Deadspin Valued at Over $16 Million

How much is your sports blog worth? Did it make the top 100? Read this to find out.

I am basing the valuations off DN Scoop, a website that values websites based on links, PR, traffic rank, and other factors. The general valuation for a website on sale is 10-20 times monthly earnings. That can vary based on domain name, branding exposure, etc, but the valuations should be somewhat accurate.

The site only works for entire domains, so blogs hosted on another domain like the Fanhouse won’t qualify. The reason is, this program will look into all links going to the entire AOL domain, not just the sports blog.

Here are the top 100:

EDIT: Every Day Should be Saturday is actually valued at $1,843,744, not $31,360, however, it’s alternate domain, edsbs.com, was valued at $31,360.

1.) Deadspin – $16,567,150
2.) Baseball Prospectus – $3,325,020
3.) Blog Maverick – $2,426,316
4.) Baseball Musings – $2,021,668
5.) Hardball Times – $1,954,316
6.) The Big Lead – $1,833,380
7.) With Leather – $1,802,000
8.) Sports by Brooks – $1,656,200
9.) Can’t Stop the Bleeding – $1,470,044
10.) Mister Irrelevant – $1,367,296
11.) The Offside – $1,337,720
12.) We Are the Postmen – $1,319,772
13.) Dan Shanoff – $1,306,768
14.) Sunday Morning QB – $1,283,448
15.) Kissing Suzy Kolber – $1,265,046
16.) Deuce of Davenport – $845,424
17.) Mets Blog – $942,820
18.) Larry Brown Sports – $893,800
19.) Brahsome – $840,274
20.) MLB Trade Rumors – $505,760
22.) The Starting Five – $401,100
23.) Pro Football Talk – $260,350
24.) Minor League Ball – $224,896
25.) Burnt Orange Nation – $210,152
26.) Golden State of Mind – $208,408
27.) Slam Online – $206,870
28.) Bucs Dugout – $201,622
29.) Dawg Sports – $197,072
30.) The Good Phight – $196,224
31.) Beyond the Box Score – $190,624
32.) Celtics Blog – $173,880
34.) Kuklas Korner – $154,336
35.) Southside Sox – $152,096
36.) EPL Talk – $146,496
37.) Sports Frog – $146,168
38.) The Basketball Jones – $142,572
39.) Blogging the Boys – $142,572
40.) McCovery Chronicles – $138,920
41.) Bugs and Cranks – $138,648
42.) Draft Express – $137,760
43.) Bloody Elbow – $127,196
44.) Uni Watch Blog – $137,122
45.) 38 Pitches – $134,724
46.) Royals Review – $134,624
50.) Fish Stripes – $134,624
51.) Camden Chat – $134, 624
52.) Sac Town Royalty – $131,672
53.) Lone Star Ball – $129,696
54.) Bright Side of the Sun – $128,048
55.) Arrowhead Pride – $128,048
56.) Bleeding Green Nation – $128,048
57.) Surviving Grady – $127,420
58.) Lets Go Tribe – $124,096
59.) Halos Heaven – $123,424
60.) Niners Nation – $122,748
61.) Pounding the Rock – $120,772
62.) Behind the Steel Curtain – $120,772
63.) Hogs Haven – $116,812
64.) Mavs Moneyball – $116,812
65.) The Falcoholic – $113,632
66.) Indy Cornrows – $113,321
67.) On Frozen Blog – $106,848
68.) Detroit Bad Boys – $104,420
69.) Boston Sports Media – $93,000
70.) The Jets Blog – $90,496
72.) Baseball Think Factory – $84,061
73.) Knicker Blogger – $83,720
74.) First Inning – $83,224
75.) Behind the Jersey – $82,823
76.) Sports Agent Blog – $80,348
77.) Hoops Addict – $78,262
78.) Biz of Baseball – $75,048
79.) Dime – $57,460
80.) Brew Hoop – $52,600
81.) Fire Joe Morgan – $51,744
82.) Goat Riders – $51,520
83.) The 700 Level – $51,296
84.) River Ave Blues – $51,294
85.) Hot Foot Blog – $51,012
86.) Empty the Bench – $50,264
87.) Need 4 Sheed – $49,268
88.) Ump Bump – $47,742
89.) Homer Derby – $47,380
90.) Joe Sports Fan – $46,948
91.) NHL Hockey Blog -$45,835
92.) Losers With Socks – $40,994
93.) Mack Avenue Tigers – $32,700
94.) Supersonics Soul – $31,970
95.) Zoner Sports – $31,800
96.) U.S.S. Mariner – $31,702
97.) EDSBS – $31,360
98.) Storming the Floor – $29,376
99.) Awful Announcing – $24,168
100.) Gaslamp Ball – $23,296

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MITCHELL BLATT

I attacked Buzz Bissinger yesterday (Post) for his stance on blogging in his debate with Will Leitch. (Video) Well, now I’m going to attack Leitch. While Bissinger attacked blogs for their offensive and angry nature, it was Bissinger who couldn’t speak a single sentence without turning the volume up to Stephen A. Smith. However, Leitch was ignorant about the issue of why blogs are popular.

Leitch criticized mainstream media for having too much access. He thinks that if you are able to interview athletes, for example like Henry Abbott of TrueHoop, one of the most popular basketball blogs, you will somehow not be able to write a good blog. He attacks the “privileged sportswriters” with access. What about “privileged” bloggers who have people sending them pictures of Matt Leinart doing a beer bong? Deadspin is one of few blogs that has access to those types of photos that are popular on sports blogs.

The thing is not whether you have access or not, but what you do with your access, and having credentials gives you a better chance of getting to seeing the sport and writing about it in any style.

