The Athletic has raised an additional $50m to hire more overseas reporters following its successful move into coverage of the English Premier League last year, giving the US sports journalism site a valuation of roughly $500m.
The four-year-old start-up, which offers subscribers highly specialised, team-specific coverage, has attracted in total nearly $140m from investors such as Comcast Ventures, the media conglomerate’s investing arm.
Hollywood venture firm Plus Capital, backed by entertainment stars such as Matthew McConaughey, was among the participants in the most recent round, according to Axios, which first reported the news.
“The Athletic’s launch in the UK was our biggest ever, and we have been blown away by the reception we have received from subscribers around the world,” said co-founder and chief executive Alex Mather.
The Athletic has cast itself as a testing ground for a new type of in-depth, add-free sports coverage and has made waves for aggressively hoovering up senior football reporters, offering salaries it has called “extremely competitive”.
The company has also hired popular beat reporters, many with large numbers of devoted fans on social media, to write detailed news and analysis about every English Premier League club.
Last year, the company reached a half-million subscribers in the US and Canada, and it plans to have 100,000 paying readers in the UK by the end of the year. Mr Mather said the UK had become The Athletic’s fastest-growing market, with many North Americans subscribers reading its football coverage out of the UK.
With the most recent cash injection, the company plans to boost spending on current and new reporters as well as invest in its app and podcasts.
“Fans have really taken to the model — the ad-free reading experience and quality storytelling,” Adam Hansmann, The Athletic’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told the FT last year.
Investors had poured billions into digital media brands such as BuzzFeed and Vice Media, hoping that their high reader numbers would translate into big rewards from the booming online advertising market. But over the past few years, the same companies have had to slash their valuations and fire hundreds of reporters after failing to compete with Google and Facebook, which grab an ever-growing chunk of digital advertising spend.
The Athletic has put its news and analysis behind a paywall and promising a “no ads, no clickbait” service for £4.99 a month, or £59.99 a year.
“A subscription model is arguably much harder to build, but you accumulate relationships with customers rather than advertisers which is more permanent,” Mr Hansmann said.
Douglas McCabe from Enders Analysis said The Athletic differs from older digital media companies in that it comes from “a completely different era of the development of the internet”.
“It is not about advertising or sponsorship and it is entirely about the quality rather than quantity of content, and building a niche audience rather than thinking about scale,” he said.
Estimating the start-up’s success has been difficult as it does not reveal revenues or costs. Mr McCabe said success will depend on sports fans making The Athletic core to their daily football news habit.
“I don’t think yet that the UK launch has been a proven success, because it takes time,” he said. “But they are getting quite significant support.”
