Fox Sports Buys Sports Blog Network Yardbarker

News Corp.’s Fox Sports Interactive has bought up Yardbarker, the popular sports opinion site and blog network. Yardbarker had already been partnering with Fox Sports both on content-sharing and on ad sales, and, in a blog post, Yardbarker CEO Pete Vlastelica says the company will now “increase the distribution of … content through the various channels that FOX controls” and also collaborate more extensively on advertising. Yardbarker will continue to be run as a standalone operation.

Yardbarker has more than 600 independent publishers in its network, which reaches 15 million unique users a month; Yardbarker.com itself, which primarily features posts from those sites, gets about 2.2 million unique monthly visitors, according to Google’s AdPlanner.

Not sure if the level of activity is unusual, but we’ve seen several acquisitions of sports blogs in recent months. SB Nation purchased The Sporting Blog from Sporting News in July, while Fantasy Sports Ventures paid in the “low seven figures” to buy The Big Lead in June.

Financial terms of this deal were not disclosed. Yardbarker had raised over $7.5 million in funding, most recently last September. Fox Sports Interactive has made several other digital deals over the years, including picking up Scout Media for $60 million five years ago, and, more recently, taking a stake OpenSports.

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