Sportsline Becomes CBS Sports

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CBS Sportsline is now officially CBS Sports.  The website had a mini-facelift to go along with the rebranding.  It’s slightly more readable than before if nothing else.

CBS decided to rebrand in order to cross-brand between websites and television easier, at least that’s the explanation given on paidContent.org.

Normally it’s a smart move, and it may be here, but Sportsline is an established internet brand.  It’s also been CBS Sportsline for a while.  Recently, a friend of mine didn’t realize you could use “www.” and not “cbs.”.  That says something about the strength of the name and the association between CBS and Sportsline.

However, CBS Sports makes it more of a big media company.  Sportsline existed solely on the internet, despite being CBS Sportsline.  CBS Sports is on tv.  CBS Sports is the NFL, March Madness and the PGA, among other things.

What CBS Sports isn’t is its own channel.  In that regard, it’s like NBC Sports on tv, but online CBS is clearly a top player, where NBC is not.

The appearance of having some form of independence was no doubt a plus.  It’ll be interesting to see if the rename has any effect on the website’s reputation.  paidContent.org cites SportsBusiness Daily (paid subscription required) mentioning that the company is concerned about the rebranding possibly harming fantasy sports operations.

Fox Sports is currently one of the sports website leaders, thanks in part to its contract with MSN, and also a network of local television channels.  Fox also has its college stations, Fox Sports Español, Fox Soccer and the Speed Channel.

ABC Sports ceased to exist a few years ago.  Instead, the network chose to brand its sports programming “ESPN on ABC”, capitalizing on the popularity of its cable channel’s brand.

The only non-television network sports website that rivals the top players in traffic is Yahoo! Sports.  Yahoo! has cleaned up the site over the past year, as well as adding more original content.  Yahoo!, like Sportsline, has leveraged its fantasy sports section to drive traffic to its content.

Posted by David M Singer on Aug 23, 2007 at 02:29 AM

Comments:

  1. So did they change the web address too?? Because if they did that then without the right amount of advertising, people will go to other sites until they realize that it’s been changed.

    Posted by kingdog819 on Aug 30, 2007 at 03:58 PM

  2. Sportsline is one of the better sports sites out there, it’s the only US sports site I check coming from a Canadian perspective…usually TSN.ca and sportsnet.ca get the job done, but sportsline over the years has been one of the only sites to serve up pre-season stats for the NHL, that coupled with the fact it used to have decent Boxing news

    Posted by Marty on Sep 24, 2007 at 04:18 PM
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