Employees have things to say, but most organizations don’t provide the channels for them to say it. Maybe there are some lessons for internal communicators from the outlandish success of the Bleacher Report.
There’s no single narrative to encapsulate the ascent of Bleacher Report, a site that churns out around 800 articles a day penned by 2,000 “core contributors.” The site is as polarizing as it is popular. And it is very popular. In August, some 14.2 million users visited it. Astronomical pageview numbers have translated into loads of advertising revenue — media reports peg the site as on pace to gross $30 million to $40 million this year.
It could be argued that Bleacher Report’s success is a 21st-century iteration of the American Dream. Four twentysomething sports nuts, friends since they attended the elite Menlo School in Atherton, quit their jobs in 2007 to found a sports website written by the fans, for the fans. In doing so, they harnessed the energy of the legions of sports enthusiasts who would have otherwise been yammering on call-in radio or laboring on obscure blogs and message boards, and bundled the labor into a platform that could be backed by advertising dollars.
The site’s deft use of search engine optimization (SEO) — the tweaking of content and coding to increase online visibility — propelled its unpaid, amateur writers’ fare to the top of Google’s search engine results, placing it on equal footing with original work created by established journalistic outlets. It’s a rare sports-related Google search that doesn’t feature a Bleacher Report article among the top results. And once readers click onto Bleacher Report, they stick there — visitors are besieged with applications to subscribe to team-specific newsletters or mobile applications, or drawn into click-happy slideshows, polls, or other user-engaging devices that rack up massive pageviews per visit (to date, a slideshow titled “The 20 Most Boobtastic Athletes of All Time” has amassed 1.4 million views).
