Building House of Highlights into a sports media powerhouse

You’ve probably heard of House of Highlights—even if you’re not a sports fan, it’s hard to miss, whether on YouTube or scrolling through your social feeds.

What started as a college dorm Instagram account has grown over 11 years into the #1 sports media brand on the platform, boasting 100 million followers and billions of monthly views.

Today, House of Highlights is a multi-platform sports media powerhouse, producing creator-led content and original series that rival traditional TV. Drew Muller, vice president and general manager at House of Highlights, spoke with Yasmin Gagne and Joshua Christensen on the Most Innovative Companies podcast about growth strategies, creator partnerships, and how the company balances viral moments with long-form storytelling.

How did House of Highlights start?

[The genesis of the project came from] a guy named Omar Raja in his college dorm room. The idea was: “I’m not seeing the highlights that I want on the platforms where I’m spending time.” Seems like kind of table stakes now that you see the proliferation of highlights basically everywhere you look on social media. But back then it really was a novel idea.

And the Bleacher Report leadership at the time [. . .] led the acquisition of bringing in this Instagram account into the sports world and saying, “this account is doing something interesting—it’s speaking with young people, it’s overperforming in ways that seem to not map to what typical sports companies are doing.”

[It was ultimately a credit to Bleacher Report] who let House of Highlights incubate as a startup within the larger company, allowing it space to grow and preserve its unique voice.

From there, the idea was: let’s figure out if we can make this into a multi-platform media company that can stand on its own and be incremental to what Bleacher Report was already doing. So how do we make this differentiated and give fans a reason to want to follow both accounts? 

How do you make sure House of Highlights keeps its own voice and identity?

A lot of it maps down to a steadfast commitment to voice and clarity of who we are and who we’re not. A lot of it is due to the organizational structure where House of Highlights is able to maintain operational and strategy independence. We have our own go-to-market strategy, we have our own assets and content strategy and logos and identities and even fonts.

But it does take a day-in and day-out focus to balance the two, because we do eat from the same pool of sports rights and sometimes resources.

You moved from Instagram highlights to hour-long programming. What were the conversations like around developing long-form content?

When we first started to make original content, it was almost out of necessity creator-led. We were a small scrappy team, and in many instances we couldn’t afford to pay huge athletes. There were creators that were starting to blow up on Instagram and YouTube, but were nowhere near the scale we’re talking about today. We were able to form big partnerships with creators that are now household names [like] Supreme Dreams, and Mark Phillips. All of it tied back to sports, youth culture, and putting an entertaining lens on what it is to be a sports fan or to experience sports with your friends in a group chat.

The most value that we’ve gotten from building habitual long-form viewership is making sure that an hour or two-hour-long video has a clear path to short form [because] we have massive amounts of short-form expertise and scale, and people are expecting that from us. 

How has House of Highlights’ approach to creator deals evolved?

[When looking at the creator’s growth chart, we want to be] where they’re starting to take off, but before they get to the point where they’re a household name and they’re the cream of the crop, not to say we don’t still want to work with them at that point, but typically that’s when they’re getting overpaid by some of the legacy companies. 

[We] built a lot of the formats that have been replicated by many of the big leagues and some of the big media companies. [Creators] know they’re not just showing up for an appearance fee or to check a box. We’re trying to build special content together and special franchises and IP that can scale. 

House of Highlights, as we’ve discussed, is publishing across multiple platforms. How do you approach content programming across those platforms that all reward different types of content and cadence?

[On YouTube], you’re going to see full game recaps for folks that maybe aren’t in the cable bundle and aren’t watching two- to three-hour games—they typically come to House of Highlights YouTube for a 10- to 15-minute recap of that game.

On TikTok, because of how the For You Page operates, you can publish more, and those videos will find their homes without taking up all of someone’s feed. On Instagram, if someone follows House of Highlights and we’re publishing a hundred times a day, it will feel like that in your feed.

Under-34 sports fans are watching less and less live cable sports events—[so how] can we build an appointment viewing experience for that fandom? From an advertising perspective, obviously that is super valuable, and it’s increasingly hard to reach that audience at scale.

What’s next for House of Highlights?

We’ve got three events left in our Creator League season. We’ve got a basketball knockout five on five, and then a championship series. That’ll carry us through the end of November. Based on the numbers that we’re seeing, we’re excited about what the championship could look like. 

And then honestly, the growth of our Fans versus Haters series and where that overarching brand can go in terms of debate style content for a younger audience. 

[At the end of the day, a lot of it] comes down to our focus on YouTube and how we’re making House of Highlights a broadcast channel.

View the full article