Sports Illustrated CEO bussinessman Ross Levinsohn is one of the most powerful people in the world of sports. Born in San Francisco in 1962, Levinsohn is an authority on the effects of tech and its future on sports. He has been interviewed by major publications such as Forbes, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal in relation to the monetization of sports media.
In 2000, he co-founded AudienceScience where he served as CEO before selling it to Yahoo! for $300M+ three years later. Levinsohn currently serves as chairman of Yahoo! Sports Properties at Oath Inc., a Verizon company.
Levinsohn has been recognized for his entrepreneurial accomplishments with the Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award for Northern California, and was recently named a Finalist for the 2017 Sports Business Awards Sports Executive of the Year award, given by SportsBusiness Journal/Daily.
A native San Francisco Bay Area resident, Ross graduated with honors from UC Berkeley as a Boalt Hall honors law scholar and Phi Beta Kappa. He also holds an MBA from UT-Austin’s McCombs School of Business.
Sports Illustrated CEO started his own sports communications, public relations and marketing firm in 1991. During this time he served as the PR representative for Raiders football, basketball and baseball teams, including their Super Bowl wins in the 1990’s.
In 1998 Levinsohn was hired by Marv Levy to serve a director of business development position with the Denver Nuggets and later the Colorado Rockies. While there he also served as Director of Corporate Development for the Pepsi Center, a downtown Denver hockey arena.
In 2000 Levinsohn co-founded AudienceScience, a company that developed innovations to display ads on sports websites. At the time it was one of the few sources for sports advertising in the early days of internet media, working with many of Yahoo’s early sports partners including ESPN and USA Today Sports/Gannett.