Yahoo Sports is creating a potential challenger to the The Athletic’s subscription model, The Post has learned.
While Yahoo will cover teams, its approach will be different than The Athletic, which has tried to digitally recreate the sports page.
Yahoo’s business will act a bit more like a membership club. It will cover teams, while attempting to form a community, with what it says will be insider experiences for fans.
The burgeoning business will begin in Flushing with the Mets. The name of the product will be the Queens Baseball Club.
It will include three writers covering the team, while planning to give members a behind-the-scenes experience, such as access to batting practices, press conferences and front-office Q&As.
The team and Yahoo have a three-year agreement, according to sources. Yahoo declined to say how much it will pay the Mets. The Mets declined comment entirely.
Yahoo is working out deals with other teams. The Yankees are not involved right now.
The site will launch March 28 and the cost is expected to be $4.99 or $5.99 per month, according to Yahoo officials.
Yahoo plans on hiring a columnist, beat reporter and a backup beat person for each team. In New York, it has lured Wallace Matthews away from the Daily News to be its columnist, according to sources. Yahoo has not hired a beat reporter yet or a backup beat person.
While The Athletic, with its $70 million of venture capital, has received a lot of publicity and generated industry buzz, Yahoo Sports general manager Geoff Reiss and Kyle McDoniel, Yahoo’s head of direct-to-consumer products, have had a lot of success with its college recruiting site, Rivals. They also had a big hand in ESPN Insider in the ’90s, so they want top coverage, but also more.
“I think the guys at The Athletic are really smart,” Reiss said. “They probably saw some fairly similar things that we did. There is this fairly significant delta between fans’ hunger to feel connected to a specific team and how well they were being served and, I suspect, I think there are some similarities of what we are putting together.
“But I do believe that the way we are building this platform is significantly differentiated based on the energy we are going to be putting into these kinds of access points and the energy we are going to be putting into these communities. We think that the information component is incredibly important, but it isn’t enough to base the entire business around.”
They will begin with MLB and NBA teams. They will go case by case, and there is no goal to cover every franchise in each sport or to have city sites.
“We will be launching steadily over the next couple of years,” Reiss said.
Reiss said there is no membership-number goal, and he will judge its success based on the aggregate number of subscribers, not on how each team reaches a specific goal.
“We would only be embarking on a business that we had a high level of confidence that could scale,” Reiss said.
Dejan Kovacevic, who began an independent subscription site called DKPittsburghSports.com five years ago, is serving as a consultant on the project.
Meanwhile, on its main free site, Yahoo has made some moves after baseball insider Jeff Passan left for ESPN. Hannah Keyser, who has written for Deadspin and Vice, is one of the people it has hired to replace Passan. Sources said it has also spoken with the LA Times’ long-form specialist, Andy McCullough, about joining Keyser and Tim Brown on the national baseball beat.