Ranking Web Pages in Sports Betting and Media
This article, posted by the NBA (National Basketball Association), outlines a new agreement extension that grows the relationship between the NBA and Yahoo! Sports. In this agreement, Yahoo! secures exclusive access to host and create content for the NBA, such as platforming their season-long fantasy game, creating daily fantasy integrations into NBA league pass, and creating shows around the Conference Finals and NBA Finals focused on fantasy and gambling. The agreement also gives Yahoo! access to game footage from the NBA, G League, and WNBA for the purposes of content creation, such as highlights and previews of games. In addition to this, Yahoo! and their subsidiary RYOT will start streaming live NBA games in virtual reality.
Another, unspoken benefit to both the NBA and Yahoo! is that there are now links from NBA.com to Yahoo! platforms. When looking at deals like these, it is important to look at them through the lens of Hub and Authority scores. The hub score of a particular search result shows how good of a list of resources the result is. The authority score ranks how good a result is in relation to others in the subset. As can be seen from the graph below and resulting normalized scores, nodes have higher authority scores when they have links from nodes with higher hub scores. These higher scores result from a larger variety of connections from those hubs. For instance, Ticketmaster has the highest authority score of 9/29 as a result of having a link from the NBA and the Mets, both of which have other connections. As this relates to the value of these cross-brand deals, like the Yahoo!-NBA deal, these deals raise the value of both firms, at least in terms of site rank; the more connections that are present, the more traffic that is driven. In the case of Yahoo! and this new deal, if they were not to have completed this partnership, their authority score in this gambling/sports media space would have fallen greatly. It falls from 8/29 to 1/18 if this link were to not be present. For the NBA, their hub score drops from 25/54 to 13/31. Clearly, when looked at through the lens of hub and authority scores, the sports betting and sports media landscape is reliant on brand deals to grow individual firm presence.
(Network with and without NBA link to Yahoo!, respectively)
