Sports Illustrated layoffs

Christopher,
Thank you for trying to shed some light on a magazine most of us cherished as kids and, later, as professionals.
My question: Does SI pay you and/or your site when they run your content? Or do you pay them for the privilege of being affiliated with SI?

 

I have no idea what Rivals makes as a whole, but it should be noted that the sites are independent when it comes to revenue. The Alabama site isn't getting a cut of the overall Rivals pie; it's only getting the subscribers and ad revenue related to just the Alabama site. Same with UCLA, Texas, Notre Dame, or whoever else is part of the network.

 

Writing for free makes me cry. I remember when I was in high school our journalism teacher told us the neighboring newspaper needed somebody to cover high school sports, not just our high school, but others too. I can't remember what I got paid but it was per story I believe and how much joy did I get when the checks came in the mail. I'll tell you one thing. I had other part time jobs that paid and this newspaper job paid enough that as a kid I was quite pleased with the pay.
I can't imagine how sad and defeated I'd feel had I received no money for all that work, mainly covering games. By getting paid, I learned it was a profession I could look into realistically. And it was like any other job I had as a teen. It felt like work, keeping stats on a hot day and writing a story and getting that story to the newspaper and seeing it in print. It should be illegal to have writers work for free. Sorry, just my take. (I know some major newspapers have unpaid internships and those organizations should be ashamed of themselves. It's just wrong).
p.s. I don't necessarily blame Christopher for not paying some employees but I know I couldn't do it. They are doing work; they have to be paid.

 

Fog lol.

 

When you're young and starting out, you're sometimes willing to do things you might not do, and/or can't do, when you're older.

Also, it doesn't always mean you're a sucker. A sucker usually doesn't know what they're doing, or what they're getting into. People who worked for free at newspapers at some point in their lives probably didn't fall into that category.

Perhaps you weren't getting what you should, sure. But you weren't getting nothing, either. You wanted clips, and experience, and professional advice/mentorship, and you got all of that. Sometimes, you even got your first real job out of it.

That's what happened to me. First, I did an internship for college credit for a semester at a local paper. Then, I did a free internship that was offered at that same local paper for a year (while I worked a graveyard-shift job at an AM-PM Minimart, to boot, specifically so that I could work the free internship in the day). After that, that paper, and those editors (some of whom I'm still in contact with today), hired me for my first professional, paid newspaper job there.

I considered it a good thing.

 

In some states, unpaid internships at for-profit businesses are illegal. That begs the question of whether journalism is still a for-profit business.

 

The contracts for each site owner typically stated that they would get a percentage of subscription revenue and ad revenue. Yahoo/Rivals/Verizon would get the rest. In exchange for that arrangement, Rivals would provide everything on the technical end, use some of the revenue to have national staff, and integrate some team site coverage into the general Yahoo Sports coverage.

So back in the day when Chip Brown was breaking news about Texas for Orangebloods.com, his stuff could be vertically promoted to Yahoo to get an even bigger audience.

Also, by doing it this way, Yahoo could keep every Rivals publisher as a 1099 contractor. The site owner would get 50-60% (some negotiated even more in later contracts if they were successful) and Rivals would get the rest. It meant that each site was typically dependent on the fanbase size and program success. The ultra successful sites typically formed an LLC and hired multiple staff members. The smaller sites that covered struggling programs or ones that had success in difficult markets were reliant on the owner and just one other staffer.

Unless things changed with Verizon's acquisition, Rivals publishers got paid via a contracted split based on the site's subscriptions and ad revenue, not a set negotiated salary or stipend.

 

With the caveat that it's been a while since I had a firsthand look at the arrangement, typically subscribers had a choice to which site they wanted to subscribe to. So if I'm a Texas A&M fan, but I select subscribe on the main Rivals page, it'd still give me an option on the subscription page to which site I wanted to subscribe to. I'd get access to everything from AggieYell, as well as subscription articles from anywhere in the Rivals network. So I could still read national stuff from Mike Farrell, if I wanted.

What I would NOT get access to is the message boards and subscriber-only areas of other team sites. So if I want to creep on what's going on with Texas Tech or UT or Houston or anywhere else, I'd have to subscribe to those sites to read the premium message boards. Those premium message boards and subscriber-only features are where the Rivals guys make their money. It's where all the behind the scenes info goes, it's where all the recruiting news goes. Some recruiting stuff gets shared to the network for every site to use, but the juiciest stuff stays locked to each private message board. If you can generate enough exclusive content and create a place that's active with a deep subscriber base, you're in good shape.

Ads have changed a lot, so I can't answer there. I heard a few years ago that some newer contracts actually didn't include ad revenue, but I'm not 100% certain that's the case. Subscriptions made the big bucks, anyway. Ad revenue was very finicky and dependent entirely on unique hits/views.

And you're absolutely right about the audience being varied. Usually the smaller Power 5 conference folks could still get enough exclusive content and have a large enough alumni base to draw upon to at least provide for themselves, if not a full staff. But unless you're THE only option for fans of a Group of 5 team, and they have a deep enough alumni base, you may not even make enough to do the job full-time. I knew of guys in the network who had to rely heavily on other freelance or even full-time gigs because they didn't make enough from Rivals. Seemed like the old wire service The Sports XChange had a lot of those guys - they'd parachute in to do gamers and other pro content to make a few hundred bucks more per week to help keep their Rivals gig going.

 

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