Yesterday, I had lunch with two execs from a startup professional baseball league. We discussed blogs and how well suited the medium is for sports.
Let’s hear from the master on the subject, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the left-leaning political blog Daily Kos and Sports Blogs, a network of blogs devoted to baseball.
“I realized that blogs were really effective for partisan audiences. One of them is sports. Sports is huge – where you’ve got your Red Sox and Yankees situation – and religion is another,” said Mr. Moulitsas. “But in religion, people kill each other, so I decided I’d rather stay away from religion.”
Getting SportsBlogs started took an investment of about $20,000, most of which came from Daily Kos profits. And because each new site has low set-up costs, pressure on the writers to reach specific traffic or revenue milestones is minimal.
Still, SportsBlogs sites such as Minor League Ball, Lookout Landing (for Seattle Mariners fans), McCovey Chronicles (San Francisco Giants), Pinstripe Alley (Yankees) and Amazin’ Avenue (Mets) are thriving. Minor League Ball, for example, gets about 3,000 unique visitors daily.
According to Mr. Moulitsas, the SportsBlogs sites are currently bringing in just under $3,000 in revenue a month in total. But the sites are only a couple of months old, and he said that no significant revenue was projected until summer.
“The fact that we have any income right now is shocking to me,” he said.
Major League Baseball is in on the blogging act, as well. They run their own network of baseball blogs, written by fans, sports writers, team personnel and anyone else willing to pay $49.95. For instance, White Sox VP of Communications, Scott Reifert, keeps a MLblog called Inside The White Sox.