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From a start-up founded by four recent college graduates in 2007, Bleacher Report has grown into a fully-fledged media company and one of the biggest sports sites in the world.
In 2012 the site was bought by Time Warner division Turner Sports Network for a reported $175 million (£112m), offering Bleacher Report the credibility it needed to step beyond its reputation as a fan-orientated site with a penchant for lists.
It is now America's second most popular sports site after ESPN, with 53 million unique visitors in June 2015 according to the most recent comScore data.
Rory Brown, Bleacher Report's chief content officer, shared tips for audience strategy and development at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in New York last week.
Screenshot from Bleacher Report
Spot opportunity
The NFL draft, an annual three-day event in which the League selects eligible college football players, is "one of the biggest, if not the biggest, digital sports events of the year, as far as audience is concerned," said Brown.
"It is literally three days of Super Bowls for Bleacher Report".
Despite this, before BR started covering the NFL draft it was largely unreported online, he claimed, while ESPN had a stronghold over the TV rights.
"This was a classic case of supply not meeting demand," he explained, so Bleacher Report chose to give the audience something they weren't getting elsewhere.
Bleacher Report's draft coverage includes results, report cards and rumours, all of which is integrated into the Team Stream app which Brown said "a lot of people just live on" during the draft.
Embrace new technology
It should come as no surprise that Brown claims audience growth "is all about mobile".
However, Bleacher Report's willingness to embrace mobile, even before monetising it, allowed it to get a head start on generating revenue from mobile channels, he said.
The outlet's Team Stream app, launched in 2012, now has more than 13 million subscribers. "That is a very loyal audience, and we know there are a lot of people who check that app 30, 40, 50 times a day," said Brown.
At times, as much as 90 per cent of Bleacher Report's traffic comes from mobile – 80 per cent on smartphones and 10 per cent on tablets.
Build stories for off-site
While social traffic has overtaken search for Bleacher Report and many other publishers, Brown notes that Facebook, Twitter et al offered "extremely volatile traffic", with publishers at the mercy of other platform's algorithms.
Bleacher Report regularly creates platform-specific content for social sites such as Instagram and Vine, and partnered with Snapchat for the launch of its Discover platform earlier this year.
The importance of these stories, which are "only built for the moment," is that they help to raise awareness of your brand and encourage people to follow you on social, subscribe to your newsletter or download your app, said Brown.
Update: This article has been edited to clarify the number of unique users who visited the Bleacher Report site in June 2015, according to comScore data.
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