Bleacher Report CEO Howard Mittman Talks Ambitions, Strategies, Gambling Content, B/R Live Plans

With a fully stocked bar cart behind him in his Midtown Manhattan office on a scorching Tuesday morning in July, Bleacher Report CEO Howard Mittman appears comfortable at the six month-mark since he was promoted to his new post. Mittman joined the company in 2017 and was appointed from chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer to one of the most powerful posts in the sports media landscape in late February.

Mittman said that B/R has deftly navigated previous pivot points it’s faced in the past and it’s currently facing another one. With 20 million app downloads, 10.7 million followers on Instagram, 8.4 million Facebook likes and 7.4 million followers on Twitter for its main accounts alone, Bleacher Report gets an absurd amount of intense engagement from its consumer base that wants a nexus between sports and culture.

“Bleacher Report leads the way and has developed an ability to be a conduit and a connection point to help players and fans get closer to each other,” Mittman said, “while not abdicating the journalistic responsibility we have to tell stories.”

One of Bleacher Report’s current challenges, Mittman said, is how to evolve its content and storytelling to help strengthen that bond between fans and the sports they love across different formats, platforms and devices, varying from traditional articles and videos to live sports and events to documentaries and e-commerce.

As he looks forward to the last half of 2019 and 2020, Mittman is thinking about content in terms of the two sides of B/R’s business.

“We have the ‘always on’ side of the business and the ‘on demand’ side,” he said.

The “always on” part of Bleacher Report is what its needs to do to keep up with the news cycle and the insatiable desire for breaking news among its users. The “on demand” side is what Mittman calls the more premium part of the business.

“The kind of storytelling that we employ, the ways that we push it out are different,” Mittman said. “There’s longer lead time, and hopefully if we do it right that content will be evergreen.”

That premium content falls under what Bleacher Report calls its portfolio brands, which include B/R Gridiron for American football, B/R Kicks for the prevalent sneaker culture, B/R Betting for the emerging legal gambling sphere, Omar Raja’s House of Highlights and B/R Football for world and American soccer. Notable original programming on those portfolio brands like The Champions, House of Highlights Live, Take It There With Taylor Rooks and Sneaker Shock have convinced Mittman and company to take the initiative even further.

A fall lineup of football-related shows for B/R Gridiron premiering on Sept. 2 was released Thursday, featuring a new season of animated show Gridiron Heights, Adam Lefkoe’s new bi-weekly Ditch the Playbook, Master Tesfatsion’s Untold Stories and an NFL Betting Show in conjunction with a new agreement with Caesars Palace, among others. This is part of an initiative led by new chief creative officer Sam Toles to widen the scope and the aperture on the ways Bleacher Report tells stories.

“So when you look at Bleacher Report and you think about what we’re best known for,” Mittman said, “some of it is the ability to tell stories, but much of it has been the ability to push those stories out there and connect fans with the sports and the culture and the players and the happenings they crave.”

This “on-demand” part of the Bleacher Report brand is quite the departure from the bread and butter of what made B/R popular enough to sell to Turner in 2012. That was its ability to master search engine optimization, harness display ads and gain millions of followers through its aggregation-based TeamStream app. There are those people still view Bleacher Report as only about the aggregated content, but Mittman maintains that the company has already diversified from that and a spokesperson said that it’s become a smaller part of the overall business over time.

“Our mission is to try to make it easier to be a sports fan, so aggregation is a part of that,” Mittman said. “We’re never going to stop doing that. That is fundamental to the way that we think about the world and the way we think about delivering value to consumers. However, we have taken great pains and made great strides in terms of the original content we produce.”

From Howard Beck’s latest NBA column, to Mike Freeman’s NFL 10-Point Stance and features by talented writers like Mirin Fader, Bleacher Report is producing a ton of content on its own. Mittman doesn’t see why it would go away from its current model, one that’s driven hundreds of millions of page views in 2019 alone with its aggregation, per a source, to its competitors.

“We are for the most part the single largest traffic driver to all of our biggest competitors,” Mittman said. “Why do sports brands, sports culture brands, love our aggregation? Because we give them a lot of traffic. It works for us and it works for them.”

The power of its app social accounts has become the nexus of Bleacher Report’s power and evolving abilities as a company, one that Mittman says now has permission. And that permission is driving B/R’s agenda for the second half of the year.

“I think that permission to explore content and commerce together and create engaging experiences for fans to then be a part of it,” Mittman elaborated, “is something that we can do that a lot of other brands can’t, not just because they can’t put it together but because they don’t have the power of the social distribution mechanism we have to push it out. They don’t have the 9.5 million consumers opted in to receive alerts the same way that we do.”

That permission has emboldened and enabled B/R to create an e-commerce line of consumer products, as it tries to diversify and beef up its non-advertising revenue. That includes an NBA apparel line with rapper Travis Scott, a clothing line with Dwyane Wade during his final NBA season and a line of jerseys leading up to June’s Women’s World Cup with trending female musical artists like Billie Eilish, Kehlani and Megan Thee Stallion.

