Barstool content is not for everyone. It’s usually goofy. It can be offensive. If you are not in the target audience or a fully-bought-in Stoolie, you may never give the brand much thought.
From a content standpoint, how much attention you pay to Barstool depends on what they do for you. From a business standpoint though, the brand keeps getting it right and if you are in the business of making digital content, you should look at Barstool with the same undivided attention that Thanos gave Red Skull on Vormir.
Understanding that the Barstool distribution model works is one thing. Understanding why it works, copying what you can and cutting through the clutter of what won’t work for you is more important and requires more effort.
In an age when so many radio professionals are trying to stand out in a digital world, one of the best things we can do is to pay attention to where the brand’s content is. Using social media to build an audience for digital and audio is a good strategy, but where do you focus your efforts to achieve the biggest payoff?
While its content is everywhere it should be, and its audience is robust compared to the average local station or host(s) gone solo, Barstool’s biggest impact is on TikTok. Look at their audience sizes on all the other major social platforms.
- Twitter – 5.2 million
- Instagram – 13.7 million
- Facebook – 5.9 million
- YouTube – 1.58 million
Combined, that is slightly under 26.4 million people that have bought into the content so much that they have decided they never want to miss a post from the brand. It is also less than the subscriber base on TikTok, which last week, hit 30 million. Embracing TikTok is so important if you are trying to make a media/content career exclusively in the digital space.
Finding an audience online can be confusing for those of us that came up in legacy media. If your background in radio, your first thought when it comes to digital content is probably a podcast, right? We know audio. It feels comfortable.
Podcasting doesn’t cast a particularly wide net though. You have to rely on the audience choosing you and then spreading the word. You can promote through other social platforms, but there is no guarantee that the audience will consume anything more than the clip you are putting out on that platform.
Giving up terrestrial for digital used to mean we had to give up easy access. In radio, you can turn people that may not have even known about you into loyal listeners because they liked what they heard as they were scanning the dial. Social video algorithms have changed that reality though and no where is better to take advantage of that than on TikTok.
Think about all of the times you have clicked on one video and just started scrolling. Maybe that first video was a short comedy clip. Then you swipe and there is an attractive woman doing some provocative dance. Swipe again and there is a highlight of Barry Sanders juking some poor fool out of his shoes.
Barstool built its subscriber base by finding ways to end up in a variety of algorithms. The content is varied and tagged on the backend in a way that makes it fit with a variety of interests.
Unlike Instagram Reels, whether you see them on their original platform or on Facebook, there is nothing else to do on TikTok. There is no other form of posting that users can be distracted by. Barstool can make their entire strategy for the platform about appealing to a wide variety of algorithms.
Pop up enough in someone’s feed, and they are likely to simply click follow. It is how I ended up following a number of comedians. I’d bet it is how plenty of Barstool’s followers ended up following them. It can be hard to imagine with media business tunnel vision, but there is likely a significant chunk of those 30 million people that follow Barstool on TikTok that have no idea who Dave Portnoy, Big Cat, PFT or KFC are. They just know that the content on that feed is reliably entertaining.
The world is made up almost entirely of non-P1 consumers. When it comes to digital media, TikTok may be the very best way to reach them and show them that it is worth coming back over and over. Barstool gets that it is important to be everywhere, but it is just as important to master the platforms with the most potential.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
