Bleacher Report CEO Says Barstool Sports Is "White Males Who Want To Join A Country Club" And That We'll Never Be As Big As Them
In a recent Recode Media podcast with Peter Kafka, Bleacher Report CEO Dave Finocchio had a whole lot to say about the state of digital sports media in general and about his own company in particular. But it’s Finocchio’s thoughts on Barstool Sports that perhaps particularly stand out.
The key part of that conversation comes around 45:30, where Kafka asks Finocchio directly about Barstool, saying “You’ve mentioned at least once Barstool, they’re the new kids. What do you think of them?”
“I honestly mostly root for them,” Finocchio says. “I think they’re one of the few examples of a brand-first company that’s kind of emerged in the space. Most of us were audience-first and then we built our brands on the backside of that.”
Kafka asks “What does being brand-first mean?” and Finocchio responds:
“Brand-first means that their audience isn’t that big, but their users are incredibly passionate about the brand, so the brand outpunches its weight relative to how many people actually consume the content. People who love Barstool really, really love Barstool. I’m interested to see what they do. I met with Erika [Barstool CEO Erika Nardini] pretty recently, and I just think their setup’s great. They have these crazy content people over here, and they brought in a very professional business development leader who has credibility everywhere.” “And is not a dude, which helps,” Kafka adds, and Finocchio responds “Yeah, I thought that was brilliant. And she seems like a great person.”
Kafka then says “And to spell this out, right, because the idea is they’re edgy, right, that’s the professional way we describe them.” Finocchio responds “Yeah, like you wouldn’t say misogynistic or whatever other words we could call them. It will be interesting to see…I’m curious…if they decide to push more chips into the advertising business, we need to clean the content up. If they do that, they risk losing some of the attachment to their audience.” Kafka says “They have an audience loves them particularly because they’re not ESPN, but also because they’re not you guys, or they’re not SB Nation,” and Finocchio says “Yeah, they’re not politically correct. They’re definitely more, it feels to me like, white males who want to join a country club. They’re never going to be as big as we are because we work very hard to be inclusive and we don’t offend people. They purposely offend people and that’s what they do, but a lot of people love that. So whatever.”
Just to put a face to the condescending lecture about being fratty white boys.
I hope to one day be as mature and highbrow as the company that puts a copy and paste phrase from Urban Dictionary and a fucking emoji in every single headline.
PS,
People don’t forget.
The difference between having a data driven algorithm manufacturing slideshows for clicks vs. having an actual fan base.
[Recode Media via Awful Announcing]