NEW YORK - The Forbes MLS Blogger Valuation revealed the intimate financial value of online bloggers and writers as the information hit the internet earlier today.
"Ok, sure... this doesn't look great, but I got a conditional press pass and a re-tweet from the official MLS account, so I'm good."
"We took the time to really review and assess current bloggers from the standpoint of their financial valuation on the market," stated senior analyst Howard Libscott. "We were able to drill down to identify exactly how much content and value a blogger/writer creates for free for a sport that relentlessly uses free labor to pad their public relations and journalism numbers."
At the top of the Forbes list was SBNation.com, the monolithic blog site that contains a vast network of interconnected sites for MLS, USMNT, NWSL, USL and NASL teams. SBnation.com creates a vast stratosphere of information for Major League Soccer (and other leagues) that is largely created, utilized and (at times) spammed out by the league for free.
"We wanted to reflect that these bloggers are actually giving away all of their work, both hard and lazy, for absolutely nothing, and generating decent amounts of publicity for their respective leagues while receiving nothing but the chance for a retweet by a team account, or the ability to write game previews for a league website and have angry mouth-breathing idiots critique their sentence structure in online comments," stated Libscott. "It's important to note that our valuation isn't based in the finances that bloggers or writers earn, because 95% of them earn nothing. The valuation is based on the amount of money that MLSsoccer.com or the NASL would actually have to pay them in order to get coverage that bloggers and writers provide for free."
Reportedly, pundits have decried the Forbes Valuations stating, "These are fans who don't know what they are doing and should be honored to get a mention by someone doing a league news recap for an official website." However, others have stated that the only people actually covering the league most of the time, in depth, are fans and that Major League Soccer utilizes the leagues position in the market to create their own narrative via a loosly designated press corp that are all employed by the league they are supposed to cover who often utilize the free writing and research that others do to create columns/information for the league.
The Nutmeg News will have more on this as owners decry the released numbers stating, "bloggers and writers don't actually offer any kind financial benefit for our team."