Fox, Yahoo Sports Vet Brian Grey to Run Sports Start-Up Bleacher Report
Brian Grey used to run big sports sites for really big portals, first at Yahoo (YHOO), then at News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox Sports. Now he’s going to do the same thing at a start-up: He’s leaving an entrepreneur-in-residence perch at Polaris Venture Partners to run Bleacher Report, a San Francisco-based sports network.
Bleacher Report is a two-year old company roughly similar to the better-known SB Nation. The start-up employs lots of writers and stringers to produce lots of local content, claiming it is now churning out more than 500 stories a day.
The company is trying to make money by selling ads on its core site, which Quantcast says draws eight million monthly uniques. And it’s doing syndication deals with the likes of USAToday.com and some of Hearst’s newspapers; last I heard, it was also trying to get a deal with Tribune’s Los Angeles Times.
Bleacher Report has raised $8 million in two rounds; investments include Series A financing completed in February 2008 from Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford, SoftTech VC and, sort-of oddly, Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick.
