Bleacher Report, the polarizing yet increasingly relevant website that Time magazine recently named one of its 50 best websites of 2011, has just received a $22 million investment from Oak Investment Partners.
“Sports is a big opportunity and no one has gotten it right yet,” said Fred Harman, general partner of Oak Investment. “People are clearly as passionate and opinionated as they are in politics, and they are less inhibited to express their opinions. I’d argue Bleacher Report has done a far better job of embracing the capabilities of the online medium than the big sports name brands have.”
Bleacher Report recently hired five new “lead writers” to spearhead the site’s sports coverage, a move that Larry Brown of Larry Brown Sports derided as “window dressing.”
(Bleacher Report is) a widely mocked sports website known for extremely low-quality content that is gamed to dominate Google’s search engines. They have a reputation for spelling errors, typos, and slideshows created in poor taste…
(H)iring four new high-quality writers doesn’t outweigh 5,000 (or however many other) poor quality ones who are published. They can throw the well written columns of their new writers on the front page, bury the low quality writers on back pages, and still rake in the pageviews. That’s what I mean by window dressing. Just because the stuff doesn’t show up on the front page of the site doesn’t mean it does not exist.
Want to make a high-impact change that will gain the respect of the sports community? Stop gaming Google.