Corporate Sports Blogging?

Yep. Right here in River City. Ladies and Gents, SBNation is now a going corporate concern. Welcome to the big time.

Former AOL executive vice president of consumer and publisher services Jim Bankoff has secured a "mid-seven-figure sum" of venture capital for SB Nation, a startup network of sports blogs. We already mentioned this briefly in an earlier post on competitor Bleacher Report raising $3.5 million, but it’s worth taking a closer look.

The round of funding was led by Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley private equity firm best known for its backing of Facebook, and joined by Allen & Co as well as a number of digital media executives and angel investors. SportsBusinessJournal got the scoop and features the complete list of investors.

OK, to be honest I have no idea whether there's an actual incorporation here--though I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least an LLC or something similar.  Nevertheless, without the pun (ok, with it), we are pwned:

SB Nation (short for SportsBlogs Nation) operates with a network model, in which more than 150 local, team-based sites are linked together with a common visual template but remain written and programmed by local writers. Rather than strike affiliate relationships or simply represent sites for national ad sales, Bankoff has structured equity swaps for each of the sites in SB Nation in which the company acquires all the content, URLs and related assets, and the bloggers then share the ad revenue.

Now, about that revenue sharing...