Will you add my blog? podcast?

We might! We're always looking for quality Canadian sports content, but consistency, quality, and balance are important to us.

We'll consider adding a blog or podcast if:

• it's mostly one-team-specific content
• it's at least one year old
• it has quality content
• it has a good user experience
• it's regularly updated (not necessarily often)
• there's room in the blog or podcast section

The age (at least one-year old) criteria is a very significant factor. If you're still going strong into season 2, then you're surely passionate and committed. In a lot of ways, this levels the playing field for new creators/sites, and helps to keep the quality up while newer entities work through the bumps.

We love the incredible energy and enthusiasm that often comes with new blogs or podcasts, but many (most?) succumb to the soul-crushing thanklessness of starting from scratch. Or, you know, you get scooped up by an established site that already has an audience and promotional channels, and start blogging or podcasting there.

Quality of content and user experience is somewhat objective, of course, but there are definitely standards that need to be met. For instance, in the past, we declined to add a blog because posts were numerous and typically around 100 words. There’s nothing wrong with a site like this; it’s useful to its users or it wouldn’t have a following, but we didn’t feel as though it added anything to our particular mix of content. We have declined to add podcasts because the sound quality was so poor that we thought they would be a poor experience for our users. We’re not looking to be arbiters of quality, in fact, we’re trying to remove ourselves and our biases (we all have ‘em) from this process as much as possible.

We’re always trying to balance different types of content as well. When something newsworthy occurs, we want to see beat-writers, columnists, radio, video, blogs, AND podcasts. If we have too many blogs or podcasts (or any source type) then they can overwhelm other content, so we may decline or wait on a source until there is room.

Over the years, these criteria have helped us be consistent and fair with content creators while keeping the quality high.

We design a very specific and detailed crawler configuration for each source we track. It takes time. Each, and there are hundreds, configuration is monitored on an ongoing basis for any changes to ensure quality content is being discovered and interpreted properly.