On Friday morning, Vox Media, which owns SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, Polygon, and New York Magazine, along with Group Nine brands like The Dodo, PopSugar, and Thrillist, announced it would be laying off seven percent of its workers, about 130 employees.
The dust has yet to settle on this round of layoffs, but it's already clear that the layoffs have hit SB Nation and its affiliated team sites hard. An unknown number of employees at SB Nation's flagship site were laid off (not that there were many left after Vox Media layoffs gutted SB Nation in 2020). Additionally, multiple sources told Defector that all but six of the SB Nation hockey websites will no longer be supported by Vox Media, and that most, if not all, of the MLS team sites will also be cut. Sources say that Vox Media has axed nearly all SB Nation podcasts as well.
If you follow me, you probably recognize the name "SB Nation", probably solely because you recognize that it's the site where Jon Bois published 17776 and 20020. So you might be surprised to learn that the "SB" in SB Nation literally stands for "sports blogs", and started as Tyler Bleszinski's Athletics Nation in 2003, obsessively covering the Oakland A's. Then:
In the few years after SB Nation came into existence, they absorbed blogs for every team in the NBA, NHL, MLB, and NFL, as well as some major college programs and other teams.
Sometime in 2008, Bleszinksi and SB Nation decided it was time to raise money and expand the business.
There were all these disparate, team-specific blogs around the internet at the time, and Bleszinski decided to offer them a platform and a little bit of money. Sure, they said; they were otherwise doing this for free, after all.
You can easily see where this went wrong. "How SB Nation Profits Off An Army Of Exploited Workers":
These sites are run by managers who are expected to post articles and videos, track and sometimes break news, manage writers, conduct interviews, assign stories, find contributors, edit posts, write analysis, and generally do the work of journalism. These responsibilities can add up to a demanding job—or, in some cases, a close to full-time one—but site managers are independent contractors who are paid a monthly stipend that varies widely. According to more than a dozen former and current site managers I spoke to, that stipend tends to hover around $600. The stipend often doubles as a budget.
[...]
Like, say, Uber drivers, SB Nation team site writers are promised flexible hours, extra cash, the chance to pursue their passions and maybe even launch a better career. And like others in similar situations, they often get sucked into working longer hours and meeting quotas. The workers who help prop up the enterprise see little to no direct return on their work and there’s little if any reciprocity between labor and capital. The fact that most people don’t know or especially care about any of this does not make the status quo tenable, and the fact that people have agreed to an arrangement doesn’t mean they’re not being exploited for corporate gain.
The comparison to Uber is apt. It's also telling of that particular era of the internet; if you were being strictly chronological, you would actually write that Uber is "SB Nation for ride-hailing".
SB Nation became Vox Media in in 2011. In 2015, the company was valued at $1 billion. The above article was published in 2017.
The enthusiasm is still there
SkyonAir, contributor, Davy Jones Locker Room (Seattle Kraken):
This year I really felt like we'd hit a decent groove, and we'd even had actual sponsors for a month or so. That felt like we were getting somewhere. To see all that get slapped down so casually on the basis of cost-cutting is...painful. I really wanted to make something fun here. I really wanted to make this work.
But for now, for you all, I'll keep making gamethreads and recaps until Chorus physically does not allow me to do that.
At the top of a dozen NHL blogs that are part of SB Nation is a post from someone, informing their community that their site has gotten the axe: come the end of February, Vox will no longer be paying contributors, and will no longer be hosting their sites. (They initially seem to be willing to help transition sites off of Vox, but who knows what will even be possible for these communities in the next six weeks.)
Invariably in these posts, you hear the passion about having had a place to write about the team they loved, with a community of commenters they cared about. Vox took this labor of love, provided a bare-minimum platform for it, underpaid their blog managers, sold ads to the highest bidder, and ran straight to the bank.
We don't have a survey of SB Nation contributors to tell us how many were writing to try and get a career in sports writing, or because they hoped to eventually get a paid position, or because they just liked writing and having an audience. I'm sympathetic to all these realities; in my industry, of course, billion-dollar companies use free labor in the form of "open source" all the time, some of which I wrote just because I wanted to write it. And, hell, if you really want to ignore a lot of important context (and if you do I will be very cross with you), you could claim I'm writing this on a site I pay for just because I like writing and having an audience.
But, surely, there can be a channel for this sports blogger enthusiasm that is way less exploitative. SB Nation decided to put a lot of blogs on an interconnected platform, and this gave a bunch of writers an audience — especially today, where you only have an audience if you already have an audience. What if someone built those, but in a way that's fair to its contributors? Would it even work? Perhaps not as an ad-supported site, as we learn time and time again as sites collapse as the ad industry continues to fall out from under them, but maybe something closer to Defector's or formerly1 The Athletic's membership models?
Probably not. Trying to recreate Defector's success, even if your contributors aren't full-time, would be trying to catch lightning in a bottle a second time2. Capitalism is certainly not favoring anyone who attempts to fix this by making sports blogging fair(er) for the writers, but here's hoping someone at least tries.
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"Formerly" because The Athletic is now owned by The New York Times, and paying for an Athletic subscription feels quite a bit less like supporting independent sports media now.
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Actually it'd be like trying to catch lightning twice in the same bottle a second time. Defector was hovering somewhere around sustainability; what ultimately helped contribute to its more massive success was Normal Gossip, a not-sports podcast from a sports blog.
