To continue our mission to make Bleacher Report the greatest sports network in the universe (this is our mission, by the way), we have to create revenue opportunities, which includes but is not exclusive to, selling advertising space.

In order to sell ads, it would help us a lot to have a little more info on you, Bleacher Report’s core membership.

Because we think it’s intrusive—not to mention irritating—to ask for info during the registration process, we’re instead hoping that everyone can take a minute and fill out this anonymous survey.

Collectively, this info will help us to determine “our demographic.”

The good news is that after you fill this out, we might actually have ads for stuff you actually want (or not). Either way, we’d really appreciate the help if you feel comfortable participating.

Thanks everybody,

Dave

Hey everyone,

I’m Zander Freund, also one of the founders of Bleacher Report and the network’s Community Director.

So we’re well into our private beta now, and I have to say I am thrilled with the results. The members we’ve brought to the site thus far have taken well to the new look and feel of Bleacher Report, and have already explored many of the site’s new features (Lineup, Play-by-Play, etc.).

But the most exciting aspect of the private beta—by far—is seeing people contributing again. When I say “again,” I mean it in the sense that I have been staring at a “product” for so long now that it’s nothing short of magical to finally see fresh content and activity on an actual “website,” with real people contributing to a thriving sports community.

For months now, we’ve been building and testing the beta to get it to a point where the BR die-hards would be able to use it. While we wanted to get this thing up and running as fast as possible, we also didn’t want to deliver a half-baked site to our most passionate members. The last thing Bleacher Report needed was for it’s finest contributors to come onto the new site and say “what the hell is going on?”

So we set the bar for bringing members onto the beta purposely high. We made it a priority to nail the vast majority of our site development objectives before handing the new Bleacher Report over to the community at large.

In our eyes, Bleacher Report’s members deserved a complete product. They had earned it with the brilliant writing and analysis they shared over the past year or so on the concept site, and therefore shouldn’t settle for anything less than near-perfection on the beta.

As Dave N. pointed out in his “Pre-Season Opener“, the very notion of the beta site would not have been possible without the enormous contributions of our devoted Bleacher members on the concept site. The least we could do in taking the idea of Bleacher Report to the next level was give them a product that was worthy of their expertise.

That’s what kept the juices flowing throughout the whole process of building the beta—thinking about how awesome it would be once all the Bleacher Creatures were using this thing. We finally got to that point last week.

And I can say without a doubt that it was well worth the wait.

When I saw Dave Metrick tell off Raider fans—within Bleacher Report’s brand spanking new platform—I was simply ecstatic. I still remember Dave’s first article about corporate renaming of stadiums (hilarious BTW), and was so thrilled that he could at last put his no-nonsense tone and witty ideas onto a site worthy of his writing.

Or seeing Kevan Lee start to publish his NFL previews on the beta—just awesome. It seems like only yesterday that Kevan originally proposed to do a preview on each and every NFL team to generate hype for the upcoming season. I remember telling him to go ahead, but secretly I never thought he’d actually finish. Little in this world has brought me more joy than seeing Kevan prove me wrong over the past few months (though for the record, his 4-12 Niners prediction is totally off base!)

There are many more examples of the rush I’ve gotten from seeing these guys finally doing their thang on the new site—but I’ll get into that at a later time, when I blog/brag about the Bleacher Creatures and everything they bring to the table.

For now, let’s just leave it at this: it’s great to finally have everyone contributing to Bleacher Report on the platform they deserve.

And there’s so much more to come. We only have a handful of users on the beta right now. Tomorrow, everyone will be invited—and that’s when things get really exciting.

I can’t wait to see Thomas Halzack break down the Celtics’ prospects for the upcoming season in graphic detail—and have the ability to make changes to his own articles for a change. Or to read Adam Amick’s latest on the world of NASCAR—but on a platform that allows for a community to form around his writing. Or for Bleacher Report’s members at large to find the latest work of their favorite writers, simply by clicking a few buttons.

The moment is finally here—BE-TA, BE-TA, BE-TA, BE-TA.

Our beta is in full effect. Let the games begin!

Hi, I’m Dave Nemetz, one of the founders of Bleacher Report. After months of hard work and planning, we’re finally opening up our brand new site to the users of the old Bleacher Report (”the concept site”) to test it out before we fully launch to the public.

Think of it as a sort of “pre-season”—hence the name of this inaugural post to our company blog.

Before I get into talking about the new site, I want to acknowledge what’s allowed us to get to this point: a great community of writers that have contributed to the Bleacher Report concept site throughout it’s existence.

Through operating the concept site, we learned the true depth of great, unheralded sportswriting out there on the web and in the world at large.

And we learned that with a platform for these unique voices and a community built around them, a new form of sports journalism can emerge that doesn’t exist anywhere else—and, frankly, is better than anything you can find anywhere else.

We’ve built the new Bleacher Report with the writers in mind. We want to put Bleacher Report writers front and center, feature fresh opinions like no other sites do, while providing a quality, professional format that writers will be proud to be associated with.

In future posts to this blog, I’m going to get a little more into the concept of The Open Source Sports Network and what that means for Bleacher Report and it’s community of writers.

For now, let’s just say I’m thrilled to see the new site coming to life, and to see the diverse personalities who have put their stamp on the concept site come over to start taking ownership of the beta.

This new site is just a starting point, and we’ll be continuing to add to it and update it as we move forward through the public launch and beyond.

On that note, we appreciate all the feedback we can get, be it sent in the form of e-mail, through the feedback form on our Contact page, or in comments to this blog.

Keep checking back to this blog for more updates from the Bleacher Report team.

This is where you’ll be hearing about new announcements from the company, be they new features to the site, partnerships with other sites, contests, or just general thoughts on Bleacher Report, the community, and the sports world at large.

In addition to me, you’ll be hearing from Alexander Freund, our Community Director, Ryan Alberti, our Managing Editor, in addition to other members of the Bleacher Report team on fronts as diverse as development to marketing.

We also plan on getting some of Bleacher Report’s Community Leaders involved in posting to the blog.

That’s all for now—thanks for stopping by. I’ll see you out there on the beta site.