SB Nation

About SB Nation

SB Nation is an American sports blogging network of team-specific community sites, founded in 2003 and owned by Vox Media. Its full name, SportsBlogs Nation, describes its structure: hundreds of individual blogs, each devoted to a single team, sport, or subject, written primarily from the perspective of fans. At its peak the network counted more than 300 community sites covering every Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Football League franchise, along with college teams, mixed martial arts, and professional wrestling. SB Nation's parent company, Sports Blogs Inc., was rebranded as Vox Media in November 2011 after the network expanded into technology content with the launch of The Verge.

Origins: Athletics Nation

The SB Nation network began in November 2003 with a single blog: Athletics Nation, devoted to the Oakland Athletics. It was started by Tyler Bleszinski, a lifelong A's fan who felt that mainstream coverage of the team did not satisfy actual fans. The site became the model for how to approach coverage in the new media landscape with an open and distinct bias, setting out to raise the level of discourse and empower fans to embrace their own community on the web. Bleszinski's approach — openly biased, community-driven, steeped in statistical analysis — became the blueprint for the entire network. He developed a close relationship with A's general manager Billy Beane and owner Lewis Wolff, demonstrating that a fan-run blog could earn the attention of the people actually running a major league franchise. Athletics Nation remains the model that every subsequent SB Nation community was built on.

The co-founders

SB Nation was co-founded by Tyler Bleszinski, Markos Moulitsas, and Jerome Armstrong, and was headquartered in Washington, D.C. Moulitsas, already prominent as the founder of the political blog Daily Kos, and Armstrong, a political strategist and blogger, brought online community-building experience to the partnership. The network grew rapidly: by June 2010 it featured more than 300 sites with more than 400 paid writers. Bleszinski served as the network's CEO for its first four years and later as vice president of talent, mentoring the community managers and recruiting the writers who ran the individual team blogs.

The fan-perspective model

The coverage style of SB Nation's communities has always emphasized the perspective of fans. Unlike traditional beat reporting, which aims for neutrality, SB Nation sites openly root for their teams, using the first-person plural and engaging directly with the emotional experience of fandom. The sites cover game previews and recaps, breaking news, analysis, and opinion, and many have produced regular podcast episodes. Revenue for the network comes primarily through advertising. The community sites encourage readers to contribute to discussions, and the best commenters have often been recruited as writers, creating a self-sustaining pipeline of fan-journalists.

Contributors and staffing

SB Nation's team sites are staffed by a combination of full-time employees and part-time contractors paid through monthly stipends or working unpaid. This hybrid model let the network scale to hundreds of communities far faster than a traditional newsroom could, though it also drew criticism over the years about the compensation of contributors. For many sports writers, however, an SB Nation team blog served as a first professional byline and a launching pad to larger outlets. The network's editors have managed the tension between amateur passion and professional standards by investing in editorial training and credentialing for their writers.

The Verge and the birth of Vox Media

In 2011, the network expanded beyond sports into technology content by launching The Verge, a technology news website that debuted alongside the rebranding of parent company Sports Blogs Inc. as Vox Media in November 2011. The company was established by CEO Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass both SB Nation and The Verge, with Bankoff having served as SB Nation's CEO since 2009. The Verge went on to become one of the most prominent technology publications in the United States, and Vox Media subsequently launched or acquired additional brands including Polygon, Eater, Vox, Recode, New York Magazine, and The Dodo. SB Nation remained the foundation on which the entire company was built.

Jim Bankoff and the company's growth

Jim Bankoff became CEO of SB Nation in 2009, after a career at AOL, and led the company through its transformation into Vox Media. Under his leadership, the company raised venture capital, built its own publishing technology platform called Chorus, and expanded into video, podcasts, and commerce. Vox Media operated additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, and London as of 2020, and in November 2023 Comscore ranked it the 35th-most popular media company among users in the United States. Bankoff has remained chairman and CEO through the company's growth, including the September 2019 acquisition of New York Media — which brought New York Magazine, Intelligencer, The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street into the company — and the February 2022 acquisition of Group Nine Media, which brought brands including The Dodo, NowThis, PopSugar, Thrillist, and Seeker into the fold. The company's lines of business have included Concert, an advertising marketplace; Vox Creative, a branded content studio; Vox Media Studios; and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Longform and editorial ambition

Beyond the daily output of its team communities, SB Nation has periodically pursued ambitious longform and video journalism under its flagship brand. The national site has produced in-depth features, documentary-style video series, and ambitious multimedia projects that aimed to demonstrate the network's range beyond fan-blog coverage. This national-level journalism sat alongside the community sites, giving the network a two-tier structure: passionate local coverage on the team blogs and broader editorial projects on the flagship site.

Relationship with leagues and teams

Because SB Nation sites write from an avowedly fan perspective, their relationship with leagues, teams, and traditional media has always been distinctive. The network's writers have been credentialed by teams, appeared on broadcasts, and been cited by mainstream outlets, while the communities themselves have sometimes been at odds with the franchises they cover, unafraid to criticize ownership or management. This independence from access-driven journalism — the sites answer to their readers, not to the teams — was central to the network's identity from the Athletics Nation days onward.

Coverage scope

The network's communities cover an enormous range of sports: professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey; college sports; soccer; mixed martial arts; professional wrestling; golf; tennis; auto racing; and more. At its peak, the network included more than 300 sites, making it one of the largest sports publishing operations in the United States by number of distinct publications. The flagship national site ties the communities together with top stories, while readers can follow their specific teams for day-to-day coverage.

Legacy in digital sports media

SB Nation demonstrated that the fan community could be a publishing model — that passionate supporters, organized and lightly professionalized, could produce coverage rivaling traditional newspapers in volume and sometimes in quality. Its structure influenced an entire generation of sports media startups, and its parent company grew into one of the most significant digital media firms of the 2010s and 2020s. For millions of fans, an SB Nation community remains the first and most trusted stop for news about their team.

Official website

SB Nation publishes at sbnation.com, where readers can browse the national site and navigate to individual team communities. The network also maintains team-specific sites under the SB Nation umbrella.