Yardbarker raises $1.5 million for sports hub

Sports news network aggregates stories from across the Web

With its eyes set on the prize of becoming the Internet’s number one hub for sharing and sparking sports conversations between sports stars and regular fans, Yardbarker just raised over $1.5 million in third round funding for the company, paidContent reports.

Though YardBarker has yet to reveal any details about the deal, in its second round of fundraising last April, the company raised $6 million from capital firms including DFJ, Baseline Ventures, Labrador Ventures, and private investors Russ Siegelman and Jarl Mohn.

Targeting college-educated guys aged 21-45, the Emeryville, CA-based startup is a sports site where everyone can get involved—professional athletes, professional and/or personal bloggers, or just plain old sports fans. As long as you’re passionate about a sport, Yardbarker wants you involved.

The network has already enlisted the NFL’s Donovan McNabb and UFC’s Joe Rogan to blog some posts for the site, demonstrating a growing influence of the site’s star power.

Yardbarker’s homepage features daily updates aggregated from blog posts, news articles, and athlete blog posts from various sources all over the Web. Users who navigate to the original source of the article or post can actively participate in a discussion of the story right on Yardbarker’s platform.

Similarly, registered users receive a daily updated list of aggregated stories on their personal news feeds, which intuitively grab stories that it expects you to want to read, based on your interests and other stories you’ve read in the past.

While Yardbarker hit an all-time high of traffic last January with nearly 1.5 million users and then dipped in the months to follow, the site is starting to demonstrate renewed growth: with 36.83% more unique visitors month-over-month, according to data from Compete, the site could see over 1 million users sometime soon.