Driving the Next 50 Years of Growth in Women's Sports
Exclusive: The Athletic, Yahoo Sports partner on new women's sports content hub
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Photo illustration: Tiffany Herring/Axios. Photos: Tim Clayton/Getty Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images; Ron Hoskins/NBAE/Getty Images; David Buono/Getty Images
The Athletic, a subscription sports news site owned by The New York Times, and Yahoo Sports are teaming up to launch a new hub for women's sports coverage on Yahoo Sports' website and app.
Why it matters: "While we can create all the best stuff in the world, it's only as important as the audience we can get to it," The Athletic's chief commercial officer Sebastian Tomich told Axios.
- With women's sports, "there's a ton of attention, but there's still room to grow in terms of distribution and audience," he added.
Zoom in: The new hub will be free on Yahoo Sports' website beginning Thursday and available on its app in the coming months.
- It will house written, audio, and video content from both outlets, including The Athletic's popular audio and video shows, "The Athletic Women's Basketball Show" and "Full Time with Meg Linehan," as well as original coverage from Yahoo Sports' reporters and analysts.
- In the future, the hub could also house co-produced content from both newsrooms, Tomich said. Major moments, like championship games, are ripe for co-production opportunities, especially in video.
How it works: Sales teams from both outlets can jointly sell advertising packages that include shares of inventory across the entire joint platform.
- While The Athletic's website and app are paywalled, the new destination will not require a subscription.
- The goal is to leverage Yahoo Sports' reach to scale The Athletic's audience around women's sports coverage, not necessarily to drive traffic back to The Athletic's site, which has a dynamic paywall, Tomich said,
- Any opportunity to serve fans better will boost business opportunities, Yahoo Sports president Ryan Spoon noted.
Zoom out: Amid a surge in popularity, both outlets have significantly increased their coverage of women's sports.
- The Athletic now has more than 15 full-time writers, editors and producers covering women's sports, a spokesperson said. The site has more than doubled its coverage of professional women's sports over the past two years with support from Google.
- Yahoo has a stable of full and part-time women's sports writers and contributors covering the topic. This past year, it tapped former Olympic athletes to cover the Paris Games, including Allyson Felix and Shawn Johnson East.
The big picture: News outlets are doubling down on women's sports coverage as audience and marketer interest in the topic soars. Tomich and Spoon believe that together, they can provide marketers with unprecedented reach of women's sports fans.
- A spokesperson for The Athletic said the outlet's seen a 226% year-over-year growth in traffic to its women's sports content through the first half of 2024. A spokesperson for Yahoo Sports said views of women's sports articles are up 253% over the last 12 months.
- "Seven of the top 10 most-viewed articles on Yahoo Sports in August were about female athletes," Spoon said.
What to watch: This is the first time The Athletic has partnered externally with another outlet to scale its journalism. Tomich said these types of deals, which offer scale without compromising editorial credibility, are rare.
- Yahoo Sports has begun to experiment more with these types of partnerships. It inked a deal with One Football to offer credible soccer coverage at scale in March.
