BigLead Sports Blog Sold to USA Today

BigLead Sports, now a property of USA Today, published the top online sports property rankings per number of unique visitors, for December 2011. Which is nice for BigLead Sports, they rank at number 6, at 19.38 million uniques. Very nice. Separately reported by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association in its most recent newsletter, is that the USA Today/Big Lead transaction was valued at $30 million. That may or not be nice. Probably nice, though, for the shareholders of BigLead, which allow them to exit.

Let's look at the comScore ranking and then discuss the valuation of the BigLead property and why or why not the valuation may be reasonable:

Top 15 Online Sports Sites (December 2011)
Unique Users (USA) (000s)
Source: www.comScore.com

1. Yahoo 53,239
2. ESPN 43,252
3. Fox Sports 37,836
4. NFL 26,286
5. Sports Illustrated 20,132
6. BigLead Sports 19,384
7. CBS Sports 18,097
8. USA Today 15,646
9. NBC Sports 14,891
10. SB Nation 9,694
11. BleacherReport 9,178
12. Sporting News 8,798
13. MLB 7,132
14. Stack Media 5,832
15. JUMPTV 4,197

So, was the $30 million price for BigLead Sports a good one? Let's take a look. This site could be described as a blog and aggregator. It has some unique content, but it also pulls in selected material from other sites, to include other owned "partner" sites. It appears to rely on an advertising model as its primary revenue driver. Given the high number of monthly unique visitors, that isn't such a bad idea.

OK, so is the price fair? The assumed valuation for BigLead is $30,000,000 / 19,384,000 or $1.54 per unique visitor. If that is now the going rate for a sports website, that might put a downward bias on the value of similar properties. If the evaluated property had significant additional revenue streams, typical of pay-to-play fantasy sports websites, then $1.54 per unique visitor would have to be augmented by a more common metric associated with gaming sites, such as annual revenue per user or a multiple of gross gaming revenue. Overall, fairly well done by BigLead Sports as they started a blog in 2006 and just under 6 years later have a $30 million exit.