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Bleacher Report is a sort of Demand Media of sports, a content farm engineered to get search engine visits with lowest common denominator clickbait. And itâs a heck of a business.
Where Demand pays people, even if only $3 a post, to write low-grade Google spam, the vast majority of the writers on Bleacher Report are unpaid. Despite that, it got 9 million unique visitors in August, according to Compete, and Turner Broadcasting bought it that month for between $175 million and $200 million. Thatâs a lot of money in media land these days. Itâs a hair under what the stock market says McClatchy is worth, andMcClatchy owns thirty newspapers, including The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, and The Kansas City Star. Itâs also two-thirds of what AOL paid for The Huffington Post.
But while the latter was obsessively covered for months, the business press barely noticed the Bleacher Report deal. It got curiously perfunctory coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Bloomberg. The New York Times wrote a blog post. I can only imagine itâs because business and media writers read a lot more HuffPost than they do Bleacher Report.
Into this media void comes SF Weekly with a deep dive and Joe Eskenazi comes up with one of the best media stories of the year: a revealing but dispiriting look at how the open Web can drive a journalistic race to the bottom.
How did a low-tier sports site mint money? As Eskenazi puts it, Bleacher Report âharnessed the energy of the legions of sports enthusiasts who would have otherwise been yammering on call-in radio.â If youâve never had the misfortune of listening to sports-talk radio callers, go read this entertaining 1996 Sports Illustrated piece by Austin Murphy for a glimpse.
âHarnessingâ is the right metaphor here. Hereâs a labor force that creates the product for free or for very low pay, and the owners reap almost all the reward.
We get a convincing picture of Bleacher Report as emblem of the modern new media as lizard-brain manipulator. Even BuzzFeed gets half its traffic, according to Compete. Bleacher Reportâs listicle-heavy content that includes gems like âThe 20 Most Boobtastic Athletes of All Timeâ and âWWE Divas Power Rankings: Which Divas Have the Most Potential?â as well as overt troll posts like âWhy Tom Brady Is the Most Overrated Quarterback in NFL History.â
Eskenazi talked to the author of that post:
This piece epitomizes much of what frustrates the siteâs detractors. The articleâs author, an affable 19-year-old college sophomore named Zayne Grantham, tells us he still thinks Brady is an overrated âsystem quarterbackâ who largely succeeds thanks to his teamâs capable defenses. (The New England Patriots advanced to the Super Bowl last year with the 31st-ranked defense in terms of passing and overall yardage in a 32-team league.) But even Grantham doesnât believe Brady to be historyâs most overrated quarterback: âIn hindsight, I may not have used that headline. Iâll be one of the first to say heâs one of the best quarterbacks weâve ever seen.â
And there you have it: Anyone baited into responding to these hyperbolic stories finds themselves debating a non-starter argument with a teenager from Shreveport who doesnât even buy the premise of his own article.
Much of the piece is withering like that. At one point Eskenazi writes, âPerhaps uniquely among journalistic entities, Bleacher Report has a âblanket policyâ forbidding its writers from seeking out and breaking news.â Say what? But yep, here it is under Content Standards on the site:
B/R has a strict policy against writers breaking their own news. While we donât doubt that some B/R writers have contacts they know and trust, a problem arises when weâre asked to take a leap of faith that those sources are both legitimate and accurate.
Headlines come pre-written from headquarters, and though the site has hired respectable writers in a bid to class the joint up, Eskenazi talks to current writers there who say theyâre run through the grinder:
âI started out being worried that joining up with Bleacher Report would make other people think Iâm a fraud and a hack,â says one high-level writer. âNow Iâm worried I have become that fraud and hack.â
Whatâs creepy is the manipulation that is baked into the model here. Clickbait, SEO, slideshows, gamification, and the like. Computer models spit out story lengths, according to one source, and they presumably dictate, or at least heavily influence, story subjects, which are primarily about activating the lizard brain.
This is what people want, you say. Bleacher Report is just giving us what we want. Fine. But if itâs the market taken to its extreme, itâs sure fascinating to see how awful the results are.
And it pays to remember, this is what people âwantâ under the Web as itâs currently structured. Technology changes; models change. Assuming the structures arenât locked in for good, we need to start to imagine what people will âwantâ under different models and technological structures. Because this one wonât do.
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