According to executive Jamie Mottram, For The Win is the first sports site designed specifically to reach readers on viral networks like Facebook or Twitter. Owned by USA Today, the site is staffed by veteran sports writers from outlets like Deadspin and the New York Times who are tasked with finding sharable content.

“You don’t have to be a sports fan to laugh at the ridiculous new logo of the New Orleans Pelicans or openly weep at the 30 year old bat boy with Down Syndrome’s reaction to a Reds home run,” said Mottram, in a phone interview.

Mottram, whose pasts gigs include creating Yahoo! Sports’ blog network and AOL’s Fanhouse, is fond of using terms like “viral lift” and “social currency” to explain For The Win’s plan to build an audience through social media.

For The Win’s social-first approach follows the playbook of viral powerhouse BuzzFeed and newcomer Upworthy. Both these sites, which rely heavily on analytics and A/B headline testing, have acquired enormous audiences by looking to social media, rather than their homepages, as a primary source of traffic. Mottram thinks such tactics can give For The Win an edge as it competes with traditional outlets like ESPN and CBS Sports, and with popular digital natives like Deadspin, SB Nation and Bleacher Report.

“I think a lot of those sites are catering to legacy behaviors and technology,” said Mottram. “SB Nation was born on online communities — message boards around each team. Bleacher Report is a search-oriented content farm. For The Win is produced on a basis of really sharable content.”

The site’s distribution and content strategy will also rely on the sprawling sports network of USA Today parent, Gannett Company, which has affiliation agreements with properties like MLB Trade Rumors and Black Sports Online. For The Win’s content will also appear in legacy properties like the paper edition of USA Today.

For The Win is opening shop with 10 writers and editors and, for the first two months, is relying on Right Guard as an exclusive sponsor. Down the road, says Mottram, the site will rely on a dual revenue stream of display and native advertising.

Correction: this story was updated at 11:45ET to reflect that Gannett has affiliation agreements with certain properties but does not control them as previously stated.

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Gannett did not disclose the purchase price for Fantasy Sports Ventures, a property in which it acquired a minority share in 2008. But a 2010 report valued the company’s flagship site, The Big Lead, in the “low seven figures.”

Sports properties are hot items these days as a series of upstarts have emerged to challenge the 800-pound gorillas in the vertical, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Sports. The most successful new players include SB Nation and Bleacher Report, sites that rely heavily on local, often-unpaid contributors who are obsessed with individual teams and topics. The popularity of the sites suggests that sports readers are not put off by amateur or opinion-based reporting.

On its website, Big Lead Sports claims it was fourth in comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) sports rankings in July of 2010 with 17 million unique visitors. In its announcement, Gannett claims that all of the Fantasy League Ventures blogs — which cut across all major sports — received 19 million unique visitors.

Gannett says the combined property will place it into the top five of digital sports properties. The claim appears reliable based on this recent AdAge report which list USA Today’s Sports Media Group as the ninth most popular property with about 11 million unique views.

The acquisition is also a shrewd play for Gannett because it gives the company a big toehold into fantasy sports. The new property reportedly has 500,000 subscribers in a growing market that fantasy business site Rotobiz claims has 32 million participants.

More details about the acquisition can be found in the company’s press release.

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Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Tyler Bleszinski cofounded the company. SB Nation has expanded aggressively organically and through acquisitions under Jim Bankoff, who started as an advisor and became CEO in January 2009 when it had roughly 1 million uniques. Internal figures from *Google* Analytics peg it at more than 25 million monthly uniques now.

It has had plenty of fuel, raising nearly $24 million from investors including Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Interactive Partners. As important, Vox Media has invested in developing technology that is used to power the sites and their journalism; that’s one of the aspects that drew Topolsky, who can wax rhapsodic about the various elements. The company also provides a common sales platform. Vox Media has nearly 90 employees.

Bankoff plans to use both to expand beyond sports and tech but he isn’t ready to talk details. In a pre-launch interview, he said, “Our mission to empower talented web voices. Tomorrow we’re all focused on making sure The Verge gets off to a strong start. We definitely will be pursuing other verticals with the same mindset.”

In the case of SB Nation and The Verge, that would be young, tech savvy affluent males. The Verge launches with BMW, Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung as sponsors. Marty Moe, an AOL (NYSE: AOL) vet like Bankoff, is publisher and gets founder credit with Topolsky. The about section on the new site sets an interesting tone when it comes to the way the company and the verticals are set up: “The Verge is a technology-focused news publication founded in 2011 by Joshua Topolsky and Marty Moe in partnership with Vox Media and its CEO Jim Bankoff.” Moe is also chief content officer of Vox Media.

