Hello, readers.

We have some big news to impart to you today on this, the 27th day of February. We have acquired New York-based sports website EliteSportsNY.com. They are the Big Apple’s largest independent sports website, much like we are Philly’s.

Some may call this sort of thing “mergers and acquisition.” We call it Empire Building.

Here’s the full press release (which you can read after the jump).

Elite Sports NY was started by Robby Sabo in 2015 and has credentialed writers covering all of New York’s major teams– Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Giants, Jets, and so on. While their tone varies slightly from what you find on Crossing Broad, their site and team very much resembles what we have here– a small group of talented, passionate sports fans and writers, covering the local teams with a zeal that mainstream media can never achieve. Their Slack channel is just as raucous and furious as ours. And the amount of content they churn out on a daily basis is incredible.

Robby’s work to scale the site in just a short period of time is amazing. In fact, Elite Sports NY’s readership is larger than ours– in America’s biggest city. NBD.

You won’t notice any changes to Crossing Broad, and only few to Elite Sports NY. I don’t expect most CB readers to frequent or perhaps ever read ESNY. But this will enable us to cross-promote stories, have NY-based guests on podcasts and videos, and occasionally leverage content between both sites.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve had several opportunities ourselves to be acquired. But with the exception of one of them, none felt right for us. Our recent move into working with sportsbook partners has changed our business for the better and made us desirable to a number of partners. We have a large audience of passionate sports fans in a major market, who wouldn’t want that?

But this site is unique, built over 10 years with literal blood, sweat and tears (white collar version of paper cuts, 2 a.m. hoodie sweats while writing a blog post, and rejoicing when Ruben Amaro landed Cliff Lee… but still!), and the notion of turning it over to a company that solely wanted to turn it into a highly-targeted phone book wasn’t going to happen.

Our recent shift in business model – away from ad networks and products, to working with sportsbooks – has not only improved the business, but it’s also improved the content. We have more, and varied, coverage of Philly sports than we’ve ever had before. And ironically, while I acknowledge that some readers aren’t interested in the volume of betting content we produce, it’s that very content which supports, and grows, the rest of it.

So, we’ve decided to double down on that model.

Last year we partnered with Jason Ziernicki and his team at Warwick Gaming, who are incredible digital marketers and run sites such as PASportsbooks.com and BetNewJersey.com. In fact, we haven’t just partnered– we share an office with them. Jason sits five feet away.

Together, we’ve decided to move forward with our own plan to scale the model we’ve perfected on CB and apply it to other sites, Elite Sports NY being the first.

I’ll be doing an AMA in the comments throughout the day. Continue Reading