Suryansh Tibarewal co-founded Essentially Sports in 2014. Picture: Essentially Sports

India-based sports news website Essentially Sports has scaled to 30 million unique users a month, after being founded in a college dorm room in 2014.

The site started out as a passion project by Suryansh Tibarewal, Harit Pathak and Jaskirat Arora, covering “niche” sports with original reporting and filling “a space in the market which gives justice to the fan voice”, said Tibarewal.

When the trio were college students in 2014, they invested $100 into the domain name and started writing stories on the blog.

“We have built this audience over time,” Tibarewal said of the site’s current 30 million monthly readers, “but most companies that have this kind of an audience are generally very well established”.

Essentially Sports now has 200 full-time staff across the world, including more than 150 in editorial, and has made $25m in turnover over the last three years (a “ballpark figure”, said Tibarewal).

It pins its success on in-depth reporting of particular niches. Essentially Sports publishers 25 articles per day just on US Nascar racing.

“The depth of coverage we’re able to provide is significantly higher than anybody else,” Tibarewal said. “The amount of coverage that you can do in sports fandom is extremely different”.

Content is filtered through specialisations, so there is “a different person who ideas the topic, different person who writes the topic, and different person who edits the topic”.

“Breaking down” this process into specialisations makes for a “very unique” approach to sports coverage, Tibarewal said, with multiple angles being researched before one is decided.

Finally, using first-party data – tracking user behaviour and collecting cookies – to “understand how the sports fandom connects to each …allows you to do journalism very differently”.

Tibarewal said: “If I combine these three reasons together…it’s why I think we were able to carve a niche in sports media landscape.”

Five years of ‘passion’ before profit

Tibarewal said the business journey is “unique”, given the founders “weren’t really looking to make a business out of it”.

“When it started, with my college friends in a dorm room, we were all just sports fans trying to find a place for our fandom online, and when we couldn’t find that, we just started to write ourselves,” he said.

After a year of other students contributing and writing between classes, Essentially Sports’ team grew to 250 volunteer writers from colleges across the world. From 2014 to 2019, the site remained a passion project not making any money.

“We felt there was a class of journalism, which we call the fan’s perspective, that nobody was doing,” Tibarewal said. “Either there were like boring expert reports, or there was a lot of fan banter, which was unstructured on Reddit, Facebook groups, Twitter, etc.”

In 2019, the company shifted its focus to the US and UK market with tennis and Formula One content, leading the site to start making revenue and hire seven full-time staff in the same year.

This focus shift was “the biggest thing” to change the company, as well as the launch of Google Discover, “an early product in the market” at the time, said Tibarewal.

“One unique insight we found was India has a growing young population – most of the population is below 35 years old,” said Tibarewal. “But if you look at UK and US fandom, it’s much older… also quite used to the internet, so … they consume a lot of editorial content.”

The company then expanded to soccer, rugby, cricket and squash coverage, finding “niche sports” to be “a big strategy for us”, said Tibarewal.

Meanwhile, Google Discover, which now makes up two-thirds of Google traffic to the biggest news websites, elevated this strategy as a platform that “really valued depth and niches”.

Essentially Sports homepage

‘Covid success story’

In 2020 the team thought consumption would fall as live sports stopped during Covid and departments were shut down.

“We had this thesis that as fans, we were more bored, right? …So, we would actually consume a lot more… we decided to double down.”

Between March and June 2020, Essentially Sports launched new sports coverage, expanded its team, and saw monthly traffic grow from around one million page views to 60 million.

Unique users grew from half a million to 20 to 30 million in this period. Later that year Essentially Sports had 40 paid full-time staff.

Content depth also improved in 2020, he said, when Netflix released sports documentary The Last Dance on basketball player Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

“It suddenly put all the legends of 1990s on the map again,” he said. “And that kind of fandom that was rising with the documentary culture, our style of coverage was able to tap into it very quickly… we would like go research all those players and pick up the top stories that are relevant for them… That really made a big difference.”

Tibarewal said 2020 was when the newsbrand found “that fans’ perspectives should not be limited to top three sports or top three teams”.

“A fan who cares about their team or player doesn’t care if that is the biggest team,” he said, adding the media was not “capturing” this fan enough, and “sports media was fragmenting”.

Because of this, by the end of 2020 Essentially Sports had developed a “depth initiative model”, splitting editorial content across 12 different sports.

Between 2020 and 2023 the company expanded to around 200 staff, producing 300 articles a day.

Eight newsletters through Beehiiv

The newsbrand launched its first email newsletter in February 2024. Today, its eight newsletters are each dedicated to a sport, and are made up of five articles and one poll each.

Essentially Sports is aiming to double its number of newsletters by 2027.

They are built on newsletter platform Beehiiv and written by editors, with at least 100,000 subscribers each.

“All these users have read like 100-plus articles on our website. So, this is the highest quality of engagement that you can get, like these get 45% open rate, 20% clickthrough-rate,” said Tibarewal. “It’s a really strong newsletter product.”

“Some” of these click-throughs go back to Essentially Sports’ site, which monetises 60% higher than organic traffic “because the newsletter audience engages more, spends more time on page” and the site can provide more personalised ads having “more understanding of that user”.

Essentially Sports has 1.2 million subscribers across all its newsletters, which are free to receive.

The team “felt newsletter was the only channel we could trust as we were scaling our audience, which we could rely on”.

Essentially Sports revenue streams

The newsbrand gets around 20% of its revenue from its newsletters, through direct-sold advertising and cost-per-click ads.

Remaining revenue comes from direct-sold adverts to brands (around 10%) and programmatic ads (70%).

Essentially Sports also puts out a podcast, called ES Thinktank, targeted toward a “niche audience”, with two seasons.

“The idea was not to create like a million plus audience,” said Tibarewal, but to find 10,000 fans that really care about the topic. Essentially Sports is also set to launch a basketball podcast.

Tibarewal said marketers who work with Essentially Sports get the “scale and engagement of a very big brand, but you’re getting the nimbleness of a startup”.

“If you’re just doing news on your website, it’s going to be very hard on a five-year level to be a recognisable platform, because a 25 to 20-year-old fan [is not] consuming just like a written 500-word piece.”

He added Google Discover recently revealed its feed “will not just have articles, it will combine everything creators in it”, like Instagram and Twitter accounts of publishers.

“So, platforms are recognising that [a] new era of media platforms will be a combination of creators, publishers and owning the audience together,” he said, adding that combining original news content, authentic storytelling and owning an audience relationship at scale “is a very strong business to be made that can last longer than most platforms will”.

“And that will be my advice to everybody, and that’s the future we are betting on,” he said.

Topics in this article : Beehiiv

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