The State of Personality Media in 2017
A report from Red Seat Ventures on the personality media space, including leaders from 2017 and 2018’s biggest opportunities for growth.
There has never been a better time for personalities to build their own businesses. The audience is more connected and digitally savvy than ever. The tools have matured tremendously just in the past few years. And, despite challenges from the social platforms, monetization options have never been greater.
Personalities have unique advantages in building new digital media businesses. While many new companies struggle to create a brand identity, successful personalities bring a loyal and engaged audience with them that helps to define the brand from day 1.
In this report, we’ll explore the most interesting, innovative, and fast-growing personality businesses of 2017, as well as the tools that are allowing for faster time-to-market and better execution than ever before. We’ll also look at key opportunities for talent in 2018 and beyond.
2017 Winners: Personalities
- Dave Portnoy / Barstool Sports
The essence of a great digital brand in 2017 is experimentation. From their Super Bowl coverage in February on Comedy Central through to their purchase of Rough N Rowdy and expansion on SiriusXM in November, Barstool has continued to expand their platform beyond being “just a web site.”
Much has been written about their success in podcasts, and in merchandise. Less covered, however, has been their “saturation” approach to promotion. If you follow any Barstool personality on any social platform, you will see consistent, unyielding promotion for whatever the company’s promotional priority is at the moment. The merchandise, podcasts, and pay-per-view events don’t sell themselves. It’s a constant push across all platforms from all personalities that help them cut through the social clutter and make users pay attention. After hearing about, reading about, or seeing a video for a T-shirt for the 10th time, you might just decide you need it. Getting entire groups of employees to all organically promote the same thing at the same time is a modern miracle, and Barstool seems to do it every week.
Finally, in a world where Buzzfeed has raised $496m in funding, Barstool has been able to build a legitimate, multimedia platform with just a few million in funding.
2. Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor / Crooked Media
If there was ever a time to launch a new left-leaning digital brand, that time was January 2017. And these guys took advantage of it.
What started as a single podcast that was part of The Ringer has grown into a multiplatform media company, with several highly downloaded podcasts, a new web site, and no doubt more in the works.
Once again, Crooked avoided the “traditional” route and re-invested podcast revenue into their business, rather than taking money from VCs. They also avoided the platform trap, with little to no dependence on the Facebook traffic ecosystem that has tripped up so many others.
With a merchandise store up and running and several tours planned for next year, Crooked is showing the way forward for personalities who want to build powerful media brands without raising capital from third parties.
3. Ben Shapiro / The Daily Wire
For a while during the Obama administration, it seemed that new right-leaning media outlets were popping up daily, following a Facebook-driven, programmatic ad driven model. There wasn’t much to tell one from the other.
What Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire have accomplished is a high traffic site with a more diversified business model, including paid subscriptions and a podcast that’s downloaded over 10 million times monthly, according to a recent profile of Shapiro in the NYT.
With nearly 5m Facebook fans, Shapiro & The Daily Wire can make money from the programmatic world while simultaneously building their non-platform revenue streams.
Honorable Mentions
- Anthony Cumia / Compound Media
OTT subscription networks are hard, but Compound Media has done a fantastic job creating shows that super serve their core demographic, giving them value for their dollar and content they can’t get anywhere else.
2. Mark Levin / CRTV
Another OTT subscription, with a popular host and additional content being added to serve an underserved audience.
3. Clay Travis / Outkick
Clay Travis has built a digital media company with impressive breadth, including radio, podcasts, original video, ad supported content, and merchandise.
Ones to Watch in 2018
- Reese Witherspoon /Hello Sunshine
Reese hasn’t launched her digital content play yet, but with a history of success in Draper James, and the right partner in The Chernin Group, there is a big opportunity.
2. Bill O’Reilly / BillOreilly.com
Bill was already a franchise, with the #1 show on cable news, a successful tour, and a string of #1 bestselling books. Since his Fox News departure, reportedly hundreds of thousands of fans have signed up for his subscription OTT offering.
2018 Focus
- Podcasts
Gathering a large and loyal podcast audience is harder than the companies on our list make it seem. With that said, the combination of low barrier to entry, high advertiser demand, and lack of gatekeepers make the medium particularly attractive to those seeking to create personality driven media businesses.
2. Tours
With the death of recorded music revenue, bands have come to rely on tours as their primary source of income. Comedians have long made most of their money on the road. In 2017, podcasters learned to love touring. We predict more of the same in 2018.
3. OTT
OTT for personalities is the highest risk / highest reward proposition. When Netflix is $10.99/month, offering enough content to satisfy your audience is a high bar, and finding and financing the marketing effort required to attract and retain subscribers is difficult.
While the content and marketing bar have gotten higher, the tools to launch and monetize these types of subscription businesses have steadily improved. Zype, in particular, has lower the barrier to entry tremendously, allowing just about anyone to launch their own OTT network.
4. Online Learning
Considering the constant content demands for full OTT subscription networks, online learning allows personalities to create most bespoke video content for certain segments of their audience. Masterclass has raised $56m in VC money to bring online learning into the mainstream, but just about anyone can use a tool like Kajabi to launch and monetize an online course.
5. Non-OTT Subscriptions
Not all subscriptions rely on video. This year, we’ve seen the launch of a dedicated subscription email tool with Substack, a subscription Twitter tool with Premo, and the emergence of Patreon as a vital additional revenue source for podcasters. There are more avenues for content monetization than ever before.
6. Traditional Media Expansion
The strongest digital media players will be drafted into service to produce movies, TV shows, radio shows, and other forms of content for traditional media channels. We view this as only good news. Americans still watch 5 hours a day of TV, and terrestrial radio still reaches 93% of all Americans on a weekly basis. Digital brands who can leverage their content and audience relationships into deals with “legacy media” stand to gain, as long as they are not sacrificing too much independence to do so.
Conclusion
The number and diversity of personality media brands will continue to expand rapidly in 2018 and beyond. The ones that are successful will build a diversified revenue base and take advantage of new tools that have become available to build cost effective new media brands that they own and control.
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This report was authored by Christopher Balfe and the team at Red Seat Ventures. Red Seat Ventures partners with top talent to help them build digital businesses. In the interest of impartiality, we excluded our own clients from consideration for the list above. However, if you’d like to hear about our success this year with clients like Nancy Grace, Colin Cowherd, and many others, feel free to reach out.