The Verge, which went due to go live overnight, is the first big test of what Vox Media can do outside sports. Bankoff is banking on Topolsky and a team of nearly 30 full and part-time staffers to create a full-blown 24/7 personal tech site from scratch without having to incubate the expertise. To take advantage of the post-announcement momentum and build an audience, the team has been operating a blog called This Is My Next, which already has drawn 3 million uniques and more than 10 million pageviews.

Asked what would make The Verge different from all the other tech sites, Topolsky quickly replied, “The quality of the content — authoritative, trustworthy, great content. Not just ther quality but the breadth.” That includes in-depth reviews and longer-form magazine-style articles a la Wired. Other features include a products database integrated with the news, comparison tools, and an emphasis on community. The latter shouldn’t be confused with creating a site on user gen content, “This is not crowdsourced content. It’s curated editorial content we’re paying top dollar for,” Topolsky stressed. He compares the site to an app that will get constant iteration.

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Over the past few weeks, a steady stream of writers and editors have jumped ship from the AOL site Engadget, and on Sunday, it became obvious this mass defection was more than just coincidence. The site’s entire senior staff has joined SB Nation, a media startup focused (for now at least) on the sports world, where they are planning to create a new gadget-oriented site. This news does two things: It reinforces how SB Nation could become a significant player in the media space, and it shines a spotlight on one of the major weaknesses in AOL’s growth plans.

Even before he left AOL, it seemed obvious Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky wasn’t comfortable with the new direction CEO Tim Armstrong was charting, particularly the so-called “AOL Way,” which was revealed in a series of slides from an internal presentation, and involved quotas for page views and a search-driven strategy that screamed “content farm.” The Engadget editor made it clear at the time that this approach would not apply to his site, but it came as no surprise when Senior Writer Paul Miller quit, citing the new AOL directives as a major factor in his departure. Miller said:

It doesn’t take a veteran of the publishing world to realize that AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content. As detailed in the “AOL Way,” and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against.

In a blog post published after the SB Nation news broke this past weekend, Topolsky also took some parting shots in AOL’s direction, saying:

SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam.

Arianna Huffington, who took over control of AOL’s editorial direction shortly after The Huffington Post was acquired for $315 million in February, has said in interviews — including one with a deeply antagonistic New York Times writer in that paper’s Sunday magazine this weekend — that the quota and search-driven strategy outlined in the “AOL Way” document is not the approach she plans to take. She has talked about letting authors be guided by their passions, and AOL has been getting rid of freelancers and hiring more staff writers in what appears to be an attempt to become more professional.

The biggest problem for AOL, however, is that doing this — and moving away from the content-farm approach — is likely to make the company’s content operations a lot more expensive, and that’s not something the cash-strapped former web portal can really afford. And whether Huffington likes it or not, her CEO does seem to see content as just a commodity to wrap advertising around.

The departure of the Engadget staff highlights another problem as well, which is that anyone who achieves a certain profile or status as a writer within AOL is probably going to start looking around for a better deal. This isn’t something that is unique to the former web giant, of course. All content companies suffer from the same kind of problem, since their main assets — the writers or creators of their content — are fungible and can leave at a moment’s notice. But AOL is in a particularly tenuous position because its content-focused strategy is so new, and suspicions about its true motivations (i.e, search-driven content farming) are so high. Firing hundreds of writers, as AOL did recently, also doesn’t really endear you to your staff.

The other interesting aspect of this news is that it clearly marks the rise of SB Nation as a substantial player in the online media space. The company started as a group of hyper-focused sports blogs co-founded by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, and in 2008 added CEO Jim Bankoff — a former AOL executive, and one of the architects of the company’s original acquisition of Engadget. Over the past three years, Bankoff has built a substantial business while staying largely under the radar.

The company recently closed a $10.5-million funding round from heavyweights Khosla Ventures and Accel Partners, and it seems obvious Bankoff plans to use that financing to expand his operations in new areas. Anyone who thought the company was just going to focus on sports and leave the rest of the web-content game to AOL and Yahoo should probably revise their thinking pretty quickly.