For example, what if a blogger went up to a baseball player and asked them to piss in a cup so that they could check for steroids. That would be hilarious. It was when Rick Reilly did it.

However Big Daddy Bitch, writing on Deadspin, used that as an example of why sportswriters suck. He said:

You can’t brutally criticize athletes and expect them to give you any access.

But Rick Reilly criticizes athletes all the time, for example in his attempt to test Sosa. Now maybe he’d have less access if they talked about Rich Garces’ tits or Tony Parker’s vagina, but hell, what do you need that for?

Any real journalist can write a column criticizing a player while maintaining access. Sometimes an athlete will get offended and overreact, and hell, you’ve got another column to write about how you got in a fight with said athlete. Though it should be said that many columnists don’t even care about access. And yet those same columnists who don’t take advantage of potential access (i.e. Jay Mariotti) and instead write trashy articles about how Ozzie Guillen sucks more than Tony Parker’s vagina, are the columnists that Deadspinners hate. (I happen to hate Mariotti as well.)

Blogging isn’t about the everyday fan writing his opinion. (“We need to pull Carmona in the 8th! That was a bad decision! I should be manager!”) It’s just about having a personality. It’s just a different medium for the sports column (albeit one that allows more freedom in most cases.)

People don’t go online to read last night’s game story. They go online to read why Rich Garces sucks. If someone badgered Sosa about giving his urine, that would be popular in print or online.

Buzz Bissinger: Why He Didn’t Major in Economics

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Leitch……Bissinger

MITCHELL BLATT

Buzz Bissinger debated Will Leitch yesterday about blogging. (Video) Bissinger, a pulitzer prize winning journalist, has been criticized harshly for attacking blogging during that piece. While he has absolutely no clue about blogging, a larger issue is that he and others have absolutely no clue about the economy and about freedom.

Bissinger, who hates bloggers, gave bloggers utter respect during that debate by saying that blogging was going to put newspapers out of business. Blogs suck? Then why the fuck are newspapers going to go out of business?!

Because this bitch has no fucking clue about what drives the economy. It’s assholes like you who are putting newspapers out of business. You can’t get subscribers because subscribers don’t like the crap you pawn off as informed, intelligent articles. (Notice I have ratcheted up my cursing because Mr. Bitchinger criticized blogs for cursing too much.)

Let me lay down a few facts and tell you why your newspapers are or are not going out of business.

This isn’t about the fans or the average person having the voice or any bullshit like this. This is about the offensive loser having a voice. One thing the Bitch mentioned was how blogs are trashy and offensive. No argument there. A lot of them aren’t, but some of the most prominent ones are. Blogs lend themselves to that because there is no corporate eye staring at all the content to make sure it doesn’t offend any readers, cause controversy and lose advertisers.

This is true with other forms of communication as well, not just blogs. Anything that is mass produced, like major newspapers, has to be clean. However, there has always been extremist newspapers on the fringe attacking people in the most vile ways. They get away with it because they have a small target audience that agrees with them.

In modern media history, this kind of off color humor first became broadcast on a large scale with talk radio. Don Imus got fired from his radio station in 1969 for saying “hell.” God knows what would have happened if he made “nigger jokes.” Then in 1971, he got his real show underway, and now we have Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, a ton of other conservative hosts that Media Matters hates, and a few liberal shock jocks like Al Franken and Jerry Springer.

So blogs causing the fall of mainstream media? No, they are just following the same model that other media platforms have.

Back to Buzz…

Let me deconstruct some of his comments.

Buzz:

This guy [pointing at Will], whether we like it or not, is the future. I have a son who is 16 who is going to grow up and be reading much more of what is on the internet, much less of what is in a newspaper or what is in a book. What he’s going to read is going to be glib. It’s going to be profane.

Okay, good job parenting, Buzz. A pulitzer prize winner has a kid who doesn’t like to read literature and he blames it on the blogs.

I wonder why your honors student won’t read books? Is it because Will Leitch stole all your books and burnt them? Or is it because your kid enjoys reading blogs and you never instilled a love of literature in him?

What I’m saying is junior doesn’t open his web browser and go to deadspin.com because he hates Deadspin. Apparently he likes it or else he wouldn’t be reading it. This whole generation of people likes blogs because they are “edgy,” just like an older generation listens to talk radio because it’s edgy.

So what the hell does Buzz and Costas and all these other newspapermen think America needs to do about blogs? Stephen A. Smith, who runs a blog, has an idea:

Someone with no training should not be allowed to have any kind of format whatsoever to disseminate to the masses to the level which they can.

He advocates censorship. And on his off days, he fights for justice on issues like “the social implications surrounding Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens.”

I have yet to hear anyone actually advocate the reasons they support censorship or defend censorship. Mostly people are just saying, “Blogs are terrible! They must be undone!” without mentioning how they plan to do that. That’s probably because they realize that nothing can be done. They know that censorship is wrong, or at least impractical.

What they should realize is that the mainstream media has nothing to fear. Blogs will not mean the end of the traditional journalist.

It might hurt journalism a little–game stories won’t be as in depth, for example–but if the mainstream media did die, blogs would die. Bloggers get most of their material from the mainstream media–and newspapermen often acknowledge that, using it as a criticism. But, if they’re so scared that Americans will stop reading the paper, why would they think that bloggers get their news from there? That would mean that everyone, even blog readers, get their news from the mainstream media. Americans are always going to need news. Bloggers can’t uncover news; they just comment on it.

The medium might change, but the mainstream media is always going to be there. And if they disappear, well, I’m going to be raking in the moolah when I start my own mainstream media company.

Will Leitch: He’s Wrong About the Mainstream Media

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