The Athletic MLB Audience Graph • Social Signal

The top 10 neighbors for The Athletic MLB span five distinct subcategories — athletes, websites, news publishers, sports brands, and a magazine — with scores compressed into a narrow band from 0.85 down to 0.83, the defining signature of a flat shape.

Abby Wambach leads at 0.85, followed closely by Onion Sports Network (0.85), NBC Olympics (0.84), The Athletic (0.84), and CBS Sports MLB (0.84). Elias Sports Bureau (0.84) and Michael Phelps (0.84) sit just behind, with FanGraphs Baseball (0.84), Deadspin (0.83), and Katie Nolan (0.83) rounding out the set. The spread across all ten is less than three hundredths of a point.

The subcategory mix is the real story. Only one neighbor — CBS Sports MLB — shares The Athletic MLB's own subcategory of News Publishers. The rest are athletes (Abby Wambach, Michael Phelps), websites (Onion Sports Network, The Athletic, FanGraphs Baseball), a sports organization (NBC Olympics), a sports data brand (Elias Sports Bureau), a magazine (Deadspin), and a TV personality (Katie Nolan). The audience shape here is not defined by a single kind of entity — it cuts across sports media formats and individual sports figures with equal pull.

This flat, cross-kind distribution suggests an audience whose composition is shaped by broad sports-media engagement rather than loyalty to any one format or platform.

Machine-Readable

Raw data

Attention graph /similar sample results (free):

https://graphs.socialsignal.ai/similar/theathleticmlb

{ "handle": "theathleticmlb", "title": "The Athletic MLB", "category": "Marketing Channels", "subcategory": "News Publishers", "resolved": "theathleticmlb", "k": 10, "shape": "flat", "filter": null, "results": [ { "handle": "abbywambach", "title": "Abby Wambach", "category": "Celebrities and Influencers", "subcategory": "Athletes", "similarity": 0.8536, "drivers": [ "P04", "N04", "P02", "H01", "A04" ] }, { "handle": "onionsports", "title": "Onion Sports Network", "category": "Marketing Channels", "subcategory": "Websites", "similarity": 0.8462, "drivers": [ "P04", "P02", "A06", "P06", "N02" ] }, { "handle": "nbcolympics", "title": "NBC Olympics", "category": "Organizations", "subcategory": "Sports Leagues", "similarity": 0.8434, "drivers": [ "P02", "P04", "P06", "N04", "N02" ] }, { "handle": "theathletic", "title": "The Athletic", "category": "Marketing Channels", "subcategory": "Websites", "similarity": 0.8414, "drivers": [ "A01", "N02", "P06", "P04", "P02" ] }, { "handle": "cbssportsmlb", "title": "CBS Sports MLB", "category": "Marketing Channels", "subcategory": "News Publishers", "similarity": 0.8408, "drivers": [ "A06", "P04", "P02", "P06", "B02" ] }, { "handle": "eliassports", "title": "Elias Sports Bureau", "category": "Brands", "subcategory": "Sports", "similarity": 0.8406, "drivers": [ "P06", "P02", "N02", "A04", "P04" ] }, { "handle": "michaelphelps", "title": "Michael Phelps", "category": "Celebrities and Influencers", "subcategory": "Athletes", "similarity": 0.8398, "drivers": [ "A06", "P02", "P04", "P06", "N04" ] }, { "handle": "fangraphs", "title": "FanGraphs Baseball", "category": "Marketing Channels", "subcategory": "Websites", "similarity": 0.8355, "drivers": [ "P02", "P06", "A04", "N02", "P04" ] }, { "handle": "deadspin", "title": "Deadspin", "category": "Marketing Channels", "subcategory": "Magazines", "similarity": 0.8321, "drivers": [ "P02", "P04", "A01", "A04", "P06" ] }, { "handle": "katienolan", "title": "Katie Nolan", "category": "Celebrities and Influencers", "subcategory": "TV Personalities", "similarity": 0.8297, "drivers": [ "N02", "A04", "H02", "P04", "P02" ] } ] }

Full Attention graph /similarity /affinity /demographics available with API key:

https://graphs.socialsignal.ai/v1/attention/similar/theathleticmlb

The Athletic MLB

Nearest neighbors by audience shape

Raw data