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One of the basic tenets of the 1996 Telecom Act was unbundled access to the telecom facilities of the local phone companies, which meant competing phone companies could access the so-called “last-mile” that led to people’s homes over the incumbent carrier’s network. The change in law created an insane amount of competition, and turned the economics of the business on its head. It led to kamikaze-style pricing of phone minutes. Voice had been the primary source of revenue for phone companies for nearly a century.

The increased competition was coupled with the arrival of Internet and Internet-based telephony. That allowed rivals such as cable companies to further take away voice customers. Skype, Vonage and others only added to the phone companies’ misery. Today, phone companies are happy to give away voice-minutes as long as you buy data from them.

Why do I bring that ancient history up?

Mostly because as I sit in the crowded Virgin America red-eye flight to New York, I’m thinking about the media business and the parallels I see between it and the media industry. In the media industry, we’re seeing an unbundling of a highly vertical business, with the most lucrative parts being siphoned off by Internet-based low-cost rivals.

Indulge me, for a minute. For longest time, things were quite cozy in the traditional media world. The large newspaper and magazine companies managed to survive the arrival of radio and television.

When competition got too intense, different types of media companies merged. It was something that made perfect sense. Time Inc., CNN, HBO — all became Time Warner — and it was a good example of such cross-platform synergy. When they applied the same logic to Internet by buying AOL, it blew up in their face. You’ll see why.

Many of us confuse the media companies as creators of media and content. In reality, their barrier to entry was ownership of distribution platforms. Just as telecoms of the past maintained their near monopoly by controlling the last mile of the network, the media companies maintained their money machine by controlling the distribution network: trucks, radio waves and television frequencies. The arrival of cable loosened their grip, but not as much.

Then came the Internet, which meant the distribution network was no longer under control of a select few. This saw the rise of new media entities such as CNET (now owned by CBS, an old media company.) And just as the distribution network was accessible to all, new open-source tools such as WordPress (see disclosure) came to market, making it easy for anyone to become a publisher of their own newspaper. With that began the great unbundling of the media business: something which continues today.

In the past, a typical big city newspaper would have multiple components: national and international news, sports, entertainment, business, travel, food, and real estate. These segments would bring in readers, which in turn would get the much-needed advertising dollars.

Today, the real estate section of a newspaper has been replaced by Curbed, Zillow and RedFin — with real estate advertising dollars flying away from newspapers to these new services.

For sports, you don’t need the back page; after all, you have SBNation, DeadSpin and ESPN. For technology news, you have TechCrunch; for analysis, you have GigaOM. For food-related stuff, you visit Zagat, Yelp, Epicurious, FoodSpotting and Foursquare. When it comes to entertainment news, PopSugar, Gawker, and thousands of other sites will keep you as busy as you want. Classifieds are for Craigslist. The brand advertising has followed, decamping from the pages of newspapers and television screens to these new media entities. In a post last fall, I wrote:

Because these new media are attuned to the needs of a new kind of information consumer, it’s hardly a surprise that media’s single largest source of revenues — advertising dollars — are getting sliced and diced in pursuit of this elusive, always transforming, info-savvy media consumer. Unfortunately, the media is used to selling page views, impressions and massive audiences: metrics as archaic as drinking on the job and smoking in a doctor’s office.

On the flip side, the unbundled television experience providers continue to do well. YouTube and Hulu, which doesn’t reveal their sales are growing steadily. (Hulu has said that it is bringing in over $240 million a year, but had declined to comment on profits.) The growth in their audience — YouTube has 101 million monthly uniques and Hulu with 12.3 million monthly uniques — is a very rough proxy of audience’s preferences.

In 2005, the newspaper industry had revenue of around $47 billion. Today, it is half that amount. The radio and television industry have gone through the same compression. TV advertising declined 21.2 percent from $52 billion in 2008 to $41 billion in 2009, and fell a further 12 percent in 2010 according to the Yankee Group.

Today, no one cares if Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network or the USA Network carries House. What matters is House. The show has been unbundled from the distribution network, which in turn has shifted the value to the show and the not the distribution platform.

As Joshua Auerbach of Betaworks had earlier pointed out:

Why doesn’t the traditional model work online? In short, the web is too fragmented (millions of videos, millions of web sites), too loosely coupled (countless hyperlinks, embed codes, APIs), and too nascent (too few revenue models, too little clarity about the future) to fit comfortably into a media conglomerate as they exist today.

