Sports Illustrated nabs “Fan Nation” for $20 million (ish)

Paidcontent.org reported yesterday that Sports Illustrated Group will buy Fan Nation and its underlying technology for something in the neighborhood of $20 million. Not bad for a site with only 100,000 unique monthly visitors.

According to Paid Content, the deal revolves around the technology, which SI and its parent Time warner will use across many of their titles. SI will license the software back to Fan Nation, which presumably will continue to develop it through real world experience – serving fans with applications that make sense – and SI and other titles can use these new tools as they’re invented.

This is similar to the future we see for our social networking platform. As I’ve said before in this blog, once our beta is launched, we hope some other teams will join us in using the system so that we can all share the burden of discovering just what fans will and won’t do with it. Ultimately, the NFL or some lucky sponsor could co-opt then whole magilla and use the technology to build other brands as well.

So I’ll say it again, NFL team sites have a distinct head start in this area if we choose to use it. We’ve already got large communities established. We’re already the #1 sport for specators and fantasy players. Why would we let sites like Fan Nation get out ahead of us in social networking? Certainly the power of SI and its millions of readers will drive adoption of Fan Nation, but for these sites to realy take off, they will rely heavily on NFL fan activity. So it comes down to building relationships with fans around an on-line experience environment. That’s a playing field on which we SHOULD be prepared to compete and win. But it’s not going to happen JUST because we’re the NFL. It’s gonna take work.