Venture Capital Investment In Digital Media Not Dried Up

Posted by michaelbean06 on
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 2:07 am

SportsBlogNation, the largest network of sports blogs in the world that I write for, recently procured a mid seven figure influx of capital from quite an impressive list of institutional and individual investors. The funding was led by:

Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley private equity firm best known for its backing of Facebook and led in part by Boston Celtics minority owner Jim Breyer. Additional funding came from Allen & Co.; AOL vice chairman emeritus and Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis; Brent Jones, former San Francisco 49ers player and now managing director of private equity firm Northgate Capital; former Yahoo! senior executives Dan Rosensweig and Jeff Weiner; and several executives from Providence Equity Partners, the venture capital shop where Bankoff remains a senior adviser.

It has been quite a process to figure out how to compensate over two hundred individual bloggers from across the country, and it has been interesting to see which metrics they have taken into consideration in addition to simply page visits. Comments from community members also have been weighted quite heavily, as well as tenure, understandably. With a legitimate management and business team in place working behind the scenes, it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, will be made to how much freedom us individuals have with our content. As of now, it’s essentially 100% hands off freedom, but as we all know, money has the power to change things quickly.