Nation Network partners with Altitude Investments

Earlier this week, FlamesNation managing editor Ryan Pike received a text from Nation Network CEO Jay Downton requesting a quick phone chat. After nervously deleting all the anti-Edmonton content from his social media feeds, Pike called him back.

The boss had an announcement that he wanted to share.

“What we’re going to be announcing today is we are forming a partnership with a company called Altitude Investments,” said Downton. “And they’re going to be placing an investment in the Nation Network to help grow this entity. We’ve been talking with them since October and the reason why they approached us is they recognize the brands that we’ve built, they recognize the communities that exist because of all this, and they also understand the potential of this space.”

Downton noted that the folks at Altitude are sports-mad – he joked that many of their office’s Oilers fans wanted to join in on the meetings to hear the Nation Network’s big plans for the future – and after discussions about hopes and plans for the future they realized that their visions aligned. Now Altitude has jumped on board to be an investment partner to allow the Network to build out their plan.

The Nation team was hoping to expand the Network’s focus without taking away from the core team sites, which have been the heart and soul of the Network since the beginning. The crux of the new strategy lies within a site that’s become a big part of everyone’s life who does anything related to fantasy hockey: Daily Faceoff. Fans league-wide already come to the site to learn about injuries, healthy scratches and which goalie’s starting on any given night, and the Network is hoping to leverage the enthusiasm around DFO into spinning off a league-wide content strategy.

While the new strategy will result in more content for Nation readers, Downton noted that another nice feature will be the opportunity for the Network to support more Canadian writers and for hockey fans to be able to follow their favourite writer’s career without them disappearing to join an NHL team or another outlet.

“It allows us build a path for someone to join the Network and build an actual career within the Network,” said Downton. “The end result is us being able to promote and attract and hire more Canadian content contributors.”

So what does the Nation’s new partnership with Altitude mean for FlamesNation readers?

“We’re going to make your site experience a lot better than current state,” said Downton. “We’re going to be able to invest in more content for you so we can make sure we’re attacking all the elements. It’s going to allow us to provide more opportunities for the team, our current roster, and allow us to be able to go and try to build the roster, because one of the big and powerful things is we can go out and employ more Canadian content creators, which is for me the thing that really gets me excited.”