Although Bill Simmons' website, The Ringer, is "producing a mix of sports and popular-culture content, as well as coverage of politics and technology, Grantland’s fans are not rushing" to the site, according to Richard Sandomir of the N.Y. TIMES. Data from comScore shows that The Ringer, which launched in June, had 1.2 million unique visitors in July. That figure fell to 643,000 in August, but "rose slightly" to 680,000 in September. Simmons' ESPN-backed Grantland site had 6.1 million visitors in October '15 at the end of its four-year run. While some Grantland writers followed Simmons, a "bunch of new staff members are writing articles that are shorter than those that appeared on Grantland." The most "conspicuous absence is Simmons’s written voice." He has published only a "few columns on The Ringer, perhaps because of his focus" on the now-cancelled HBO show "Any Given Wednesday." It is worth wondering if Simmons "launched The Ringer a little too late in a digital world that increasingly requires bigness, like an association with ESPN or a partnership along the lines of the one" between SI and Fox Sports. The Ringer "receives a small portion of its financial support from HBO." Meanwhile, it has also become apparent that Simmons is "not good on television." His informed but "freewheeling and logorrheic writing voice and the loose persona he brings to podcasting do not translate well to onscreen work." It became "evident, quite soon, that he would not create a triumvirate of great HBO hosts with Bill Maher and John Oliver." The HBO show "could not rely on Simmons’s force of personality to generate a consistently big audience." Too often, he was "bland and looked as if he wanted to duck into a podcast studio to chat" (N.Y. TIMES, 11/14).
