When David Finocchio co-founded Bleacher Report in Atherton, California, in 2007, it was with an aim to better serve young digital sports fans who were going un-served by legacy media.
Five five years later, the success story of the site earned it an acquisition for $170mn by Time Warner.
Now Finocchio, who is Bleacher Report’s CEO and who, prior to his site, had only previously interned in finance, finds himself touting his brand to ad buyers at the NewFronts, digital publishers’ opportunity to showcase their content roster to agencies and others.
“I wanted to build a sports experience that people loved… not be stuck with properties or brands that were optimised for their dad’s culture,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview at the event.
“We’re not just a place where advertisers buy spots and dots anymore – we’re actually able to solve problems for them, because we have such influence with our audience that we can actually shape their behaviour as consumers.”
Bleacher Report clocks a claimed 1.5bn monthly page impressions, forcing the publisher to tweak its infrastructure to cope with demand.
The reason is virality. “The whole dynamic revolves around sharing,” Finocchio adds.” Our content is shared at an incredibly higher rate than our competitors’ content. Sport fuels the conversations (readers) have with their social graph.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
