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Barstoolsports.com Seeing 1.4 Million
Unique Visitors Per Month |
BOSTON magazine's A.J. Downey profiles David Portnoy, the Founder of Barstool Sports, a "crudely designed, widely read 'sports/smut' site that can only be described as the bastard child of ESPN and Girls Gone Wild." The company has only "five full-time employees," but "since its launch a few years ago, Barstool has become one of the most popular and talked-about blogs in the country." Barstool "sees 1.4 million unique visitors a month, while its subsidiary websites -- Barstool Sports NYC and StoolLaLa.com -- bring in an additional million." The website is "basically a virtual frat house, a place of uncensored, intemperate, often sexist stream-of-consciousness chatter among relatively well-educated 25-year-old guys." The writing is "vulgar, lowbrow, over the top, and full of expletives," though it can also be "oddly addictive, with one sophomoric headline followed by another." Just as "impressive as Barstool's ability to attract readers is its ability to convert that traffic into actual profits." Barstool's promotions "can be as entertaining as its posts." The campaigns "help advertisers," but they also are "conspicuously in line with the 'Stoolie ethos." That is how Narragansett Beer's "Search for New England's Best 'Can' came to be," or Miltons department stores' "Pimp My Look" contest. The revenue from those campaigns "allowed Portnoy to launch a Barstool Sports.com last year in New York City, and he'd someday like to have outposts in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago." Downey notes the "value of Barstool Sports is anywhere from $220,000 to $900,000 ... depending on which numbers you look at." The company also has been doing "brisk business selling merchandise," and in October, "one T-shirt netted the company $50,000 in three weeks." That growth "has earned Portnoy notice from large media corporations" such as Comcast, which recently "approached Portnoy to discuss the future of the site" (BOSTON, 12/ '10 issue).
