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

MITCHELL BLATT

Will Leitch once was a journalist. Now he posts pictures of athletes like Matt Leinart over there. The entire post accompanying that photo included a total of six sentences then a link to the site that actually reported the story.

You can’t blame him though; when you post needless trivia and gossip 20 times a day, you won’t be able to write a good long post very often. It’s the Gawker business model. The model that spawns false gossip about celebrities and athletes and others who are “protected by piles of money,” as former Gawker.com editor Emily Gould said infamously on Larry King Live on April 8, 2007.

Appropriately, it was just over a year later, April 29, 2008, that Will Leitch folded to Buzz Bissinger on Costas Now. Deadspin certainly doesn’t have the level of filth as Gawker.com, but, being owned by the same company, they basically do the same thing. The only difference, really, is people don’t care as much about athlete-gossip as they do about celebrity gossip, so there isn’t as much fallout when people see that Matt Leinart is “taking his offseason work quite seriously,” as Leitch said.

Emily Gould has since quit as editor of Gawker and now attends therapy, she wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this past Sunday, a fitting ending for someone who said, “No one has the reasonable expectation to be able to walk down the street and not be noticed.”

Gould and Leitch are both members of a disturbing new niche in the media that provides no value and no defense for their actions.

They reacted similarly in their respective media appearances, neither being able to justify their low-bar journalism, or their sometimes questionably ethical post topics. Leitch shuns his journalistic roots and seems to have no gripes with his cut-and-paste potshots. Gould actually referred to Gawker.com as “citizen journalism” before clarifying that, “Everybody reads it knowing it isn’t checked.”

Journalism indeed.

Gould certainly made the biggest fool of herself:

Emily Gould, Larry King Live, featuring Jimmy Kimmel

Notice her facial expression as she is asked serious questions about the repercussions of Gawker listing where celebrities are at any given time of day or just making up complete lies about them. She seems to think the questions were jokes (as she acknowledged in the Times Magazine). Go to 1:30, and an agent/publicist is saying his clients have been stalked because of the Gawker Stalker map that lists where celebrities are, and he says, “I’ve had my clients say, ‘These assholes,’” and Gould just makes childish facial expressions then laughs.

She shrugs off all the questions and saying, “This is citizen journalism. People don’t read it with the expectation that everything is the gospel. … It’s not checked.” That’s at 3 minutes. She didn’t attend journalism school, but still…

Leitch acted similarly, saying that it didn’t matter what he wrote, and besides, everyone already knows athletes get drunk. He says that athletes don’t care if they have their drunk pictures posted. Shawn Phillips says he wouldn’t want that shown of him (Video), and so did Braylon Edwards on Costas Now (Video).

The entire video of the Leitch’s confrontation isn’t available on YouTube, but you can watch it here.

At one point, Leitch was looking for sympathy from Edwards, so he says, “We get the pictures from Facebook … You don’t ever have any paparazzi?” to which Edwards replies, “We can’t go anywhere without watching ourselves.”

Gould and Leitch both gave the same answer as well when defending the purpose of their blogs, Gould being the more idiotic of the two once again.

Kimmel was talking about how Gawker lied about him being drunk and how they lie about lots of other celebrity gossip, then Gould says:

“I think it’s great that we’re not putting people up on a pedestal and worshipping them anymore.”

Kimmel: “But you’re throwing rocks at them.”

Then, one of the most idiotic quotes you’re ever going to read:

“Aren’t they sort of protected by piles of money?”

Leitch said no one is going to change their perception of an athlete based on a picture of them drunk. “He’s 24 years old. Of course that’s what he’s doing.”

Bissinger mocked him: “Oh, so you’re doing it to make them look human?”

Edwards voiced his agreement with Bissinger.

If Leitch is going to defend himself by saying that athletes don’t care, why doesn’t he stop posting pictures of athletes who do care? The fact is he doesn’t ask athletes before he posts pictures. Most of them want to be fun guys, so they play along, but he can’t keep pretending he actually cares what they think. Admit what you’re doing: profiting by making fun of athletes, who, in your own words, are just doing what you’d expect them to do.

I’m not going to say anything should be done about Deadspin like Stephen A. Smith would. It’s popular because people today have no attention span, so they like reading one paragraph blog entries on useless trivia. It’s all about the market. It’s just that Deadspin and Gawker suck, that’s all.

If you’re a journalist today, like Leitch was, and you start blogging like that, you’ve got no pride.

I just read Mitch’s post about the Cinncinatti Bengals, and how they sent a cease and desist letter to one of their biggest fans, a blogger who ran the blog, Stripe Hype.

Call me crazy, but this could be the start of something huge.

The Bengals are clearly on the look out for not threatening blogs. So what else might be out there? Who else might be looking?

I look at this letter they sent as totally ridiculous, but this much is clear. The big mighty franchise is now feeling the wrath of the small blog. Do you know what this means? It means we just might be getting closer to what we want.

What do we want exactly? Well for many in the blogosphere, press credentials. If the Bengals had just handed those out to this blogger, and let him take the pictures and conduct the interviews he wanted then this could have all been avoided.

Seriously, what’s better: informed media or any man?

This is in the internet folks. If teams starting going after their logo packages, by god, I think google would be left bare. Could you imagine searching “Bengals logo” and the only thing that came up was pages from the team’s website? There are Bengals Myspace layouts. Surely someone’s going to get sued!

I honestly believe that the Bengals are taking on an army and a world with this ludicrous cease and desist letter. Why? Well, if you start fearing for your logo’s safety what is your next plan of attack, raiding the entire internet until black and orange is in nothing but Halloween?

And just for kicks, because the Bengals appear to be pricks, I think Halloween the holiday should sue the Bengals for their use of Orange and Black.

Seriously, this is ridiculous. The Bengals have their robots who write their perfect columns about that perfect team. But other fans on the internet see quite the opposite. So they voice it. And they use (gasp) Bengals colors and logos to emphasize and drive home their point and of course to visually enhance the site.

As Mitch noted, are they going to censor out our use of team names and player names? I think he actually didn’t go far enough. Why not censor out the cities too and simply place the longitude and latitude, because somewhere a city name has to be copyrighted.

If the Bengals PR guy is trying to get good attention for his bad (on the field and off) scrubs, dare I suggest some goodwill stuff, like allowing more people to have media credentials so that they can see what really happens inside the Jungle. O wait a minute, I think it’s clear how the Bengals are. Greedy and trying to run off the people who oppose their mediocre play. Hey Mike Brown! You can’t just 1984 the blogosphere. But you can look like more a schmuch then ever.

Now please Mike Brown, are you guys going to sue me too?