

The concept of SB Nation was rooted in Athletics Nation, a blog focused on the Oakland Athletics, which was founded in 2003 by Tyler Bleszinski. Bleszinski noted that at the time, blogs focused on sports were a new concept limited to "mostly baseball sites on Typepad and Blogger", and that he was displeased over how the Athletics were being covered by these sites. In the spirit of Athletics manager Billy Beane, he decided to build his own blog with an aggressive focus on the team. Athletics Nation soon became the second-largest site on the advertising network Blogads behind the political blog Daily Kos. Its author, Markos Moulitsas, was also a friend of Bleszinksi; in 2005, Bleszinksi partnered with him to form SB Nation, which would serve as a network of sports blogs with a common platform enabling community participation. Athletics Nation began hiring additional part-time writers, while the SB Nation network would absorb and acquire other sports blogs focusing on major league and college teams.[7][8]

In 2008, Jim Bankoff, a former AOL executive, joined as CEO to expand SB Nation. Comparing it to his previous company's focus on publishing content in specific verticals, Bankoff wanted to build a topic-based sports media company, explaining that "when you go to Google you don't type in 'sports', you search for a specific team or a player. As media consumers, we're not sports fans, but we're fans of a given team. That's our philosophy here, and our tagline fits it well when it says pro quality—in reference to the type of content and commentary, and fan perspective—as we speak from a fan voice, which can mean we're sometimes very critical."[8][9]

Relaunch

In 2009, SBNation.com was re-launched to serve as a nationally-focused portal for the network's sites.[8] As of February 2009, there were about 185 blogs. ComScore, the Reston, Virginia-based tracker of consumer Internet habits, tallied 5.8 million unique visitors to SB Nation websites during the month of November 2010. That 208 percent increase over the 1.9 million unique visitors in November 2009 made SB Nation the fastest growing sports website the company tracked at that time.[10]

As of December 2010, SB Nation had 12 million unique visitors and over 100 million page views monthly; the site also announced plans to expand its scope into international sports by launching blogs focused on the English Premier League of soccer.[11]

Vox Media

In 2011, a number of editors from AOL's blog Engadget, including Joshua Topolsky, left the site to join SB Nation, where they would begin work on launching a new technology website under its ownership known as The Verge, with Topolsky as editor-in-chief.[12][13] Following the launch of The Verge, SB Nation's parent company was renamed Vox Media.[8][14]

In November 2011, Vox Media acquired MMAFighting.com from AOL; the site was integrated into SB Nation.[15] In December 2011 Time, listed SB Nation #1 in Sports, and #15 overall in its "50 Websites That Make the Web Great" list.[16]

In September 2012, SB Nation unveiled a comprehensive redesign of the website codenamed "SB United". The project reconstructed the site with a unified format and design, using a responsive, "magazine-style" presentation with multimedia and "StoryStreams", and new circular logo designs for each one of the site's blogs. The changes came under the direction of Spencer Hall, writer of the college football blog Every Day Should Be Saturday, who was named as the site's first ever editorial director, and stated that he had wanted to "corral some kind of common vision and coordination" between the individual blogs on SB Nation.[17][18][19]

As of July 2013, SB Nation averaged 50 million unique visitors per month a 178% increase from a year earlier. It currently sits at 454th in the USA according to the web-ranking outfit Alexa. SB Nation purchased Outsports in 2013.[20]

Holtzclaw article

In February 2016, the site published a lengthy profile of Daniel Holtzclaw, a former police officer convicted of multiple accounts of rape and other charges, focusing on his college football career. The piece, which was seen as sympathetic to Holtzclaw, was heavily criticized and was taken down within hours of publication. SB Nation's editorial director Spencer Hall apologized for "a complete breakdown" of SB Nation's editorial process, and described the story and its publication as a "complete failure" of site standards.[21][22][23] SB Nation subsequently cut ties with the story's author, freelance journalist Jeff Arnold, and put its longform program on hiatus pending a peer review of the editorial process that led to the Holtzclaw piece being published.[24]

Notable blogs

Mixed Martial Arts

SB Nation's mmafighting.com[25] won first place in "MMA Media Source of the Year" category of World MMA Awards 2013 awards.[26] with their MMA journalist, Ariel Helwani winning "MMA Journalist of the Year" consecutively from 2010-2015.

Bleacher Report listed both mmafighting.com and bloodyelbow.com in their "top MMA information and opinion sources" list (seven overall).[27]

Web data traffic ranking leader Alexa Internet, list mmafighting.com, bloodyelbow.com and mmamania.com in their top 10 most popular "MMA news and media" websites category[28]

Breaking Madden

Jon Bois uses the Madden NFL series of videogames to set up various hypothetical situations or implausible challenges (for example, attempting to break the record number of career touchdown passes, all in a single game) and then reports on the results.

See also

References

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  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category;0/Top/Sports/Martial_Arts/Submission_Fighting_and_MMA/News_and_Media

External links

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