SB Nation

• 1. Introduction

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  SB Nation began as a single blog about a baseball team in Oakland and grew into one of the largest sports media networks on the internet. In July 2003, Tyler Bleszinski launched Athletics Nation to write about the Oakland Athletics. Within a short time, that one blog had become the second-largest website on the Blogads network, trailing only Daily Kos. That achievement caught the attention of the right people, and a network was born. By the time SB Nation reached its peak, it operated more than 300 community sites covering everything from NFL franchises to mixed martial arts. The story of how that happened, and what it cost the people who built it, raises questions about who gets paid when passion becomes a business.

• 2. From One Blog to a Network

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  Markos Moulitsas, who worked as an editor at Daily Kos, was a co-founder of SB Nation alongside Bleszinski. The two had an early advantage: Daily Kos's publishing platform was adapted to power the new network, which helped accelerate community growth from the start. Six additional writers were hired to join Bleszinski, and established bloggers were recruited to contribute. The model was fan-first. Readers were encouraged to leave comments and shape the conversation, which set SB Nation apart from traditional sports journalism.

  By 2008, the network was ready for serious investment. SB Nation raised $5 million in a Series A round that included Accel Partners, Allen and Company, and Ted Leonsis. Jim Bankoff, who had been advising the company during that round, became SB Nation's CEO in January 2009. By February of that year, the network had nearly 185 blogs and was drawing roughly 5 million unique users. The NHL became an early institutional partner, sanctioning SB Nation content and linking to it from the league's own official website.

  A second financing round followed in July 2009, led by Comcast's venture capital branch, Comcast Interactive Capital, and brought in nearly $8 million. By that September, SB Nation relaunched as a nationally focused portal for the whole network. Revenue quadrupled over the course of 2009. A third round in November 2010, led by Khosla Ventures, pushed the company's total funding to approximately $23 million. By mid-2010, the network had 31 full-time employees and was drawing 40 million monthly page views from roughly 8 million unique users.

• 3. Becoming Vox Media

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  In October 2011, the parent company SportsBlogs Inc. rebranded as Vox Media, and a month later The Verge launched. The new identity reflected the company's ambitions beyond sports. SB Nation had already pushed in that direction by acquiring the blog networks FanTake and The Offside earlier that year, expanding its college sports and soccer coverage. Several Engadget employees were hired to help launch The Verge as SB Nation's first major non-sports expansion.

  Also in late 2011, MMAFighting.com was brought into the fold after Vox Media acquired it from AOL. The site produces The MMA Hour and The MMA Beat, which were still streaming on SB Nation and social media outlets as of 2017.

  In September 2012, SB Nation unveiled a major redesign codenamed "SB United." The overhaul introduced a magazine-style layout with a greater emphasis on long-form content, and included new logos for all of the network's approximately 300 blogs. Spencer Hall, named the site's first editorial director, oversaw the project. The LGBT sports website Outsports joined in March 2013, with its founders keeping editorial control. That acquisition was notable as the first time a major sports media company had purchased an LGBT-focused sports website. By mid-2013, SB Nation was drawing approximately 50 million unique visitors a month.

• 4. The Holtzclaw Collapse

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  In February 2016, SB Nation published a lengthy profile of Daniel Holtzclaw, a former police officer who had been convicted of rape and other charges. The piece centered on his college football career and was read by many as sympathetic to a convicted rapist. Within hours of publication, it was taken down. Spencer Hall, by then the site's editorial director, described what happened as "a complete breakdown" of the editorial process and called the story's publication "a complete failure" of site standards. SB Nation cut ties with the freelance journalist Jeff Arnold, who wrote the piece, and suspended the longform program pending a peer review.

  The head of the longform program, veteran sportswriter Glenn Stout, was suspended and later fired.