The unbundling is also forcing a new kind of economics on the media industry. For the longest time, because the media companies controlled the distribution platforms, they could charge exorbitantly high rates for their advertising inventory. There was a lot less transparency in the system at that time, and arbitrary metrics like cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) became standard for the industry.

That CPM has become a millstone around the industry’s neck in this new Internet-centric environment, which has a lot more transparency (though not as much as we think there should be.) Today’s media industry, regardless of individual companies’ businesses, is a slave to page views and video views. Demand Media and the AOL of today are no different from the low-cost and flat-rate VoIP providers: selling cheap, search-optimized pages for nano-pennies.

And just as SMS, IM, Facebook and Twitter started to siphon away conversation minutes away from the traditional phone system, we are seeing something similar happen to the media industry as well. The chase for page views is going to face a whole different set of challenges from the likes of Facebook, Zynga, Netflix and Twitter. These services are siphoning off attention (and thus time) from what we have so far known as media.

Perhaps it is time for the media industry to come to terms with unbundling and re-imagine the definition of media. If it isn’t the medium, then what is it?

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If you like Instagram, CameraBag and Hipstamatic, then you should definitely try out this 99-cent photo app created by Stuck in Customs. 100 Cameras and I gives you access to 100 different effects to add to your old or new photos. It can turn boring photos into elegant works of art, allowing you to pretend that you actually know how to take great pictures. It’s beautifully designed, and the filters are well thought out. I like that you can share photos via email or on different social networks including Facebook.

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When it comes to being passionate and engaged, nothing (with the possible exception of some religious cults) matches the kind of devotion that sports fans have to their local teams. Those fans are the heart and soul of sports-based media company SB Nation, which just closed a $10.5-million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, along with Accel Partners and Comcast Interactive. The company says it plans to use the money to expand its network and build out its mobile strategy. In a sense, SB Nation has created a hyper-local news operation — much like what Aol is trying to create with its Patch project — except it’s all about sports.

The SB Nation network encompasses blogs focused on almost 300 separate brands, including those devoted to individual teams, leagues and sports coverage in a number of cities and major regions — blogs like Twinkie Town (about the Minnesota Twins) and Bleed Cubbie Blue (about the Chicago Cubs). The company has more than 400 writers under contract, and a proprietary content-management platform that Bankoff said provides bloggers with real-time analytics but also the “deep community and social interaction” that the network sees as a core value for its readers — an approach that any locally-focused media venture would be wise to emulate.

What eventually became SB Nation grew out of a sports-themed blog called Athletics Nation in Oakland, started by Tyler Bleszinski — who is now the company’s editorial director — and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, better known as the founder of the political commentary blog network Daily Kos, in 2003. The two developed a broader network of fan-based blogs called SportsBlogs Nation and in 2008 got a round of financing from Accel Partners, Allen & Co. and a number of angel investors, and Bankoff joined as chief executive. “Spectator sports provide a common cultural touchstone,” Bankoff says. “Digital media allows us to capture that conversation and make it valuable.”

SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff

The idea of topic-focused blogs with real-time content and a passionate readership was a natural for Bankoff — he is a former senior executive at Aol, where he was in charge of developing the blog strategy that led to the creation of the massively successful entertainment blog TMZ, as well as the acquisition of Weblogs Inc., which brought to Aol such leading blogs as Engadget. “I have always believed that online publishing is getting more targeted, more social and more real-time,” Bankoff said. The CEO said that SB Nation’s traffic and readership numbers have tripled in the past year, and that the network now gets about 17 million unique visitors a month.

Is there anything that broader news-oriented sites like Patch — or the hyper-local offerings that the Washington Post is reportedly planning to launch — can learn from SB Nation? Bankoff says one of the important features of the network is that hyper-focused, topic-specific blogs don’t just appeal to readers, they appeal to advertisers as well. “You can have a much deeper and more focused conversation as a member of these communities,” the SB Nation CEO said, “and that’s what advertisers care about.” The important thing is that the writers are a part of that community and engage with it on a deep level, he said.

Both Yahoo and Bankoff’s former employer seem to have come to a similar realization, that what works in sports and technology-focused blogging might be applicable to general news and other topics: Yahoo has built up its own sports-oriented media-blogging strategy over the past year or so, and is now trying to extend that strategy to news and politics by building up its blogging ranks. And after building out its FanHouse network by hiring a number of prominent sports journalists, Aol seems to be pursing the same topic-focused approach with its acquisition of TechCrunch. Game on.

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