Yahoo Sports’ new golf hub tees off with a foursome of partnerships with GOLF.com, Golf Digest, Skratch, and The Smylie Show.
Yahoo Sports
The Ryder Cup is right around the corner. The biennial team golf grudge match pitting the U.S.A against Europe tees off at Bethpage Black in New York next Friday morning. It’s the last whopper of a golf tournament on this year’s schedule and Yahoo Sports is seizing the occasion to introduce a one-stop golf content smorgasbord featuring curated news, analysis, commentary, video, podcasts and more.
“We’ve been exploring ways to go deeper in golf for the past two quarters,” Jon Shaw, Yahoo Sports head of revenue and partnerships, said. “We really felt it was an awesome moment to capitalize on what as a fan is one of the most fun and broadest interest times for the sport and that matches with the Yahoo Sports audience. Our fans love to get behind big tentpoles.”
They felt the timing, coinciding with the Ryder Cup’s lead-in hype cycle, would give them ample time to grow a following, well in advance of next season’s marquee events starting up with the season opener in January through the Players Championship and ensuing majors that really tend to whet advertisers’ appetite.
They hope their new golf hub, built through partnerships with GOLF.com, Golf Digest, Skratch, and SportsGrid’s The Smylie Show, will become a go-to for both ardent and casual fans of the good walk spoiled looking to get their fill of tour talk.
Internet pioneer Yahoo was a goliath in its late 1990s salad days, when web portals and search engines were as influential as AI is today in reshaping the tech landscape. Two decades later, in 2021, Apollo Global Management acquired 90% of Verizon Media, encompassing Yahoo and AOL, for $5 billion. Since coming under the umbrella of the private equity firm, the company has focused on adapting to the evolving digital media landscape and engaging users in new ways.
Their Sports vertical’s current strategy of tapping into content partnerships to create curated hubs is just over a year old, having begun midway through 2024.
“The common thread with all of our partner network launches that we’ve done is working with a leading publisher or in some cases like this one, multiple leading publishers in their category to strengthen our coverage and really grow fan interest and demand,” Shaw said.
The resulting single-sport hubs act as ‘top-of the-funnel’ destinations, drawing new audiences and expanding the reach advertisers can achieve, creating the beginnings of a content flywheel.
Previous hub launches, such as Uncrowned for combat sports, have demonstrated sizeable gains in audience size, time spent, and advertising performance. The company aims to replicate the formula in golf, an area where they feel they already have an engaged fan base that hasn’t been fully served.
“We think golf has a ton of potential based on the signals that we have from our audience and some of the limited original content we’ve done in the past and the coverage around key moments in the sport. We believe we have a lot of golf fans and serving them is the point of this,” Shaw said.