Objective

Yahoo Sports, one of the internet’s leading destinations for comprehensive sports news and engaging fantasy games, experienced a transformational year in 2024 shaped by ambitious content, technology, and revenue goals.

 

Content: Media consumption is highly fragmented, as sports fans consume their news and highlights across multiple outlets, platforms, and devices. This digital wilderness makes it difficult for fans to find quality sports coverage. Yahoo Sports aims to make it easier by guiding fans to comprehensive sports content from across the internet. In doing so, it can achieve its broader mission of making sports fans smarter. 

 

Technology: Sports are best experienced together. That’s why Yahoo Sports is focused on building products that enable participation and community engagement. As an original fantasy sports pioneer, Yahoo Sports has a long history of delivering games that help fans connect and engage around sports’ biggest moments. It has accelerated this innovation over the past year across its platforms to strengthen its position as not only a leading destination for scores and news, but also a home for community engagement. 

Revenue: As the internet’s third-largest sports media destination, reaching an average of 115 million unique visitors a month per Comscore, Yahoo Sports is one of the best places for advertisers to reach sports fans. With unique scale comes unique opportunities to drive business growth. Yahoo Sports aimed to capitalize on these opportunities in 2024 to generate historic sales revenue.

Strategy

Content: To help fans navigate a fragmented media landscape, Yahoo Sports instituted a multi-platform content approach. It routinely met fans where they are by serving tailored content across its website, apps, and social channels. It prioritized hiring experts who have strong multi-platform presences and social followings. For its Olympics coverage, Yahoo Sports hired Olympic legends Allyson Felix, Kerri Walsh Jennings, Missy Franklin, Katie Hoff, and Shawn Johnson East. It also added new show hosts such as former NFL assistant coach Nate Tice, former NFL Pro Bowler Gerald McCoy, current Baltimore Ravens linebacker Kyle Van Noy, veteran NBA analysts Kevin O’Connor and Tom Haberstroh, and the popular Cespedes Family BBQ MLB personalities Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman. 

 

However, Yahoo Sports recognizes that it can’t guide fans to comprehensive sports coverage on its own. That’s why it invested in several major partnerships in 2024 to enhance its coverage in areas of growing fan demand.

• The Athletic: Yahoo Sports partnered with The Athletic to deliver comprehensive women’s sports coverage – totally free, no subscription required – via a dedicated women’s sports hub on the Yahoo Sports website. The partnership enables Yahoo Sports to deliver more women’s sports reporting to more fans than ever before.
• Uncrowned/Ariel Helwani: Yahoo Sports partnered with award-winning journalist Ariel Helwani to launch Uncrowned, a new combat sports media brand. Uncrowned spans five combat sports shows, written reporting and analysis from a team of experts, and a new combat sports hub. According to TKO’s 2023 annual report, there are more than one billion combat sports fans worldwide. Despite this rising interest, there historically hadn’t been a media brand that’s covered all three major combat sports comprehensively until Uncrowned. 
• OneFootball: Yahoo Sports partnered with OneFootball, one of the world’s biggest soccer platforms, to create a soccer hub on the Yahoo Sports website and app. The hub features soccer coverage from OneFootball as well as original Yahoo Sports reporting. This new hub arrives at a pivotal time for soccer in North America with the 2026 World Cup on the horizon.

 

Technology: Nearly every pixel of Yahoo Sports product offerings was updated in 2024 to help sports fans better connect and engage around sports.

• Yahoo Sports redesigned its fantasy app, giving it a bold new look and easy-to-use interface to help fantasy players have more fun and set a winning lineup, faster.
• The new Yahoo Sports app features Game Discussions, which enables fans to discuss a game with fellow fans and Yahoo Sports experts. The app also launched Daily Draw, a free-to-play game that gives fans a fun new way to engage with the biggest sporting event of the day, every day. Daily Draw’s gameplay and communal leaderboard adds another layer of participation and community to the app.

 

Revenue: Yahoo Sports streamlined its sales operation in 2024, with a focus on driving premium sales around its new talent and shows. Yahoo Sports also closely aligned the sales and product teams to unlock more sponsorship real estate across its website and apps.

Results

Across the board, Yahoo Sports had a record-breaking year in 2024. 

 

Content: Yahoo Sports investment in multi-platform talent and content helped it guide fans to comprehensive sports coverage at unprecedented rates. 

• Yahoo Sports launched 11 new multi-platform digital shows in 2024.
• Yahoo Sports show views/listens were up 160% in 2024 compared to the year prior.
• Views of Yahoo Sports social media video in 2024 was up more than 360% year over year. Yahoo Sports social channels posted more than 500 videos that eclipsed more than one million video views in 2024 compared to only 63 such videos a year ago.
• Yahoo Sports’ YouTube channel saw an 85% year over year increase in average watch time per video.

 

Technology: With refreshed products, Yahoo Sports helped fans engage around sports in record numbers.

• Yahoo Fantasy delivered all-time highs for both fantasy football users and fantasy basketball users in 2024. 
• In 2024, Yahoo Fantasy had its two biggest fantasy draft days (in terms of people drafting) in Yahoo Sports history: Sept. 1 and Sept. 2.

 

Revenue: The strong performance across Yahoo Sports content and technology contributed to record-breaking sales revenue.

• 2024 was the largest year of direct sales in Yahoo Sports history. 
• Yahoo Sports drove 81% more booked sales in 2024 than the year prior.

Media

Video for Yahoo Sports