“We’re continuing to do a lot more of that, and it’s been successful for us,” Mittman said.

That real permission Mittman alluded to is Bleacher Report’s ability to reach that staggering 9.5 million number with its home screen alerts to users’ mobile devices.

“The most valuable real estate in the world is your smartphone, the home screen of your smartphone,” Mittman said.

Bleacher Report is trying to find new ways to utilize that precious real estate. An anecdote Mittman used during a presentation at June’s Hashtag Sports Conference in New York and repeated inside his office was creating their own Reddit AMAs.

B/R used to average 1,300 questions per AMA, or “ask me anything,” hour on Reddit, but when they launched an AMA-style Q&A with Ron Artest on its app to promote the Showtime documentary Quiet Storm— another way the company is trying to branch out in original content, including other separate deals with Twitter and Facebook— users asked 4,500 questions in that hour. The week after, an AMA with New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman got 5,500.

“It proves out the theory we have that our app is in transition from being a publisher app to being a platform unto itself,” Mittman said, even opening up that platform to his chief rivals. “What we’re doing inside of the app is not competitive with anything else that we see out in the market right now. ESPN or DAZN or The Athletic or anyone else can feel free to play inside of that ecosystem.” 

In fact, Mittman believes that the B/R app is the single biggest point of differentiation the company has against its rivals over the next 36 months. And Bleacher Report plans to continue to parlay that app to its non-advertising revenue strategies, notably an increasing foray into live events, which it’s been developing over the last two years. That includes a big party on the Sunday of NBA All-Star weekend, an event centered around the NBA’s annual Las Vegas summer league called B/R Jump-Off and the Drop-Off, which is part streetwear drop and part pop-up shop in conjunction with B/R Kicks. It should come as no surprise that these events are centered around the NBA and soccer, the two biggest growth areas in American sports.

“In its second year, these events will drive over $20 million in revenue for us,” Mittman said, “which is not an insignificant number and I think proves that the brand is resonating, that we have an intense ability to drive consumers.”

Mittman plans to double down on live events in 2020, including a big push associated with House Of Highlights. The aim, he said, is to activate with consumers on the ground and not just on the app while putting its advertisers at the center of the action.

Perhaps more important to Bleacher Report than all the aforementioned initiatives is B/R Live, WarnerMedia’s OTT streaming service with content including the UEFA Champions League, the National Lacrosse League and others. Mittman’s current large, overarching challenge is to integrate B/R Live’s events with the B/R app and have them work more closely together in ways he won’t currently disclose publicly.

Mittman was pleased with the first year of B/R Live’s Champions League coverage. Thanks in part to the new rights deal, B/R Football gained twice as many Instagram followers on match days during the 2018-2019 season and added 800,000 YouTube subscribers over those nine months. While the broadcast on TNT and B/R Live had its share of first year hiccups like trying to toggle between two different studios and minor sporadic sound issues, Mittman was really happy with how things turned out.

“Overall we felt great about it,” he said. “We loved the studio team we put together, and we’re as excited about that as anything.” 

With OTT competitors like ESPN+ and DAZN quickly and substantially snapping up rights deals, B/R Live is discussing content deals with teams like Liverpool and are going to be players when rights deals go up for bid over time.

“I can say that we are incredibly aware as I’m sure most of the world of the sports rights calendar when things are up and available,” Mittman said. “I think we are constantly looking at and evaluating all those opportunities and thinking about how, when, where is sort of best to place our bets and use that to drive our ambitions throughout the rest of the business.”

Bleacher Report just seems to not be talking about it as loudly as other places like ESPN+ or DAZN or Amazon and others.

“I think everyone has their own strategy,” Mittman said, alluding to DAZN, clarifying that he respects what they’re doing. “I tend to lean more on the side of— I’m not saying they’re doing this— but the way I think about it, I want to get press for what we’ve done or doing, not what we might do.”

In building off an SEO-driven app and website, Bleacher Report has greatly widened its goals and ambitions for 2020 and beyond under the WarnerMedia umbrella. Live sports and sports betting, led by its partnership with Caesars, will become a bigger priority. So will live integration with the app, like the AMAs it rolled out with Artest and Edelman. And as the large amount of content B/R produces continues to grow, that will help supplement the live streaming content Mittman and company plans to produce and buy rights to over time.

“That point of distinction is why we’re so very different from any of the other pursuits that I see in the market and any of the other OTT strategies,” Mittman said, “because what we’re building isn’t an OTT strategy. It’s an engagement strategy that’s meant to deliver engagement 24/7 versus a couple of days a week for two to three hours at a time.”

As he sits in front of his corner office bar cart which contains a flask that reads “get shit done,” Mittman seems like he’s already fully embarked on an ambitious plan for Bleacher Report for 2020 and beyond.