How Barstool beat ESPN at their own game


As a young avid sports fan I watched ESPN religiously. I grew up loving the personalities like Stuart Scott and John Anderson. They were legends in their own right. But one thing I found when watching sportcenter that really turned me off was that they would re-use their content constantly. Ive watched sportcenter on repeat a disgusting amount of times. ESPN 2 used to just re-air ESPNs content an hour later. ESPN was the best was when they first started out. The anchors were young and were able to relate to the younger demographic better. Their personalities were the things that kept peoples interest. TV was relatively new, it was sort of like the wild west. They were the first to do what they were doing. Pictured below is the legend Chris Berman in 1985. He started at ESPN over 30 years ago and continues to make content for them today. Okay Boomer.
Chris Berman of ESPN
As like any dynasty there is a run and naturally an end to that run.
Enter Barstool Sports. What started as a small blog site recently was involved in a deal with publicly traded company Penn National Gaming which valued Barstool Sports at a whopping $450 million.

Dave Portnoy founder of Barstool Sports
I believe Barstool has taken market share from ESPN and will continue to do so as time goes on. Im not going to say that ESPN will die but there market share is shrinking and will continue to do so with companies like Barstool.

Similar to what attracted me to ESPN back in the day, Barstool's personalities are what makes them entertaining. The company employs fans of practically every large market team and unlike a company like ESPN they can express a bias. ESPN has become too buttoned up for me, what sets Barstool apart is that there are literally no rules to their content. Similar to how TV was less regulated back in the day giving it a wild west feel, Barstool is creating content in this new digital era when things are certainly like the wild west. What I mean by that is there is way less regulation. The internet is so powerful and Barstool utilizing the immense reach the internet allows for without any large overhead of cable television.

One more thing about ESPN is that they come off as trying very hard to be politically correct and it shows in their scripted content. Im not trying to get political, but I am looking for sports content, not politics. If I'm looking for politics content, I'm certainly not going to watch ESPN so they should just focus on covering sports. Barstool is way more relatable and far more entertaining. Some of their takes are controversial, and thats okay. It's called content.

They are way ahead of the game on Podcasts as the company has the most popular sports podcast in the world Pardon My Take featuring Big Cat and PFT. I bet ESPN is S****ing their pants about this and are scrambling to create podcasts as I type this sentence out.

Although I do think that there is enough space in the sports media market for both of them, I think Barstools fan base is way more engaged and loyal which will only accelerate the growth of Barstool.




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