Congratulations to our friends at Yardbarker, who today announced that they’ve been acquired by Fox Sports. Yardbarker and the YBN (Yardbarker Network) of over 800 sports blogs get the added exposure of Fox’s network (and relationship with MSN), while Fox gets a massive network of new voices to help bolster their offering and potentially make them considerably more competitive with the likes of ESPN and Yahoo! Sports. After spending the past year in an advertising sales partnership, it’s clear that Fox got a good look and liked what it saw.  All of which is a good thing for sports bloggers everywhere.

A few words about the deal, from Yardbarker CEO Pete Vlastelica’s official announcement this morning:

Becoming a part of FOX will ensure that Yardbarker has the resources it needs to drive more and more traffic and revenue toward the independent sports sites that we’ve built our business serving. If you are a publisher in our network, the only changes you’ll notice will be positive. We’re working with our new parents to increase distribution of your content through the various channels that FOX controls, and to line up even more brand advertisers to run high-CPM campaigns on your sites. Publishers will still run their sites independently and maintain their current editorial control; payment arrangements will remain the same. We will send out more information about this deal to publishers in the Yardbarker Network shortly.