The slow, steady efforts of Yahoo! Sports to become a major brand for sports content online finally hit mass scale in 2007.
Achieved rarefied air of repeated victories over ESPN.com in monthly traffic wars.
Reset market for college sports content with $98 million purchase of Rivals.com.
After years of toiling in relative anonymity against more established players such as ESPN, Fox and Sports Illustrated, Yahoo! built upon existing strengths in fantasy sports with a series of content initiatives that included a $98 million purchase of college recruiting destination Rivals.com, a new focus on blogging, and a continued advance of original news material under executive editor Dave Morgan.
Yahoo! Sports also spent the year positioning itself as a key distribution arm for live video content, signing deals with the NFL, the MLB Players Association, World Championship Sports Network, Turner Sports and the Tennis Channel, among others.
The moves paid significant dividends, as Yahoo! Sports’ revenue soared by double-digit percentages to $140 million in 2007, and the site began regularly toppling industry heavyweight ESPN.com for the No. 1 ranking in monthly traffic ratings.
While Internet metrics remain the subject of fervent debate, Yahoo!’s regular appearance at or near the top of monthly traffic reports from comScore, Nielsen Online and other measurement agencies has led to a quick acknowledgment among industry leaders that Yahoo! is perhaps the only site now capable of routinely challenging the dominance of ESPN.com.
“We’re finally at the point where we’re making the right decisions and seeing those decisions produce results,” said Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo! Sports vice president and general manager, who previously ran Yahoo!’s music area before moving to his current role in October 2006. “We’re now getting closer to being a full, pure sports destination.”
What makes all of Yahoo!’s accomplishments even more impressive is that they all occurred while the company at large struggled mightily for a sense of corporate direction. Battered on numerous competitive fronts by rival companies such as Google, Yahoo! Inc. last year suffered under sagging profits, an underperforming stock and a revolving door among the senior leadership ranks.
But Yahoo! Sports stood as one of a select few corporate units to hit its financial targets and now stands as a beacon for the company’s future course.
