Bleacher Report "has become mobile-first in the process of building and developing its app, Team Stream," according to Catalina Albeanu of JOURNALISM NEWS. Bleacher Report Chief Technology Officer Sam Parnell, speaking at the Monetising Media conference, said that the business "'had really changed' in order to move from a web-first mentality and embrace mobile, and Team Stream users spend 174 minutes a month using the app." He added that Bleacher Report "first developed a mobile website in 2009, when 'one of the engineers got bored over the weekend.'" Parnell said that two years later, 20% of Bleacher Report's traffic "came from mobile, and while it was not equal to desktop traffic yet, 'the trend was upwards.'" Bleacher Report's team "started to split its time equally between desktop and mobile despite the fact that mobile accounted for only a fifth of the traffic." Parnell noted that building the mobile app "took Bleacher Report beyond being a publisher towards becoming a content curator and a 'portal for sports fans.'" He added that while the app "delivered better results than web on the personalisation front ... he quickly realised Bleacher Report was falling behind on publishing real-time news." Parnell said that this "was the point Bleacher Report started to transform as a business, and the product engineering and design teams started to focus on the mobile side, both web and app." He added the mobile app became a "flagship experience." Parnell noted that while an individual visitor "would come to the website two or three times a month at this point, app users were visiting closer to 30 times a month" (JOURNALISM.co.uk, 10/1).
