The large-scale digital content and ad sales partnership between Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports announced last week is designed to create greater audience scale — and a greater challenge for ESPN for supremacy in the market. But it also follows several years of turbulence and change for the digital operations at both companies.
Fox Sports over the past year has turned sharply away from traditional news coverage and highlights for both its Fox Sports 1 cable property and FoxSports.com, focusing instead on personality and social media-driven content. The company two
years ago partnered with the Perform-owned Sporting News on a less ambitious digital content and sales partnership, but the deal in many months has failed to reach an original projection of at least 55 million unique visitors in monthly comScore mulitplatform rankings.
Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, has seen even more twists and turns in its digital operations. A partnership struck in 2010 in which Turner Sports, then a sister entity within Time Warner, managed SI’s digital business operations lasted less than two years amid numerous internal conflicts. Turner Sports then bought Bleacher Report in 2012 and has successfully grown that operation after briefly contemplating a creation of its own general interest sports site.
Since then, Sports Illustrated parent Time Inc. has spun off from Time Warner into its own entity. Sports Illustrated has introduced several new and expanded content franchises, including SI Films, SI Play, and a year-round Swimsuit presence. But Time Inc. itself has sought to find firmer financial footing, and has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and executive restructuring, including staff reductions earlier this month.
The Fox Sports-Sports Illustrated partnership seeks to leverage the relative strengths of each between Fox Sports’ video content and live event rights, and the power of the Sports Illustrated brand name and the outlet’s abilities in newsbreaking and analysis.
“We’re not in the business of traditional sports journalism now. We’re really driven by social video,” said Pete Vlastelica, Fox Sports executive vice president of digital. “So SI can really complement what we’re doing.”
Sports Illustrated will take a lead role in ad sales in the partnership, not unlike its position in the 120 Sports partnership with MLB Advanced Media, the NHL, the PGA Tour, Silver Chalice Ventures and Campus Insiders.
A combined comScore entry blending Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated and Sporting News is due to debut this fall, with the involved parties projecting a combined reach of about 70 million unique users a month. More broadly, that traffic will be assigned to Time Inc.
“Partnerships like this are really important as we rebuild our infrastructure,” said Patty Hirsch, Sports Illustrated group vice president and general manager of digital. “There’s quite a lot we can do together.”