  Vox Media published the peer review's findings in May 2016. The review found the longform program had been isolated from the rest of SB Nation to a degree that made proper vetting impossible. It also found fault with the practice of routing sensitive stories exclusively through the newsroom's two most senior women, senior editor Elena Bergeron and senior content producer Sarah Kogod. The reviewers concluded that this arrangement made it seem as though individual editors bore no personal responsibility for ethics and accuracy. The review also raised concerns about the lack of diversity in the newsroom. SB Nation permanently shelved the longform program and announced steps to diversify its staff. The company stated that the Holtzclaw situation proved that "an organization cannot afford to wait to be diverse, particularly if that organization is one that wants to tell stories."

• 5. Labor and the Lawsuit

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  Elena Bergeron was named SB Nation's first editor-in-chief in March 2017, in the aftermath of the Holtzclaw fallout. Five months later, in August, a report from Deadspin detailed how heavily the network relied on underpaid and unpaid contributors. Bergeron was quoted in that story saying it was company policy that everyone who contributed to a Vox Media property got paid. Several site managers interviewed for the same piece said they were not aware of any such policy.

  In September 2017, a former site manager filed a collective action lawsuit against Vox Media, arguing they had been misclassified as an independent contractor rather than an employee. Three separate lawsuits were eventually combined into one. In August 2020, Vox Media agreed to pay $4 million to settle the case, with 450 writers and site managers sharing the payout.

  Within nine months of the original Deadspin report, SB Nation had hired additional staff to support team sites, increased budgets for some sites, converted several part-time roles to full-time positions, and restricted the use of unpaid contributors. In November 2017, Vox Media staff announced they were forming a union affiliated with the Writers Guild of America, East. Full-time SB Nation employees were included, but part-time bloggers and site managers were not. The Vox Media Union ratified its first contract in June 2019.

• 6. Cuts, Closures, and Departures

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  February 2018 brought the first significant wave of layoffs, hitting SB Nation's social video team along with a number of part-time copy editors and news writers. Bergeron announced in February 2019 that she would step down as editor-in-chief once a replacement was found. Vox said it would hire a senior vice president to oversee SB Nation, but it was not until October 2020, some 16 months later, that Jermaine Spradley was promoted into the SVP role.

  In August 2019, SB Nation closed Every Day Should Be Saturday, its national college football blog, and launched a replacement vertical called Banner Society. That same September, SB Nation launched DK Network, a dedicated sports gambling site built in partnership with DraftKings.

  The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the cuts. On the 17th of April 2020, Vox Media announced it would furlough 9% of its workforce starting the 1st of May 2020. By July, an additional 6% of the company was laid off, with an internal memo noting that only 30% of furloughed workers were being recalled. In January 2023, another round of layoffs hit 7% of Vox's staff. A majority of SB Nation's hockey and soccer sites were shut down or became unaffiliated. Bloody Elbow was sold back to its original founder in March of that year; Sactown Royalty and BlogABull both departed by April. Jermaine Spradley left the company in January 2024. In March, Vox divested Outsports to LGBT-oriented publisher Q Digital, with the site's co-founders receiving an equity stake. April 2024 brought the shutdown of the website's entire podcast network.

• 7. Jon Bois and Secret Base

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  In July 2017, SB Nation published 17776, a serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative written by Jon Bois. The project was unlike anything the network had run before, blending fiction, data visualization, and sports history into a single online experience. It earned SB Nation a National Magazine Award, known as an Ellie Award, in the Digital Innovation category in 2018.

  A sequel, 20020, was published in 2020. Letterboxd named a collaborative documentary by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein on the history of the Seattle Mariners the highest-rated documentary miniseries of 2020. The New York Times listed its first episode, titled "This is not an endorsement of arson," among the best episodes of television that year.

  SB Nation's YouTube channel, which launched in March 2012, became the home for regular web series including Dorktown and Pretty Good. In August 2020, the channel was renamed Secret Base. The following year, Secret Base won a Webby Award for its Beef History series. In May 2024, the company launched Top Secret Base, a paid subscription tier on Patreon. On the 11th of February 2025, Vox Media laid off three employees from Secret Base, a group that represented more than 20% of the channel's staff. Among those let go were Steven Godfrey, who had been with SB Nation since 2011, and Kofie Yeboah, who had worked at Secret Base since 2017.