When the pandemic turned businesses upside down, many digital publishing leaders scaled back. Not Suryansh Tibarewal, Co-founder & Growth Lead at EssentiallySports.
To understand how EssentiallySports pulled off the leap from anonymous upstart to industry standout, we have to rewind to a different kind of origin story: one that started with a lot of late nights working in a college dorm room in India.
That dorm room was where a trio of engineering students bought the essentiallysports.com domain, not to launch the next media juggernaut, but to have a place to write about their passion for sports.
For the first five years, business models took a back seat, according to Tibarewal. “We just wanted to express ourselves,” he said, and the site offered the outlet he and his co-founders were looking for.
That DIY ethos stuck even as EssentiallySports began morphing from what Tibarewal described as “WhatsApp groups and volunteers” into a bona fide digital publishing operation.
Then COVID changed the game. While much of the sports world hit pause, EssentiallySports’ audience and ambitions skyrocketed.
“We doubled down when everyone else scaled back,” Tibarewal said. “In February 2020, we had about one million page views. By May, it was 60 million,” he said, adding that a majority of the site’s audience was in the US.
How did EssentiallySports build that following? According to Tibarewal, it was a mix of publishing the right content at the right time, combined with a deep understanding of sports fans.
The site’s impassioned coverage of the NBA’s “The Last Dance” documentary and UFC’s COVID-era comeback (remember “Fight Island”?) struck a nerve with sports-starved fans. “We covered those emotions really well,” Tibarewal said, “and that just put us on the map.”
Monetizing Media – Leveling Up with Ad Ops and Data
But tremendous growth also meant a crash course in what it actually takes to operate a publishing business.
The early grind gave EssentiallySports “experience in publishing 22 hours a day, getting traffic, and figuring out services like Google AdSense,” Tibarewal said.
Those lessons proved invaluable once the audience exploded, and EssentiallySports’ newfound ad ops knowledge helped transform the small blog into a full-on media company.
After all, no matter how much passion a publisher brings to the table, scaling up the business still comes down to one thing: making the media math work. Fortunately for EssentiallySports, it got an assist from an unexpected place.
“We started with AdSense, like everyone,” Tibarewal joked. “But in 2020, Google actually reached out to us directly. Their rep was like, ‘How’d you grow so fast?’”
From there, EssentiallySports made the decision to swap AdSense out for Google Ad Manager (GAM), which proved to be an early milestone in the growth of its business. Shifting to GAM improved the company’s margins and brought in premium demand. But there were plenty more lessons ahead.
“We didn’t know everything,” Tibarewal said. “We started using a third party to manage SSPs. Over time, we realized we needed direct relationships and cut out the extra hops. Now, those partners reach out to us.”
EssentiallySports also took Google’s advice and started using first-party data to better understand and serve its audience.
“Google recommended we try out PPIDs—first-party cookies—which, back in 2021, wasn’t exactly standard,” Tibarewal said “But it let us show advertisers which sports or players our users cared about. That, plus all-organic traffic and our newsletter audience, really helped premium SSPs see our value.”
The numbers back it up: newsletters account for nearly 30% of EssentiallySports’ revenue, and more than a million subscribers visit the site an average of 10 times a month.
Rebranding and Reinvention
But with the challenges facing publishers today, it’s not enough to do the basics. Audience habits are always evolving, and publishers have to pivot to keep up.
Social media platforms and algorithms are constantly shifting, making it tough for publishers to rely on them for steady growth. So EssentiallySports decided to take more control over how users find and interact with its content. Enter: the big rebrand.
“We’ve hired a top design studio to overhaul how EssentiallySports looks and feels both internally and in the world,” Tibarewal explained.
It’s not just about aesthetics, though. The rebrand also reflects how sports fans prefer to engage with content on their own terms and across multiple media formats.
Over the last year, EssentiallySports expanded from its original focus on traditional written editorial and began building a multimedia platform. It now partners with creators and journalists for everything from custom NFL draft boards to skit-based explainers and “man on the street” video interview segments. On Instagram, the company is working with outside creators to bring authentic social media storytelling into the fold.
Newsletter strategy is also part of that pivot. So is EssentiallySports’ commitment to cover a diverse range of sports—not just the top professional leagues, but also growing leagues like the LPGA, TGL, and more. That way, every fan finds a home and a voice on its platform.
Community engagement is at the heart of it all, with readers providing insights through polls, surveys, and promotional giveaways, forming a feedback loop that shapes coverage.
Amid all this change, Tibarewal admits there’s a balancing act between providing creative freedom and creating a consistent brand voice.
“When you get into multimedia, it’s easy to get fragmented and have each team doing its own thing,” he said. “We learned you need a core philosophy everyone understands, but enough creative room so each piece feels genuine. And maybe most of all, you have to stay close to your fans, wherever the platforms go next.”
Even as AI and industry shakeups keep everyone guessing, EssentiallySports is sticking to its blend of innovation, audience focus, and a willingness to experiment.
“Trust and brand identity are going to become even more important,” in the AI era, Tibarewal said. “And the only way you survive in publishing is by building a direct, real connection with your audience.”