NEW YORK — A decade ago, when contributor-driven media companies like Bleacher Report and Huffington Post grew in popularity, Asaf Peled took notice. The Wharton-educated Israeli was a Cisco Systems executive at the time with no professional background in sports or media but believed he saw an opportunity to streamline the publishing process.
The company Peled started in 2011, Minute Media, now operates three sports websites that publish 30,000 pieces of content per month and have a combined reach of nearly 85 million visitors worldwide. The flagship brand is 90Min, a global soccer platform that publishes stories in nearly a dozen languages. That has since been followed by 12Up, a U.S.-centric sports lifestyle site, and DBLTAP, Minute Media’s esports brand.
As Minute Media president Rich Routman explained, the content-production process was laborious—“a bit of a Jurassic ecosystem.” Not only has Minute Media had success using its proprietary publishing platform for its own editorial content, but the company also has started a SaaS business in licensing the software to MSN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, Turner-owned Esporte Interativo in Brazil, German-based ProSeiben and India’s HT Media. Having that second revenue source has attracted investors. The company just completed a new $17 million Series F round of funding that included Goldman Sachs and Vintage Investment Partners, and the total capital raised so far is $77 million.
“We’re trying to build a tech-first media company,” Routman said. “Some people say content-first or studio or social or millennial or global or whatever hot word. For us, it is about the platform and the tech. Everything else follows suit.”
Minute Media created that technology in Tel Aviv, where roughly 70 developers and engineers are based. In all, the company has grown to 180 full-time staff and also has offices in New York, Manila, and London. Artificial intelligence is used to aid the full-time editors in wading through the 100,000 monthly submissions, providing an initial layer of elimination to winnow down the total to a more manageable number. The development team is also unbundling the platform in order to license à la carte.
Routman said his first editorial project, 90Min, now captures roughly 65 million readers per month. The site also provided an abject lesson.
“Initially we started in English language and translated for everything else, and we realized that doesn’t work,” Routman said. “If you’re a Mexican soccer fan in Mexico City, you need to have the tone and voice of that particular region of the world as well. I guess you can’t even do Spanish language in the Spain dialect and expect that to work in Mexico.”
The language inventory now include Spanish, both from Spain and Latin America, as well other major European and Mediterranean languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish) and Asian (Indonesian bahasa, Vietnamese and soon to be Mandarin). The exact ratio varies, but generally about 70 percent of the content comes from contributors and 30 percent from staff.
“We really think of ourselves as the fan voice in everything that we do,” Routman said.
That includes a lot of opinionated pieces and professional videos produced with that fan perspective in mind. In one video series called the Year of the Underdog, 90Min journalist Ben Haines went behind the scenes with the lowest-ranked club still alive in the FA Cup, the English soccer tournament that covers all divisions. The first episode chronicled the eighth-tier Heybridge Swifts before moving onto Slough Town—the only club at the seventh rung to win its first match. The fact that Slough’s second-round match was televised live on BT Sports was so momentous that its 4-0 defeat didn’t seem to matter so much.
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Emboldened by the success of 90Min, Minute Media moved into the crowded U.S. sports market, knowing full well that the climb to relevance or dominance would be far more challenging. The editors identified two markets they felt were underserved domestically: sports lifestyle and Spanish language. Launched in 2016, 12Up competes more with Deadspin, The Big Lead or For The Win than a more classic sports news and analysis site. The majority of its readership is in the 18-to-28 age demographic, and roughly a third of its 15 million monthly users are seeking out Spanish content.
“We thought the emerging segment of sports was the fashion aspects, the individual players and their personalities rather than the game itself,” Routman said.
Then came the esports play, with Minute Media launching DBLTAP in June 2017. That new platform quickly offered its own lessons on readership: esports fans drew from the same young demographic at 12Up, but preferred video to text, Reddit to Facebook, and desktop to mobile. While Twitch is the industry leader in streaming events, Routman said, “There’s no storytelling in esports. No one knows who the heroes and villains are.”
DBLTAP has licensing deals to show some highlights but won’t show events, opting instead to align with teams and players to draw out the best characters. Sometimes, there’s mainstream crossover. The Philadelphia 76ers own the all-female esports unit Team Dignitas, so a recent video featured 76ers center Richaun Holmes playing Counter-Strike player Emmalee “Emuhleet” Garrido in PIG, i.e. a shorter game of HORSE. Holmes handicapped by wearing oven mitts. (Spoiler: Holmes still won by a letter.)
Routman said his plan after raising new capital is to avoid complacency with the technology and be “nimble” enough to make acquisitions as deemed necessary. The New York City team’s growth from a shared WeWork space two years ago to a capacity Midtown office now suggests Minute Media has a compelling business plan in a publishing market that has struggled.
“I think people are looking for something a little bit different right now because of all the volatility,” Routman said.