Fooch’s update: 11 years is not quite as round as 10 years, so for the time being, I’ll just update this one. Today marks 11 years of Niners Nation!
Time certainly does fly by. Today marks ten years of Niners Nation. Ten years ago, I launched the site while working as an accountant for the Oakland A’s. I also happened to apply to law school around the same time, which suggests to me in hindsight that I was mostly just bored at work. While I am in all sorts of debt with student loans, both decisions have combined to put me in the position I am today, working full time for Vox Media (parent company of SB Nation), and living back in Washington, D.C.
It’s been a crazy ten years since things first started. When I launched NN in 2006, SB Nation and Vox Media were then known as Sports Blogs, Inc. It became Sports Blogs Nation and eventually SB Nation. Vox Media was created as the parent company once we moved beyond just sports.
When we first were creating the site, we tossed around some different names. Some were already bought, others had copyright issues. Some of the names mentioned included Niners Chronicles and Bay of Pigskin. Eventually, Niners Nation was the choice.
Ten years ago today, NN launched on a platform that looked drastically different than what we see today. I don’t know how many people we have from the earliest days, but a lot of people have joined the site at different times over the course of a decade. Naturally, plenty of you don't remember the early days of the site. Each year I like posting some screenshots of what the site has looked like over the years. The screenshots below include the first available, three weeks after the site launched. You can play around and check out other iterations at the Web Archive. And as always, you can read every piece of front page content we've ever published in the site archive. You can read our first article here.
January 11, 2007
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September 29, 2008
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May 29, 2010
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