For the Brand?, or, New Media, Old Practices

Introduction

By now, Aaron Rodgers’ infamous interview with Pat McAfee on Nov 5, 2021 has traveled around the mainstream media and blogosphere several times. Criticisms of Rodgers’ factual inaccuracies, lazy excuses for his lies (or, as WaPo put it, “at best, duplicity”), and decontextualized quotes from civil rights icons about his vaccination (sorry, “immunization”) status abound. Many have also lamented McAfee and his crew for their failures to press Rodgers on these issues. Some analysts have pointed to the upstart livestreamers’ cozy relationship with their friend(ly acquaintance) as an explanation for their journalistic missteps. As McAfee later explained it, he’s ready to “just move on” from this “whole COVID thing.” More cynically, others have postulated The Pat McAfee Show’s nearly exclusive access to Rodgers drives channel traffic and thus advertising and sponsorship revenue: to disrupt that relationship, the hypothesis goes, might mean disrupting the money train and jeopardizing The Brand.

Rather than merely speculate about McAfee & Co.’s individual rationalizations, I can analyze traffic & other engagement metrics to test several hypotheses about their overnight explosion. In this analysis of The Pat McAfee Show’s YouTube channel history, I illustrate that 1) Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays pivotally launched the channel to its success, especially but not exclusively during the NFL’s season and 2) clips about Rodgers have sustained the stream’s growth. Taken together, this evidence highlights the shortcomings of new media as it holds to old/mainstream corporate media’s practices.

The Aaron Rodgers Tuesday Effect

To get a sense of how the channel fared over its four-year history, we can examine how view counts of its primary source for content, daily live streams, changed over time.

A few patterns are immediately evident in the first plot below. For the channel’s first two years, there were two Video On Demand (VOD) bursts in viewership: at its outset in late 2017, and immediately following the pandemic’s start in March 2020. Although further investigative journalism might reveal that McAfee & Co., like many content creators, recognized an opportunity to pull eyes to their media with millions of homebound people, the major boost in live stream views does not begin until September 9, 2020, marked by the first green vertical line. On that day, the team published their “MASSIVE Announcement” that Aaron Rodgers would be “joining [the crew] every Tuesday this season” to breakdown that week in football, share some stories, and freely speak his mind. The announcement’s impacts were immediate: whereas the previous week’s Thursday stream accumulated about 150,000 views, the first Aaron Rodgers Tuesday stream raked in nearly triple as many views.

A line graph depicting the total number of daily live stream views over channel’s entire history. After nearly every major event involving Aaron Rodgers and the Packers (Aaron Tuesday announcement; 2021 NFC loss), or the NFL (2021–22 season start), the channel sees a massive uptake in views followed by a slow decline after the NFL season.

Zooming into the post-announcement period, Tuesday live streams far and away dominate the channel’s VOD views, as indicated by the green dots topping the chart. Indeed, their most viewed VODs ever came immediately before and after the Packers’ 2020–21 NFC Championship loss. Undoubtedly, many people (including myself) wanted to know Aaron’s headspace going into it, and how he felt coming off it. But with the season’s close on Feb 4, 2021’s Superbowl LV, marked by the brown line, so too came the slow tumble from peak numbers. During the offseason, daily live stream views sat around 279,000 per VOD, nothing to snuff at but strikingly lower than their 397,000 views per VOD during the 2020–21 season. Once the 2021–22 season launched, marked by the second green line on Sept 9, 2021, daily live stream views quickly began to rise again. Since the first anniversary of the Aaron Rodgers Tuesday announcement, daily live streams have averaged about 323,000 views. Clearly the NFL season is an important part of The Pat McAfee Show’s success.

A line graph depicting the total number of view counts by day of week since Aaron Tuesday announcement in October 2020. After the announcement, Tuesday live streams consistently remained the most viewed live streams week over week.

These trends over time are more starkly illustrated by examining the average number of daily live stream views pre- and post-announcement. As you can see below, not only did Tuesday VODs’ average view count triple, but every other day of the week’s viewership no less than doubled. Part of this story may be that Pat McAfee & Co. got their sea legs and started to steadily steer a content production ship. Even so, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays were a major boon for the channel’s growth.

A bar graph comparing the average number of views by day of week for TPMS live streams. Before Aaron Tuesdays were announced, Wednesday live streams were the most viewed but did not significantly outpace other days of the week. Afterwards the announcement, every day of the week’s average number of views nearly tripled, but Tuesdays outpaced every other day of the week.

Tales from the Titles

Like other new media creators, McAfee & Co.’s livestreams are also a critical source for clips. To understand what these clips discuss, we can analyze the most frequent terms in their lightly edited titles (I removed all extremely common words like “the” and “to”, and a unique set of the channel’s oft-used terms comprised of “pat,” “mcafee,” “ep,” and “pms”). Aside from common verbs like “reacts,” “talks,” and “tells,” all the other most frequent fifteen terms are related to football. We also see those words most frequently discussed are Number 12’s first and last name: together, “aaron” and “rodgers” accounts for 2% of all words in the clips’ titles. The only subject close to Rodgers’s popularity is Tom Brady; “tom” and “brady” together account for just over 1% of all terms in the clips’ titles.

A bar graph comparing the frequency of terms in TPMS clip titles. “aaron” and “rodgers” are among the five most frequent terms in the TPMS’s titles. They’re used less frequently than typical verbs for clips (“reacts”; “talk”) and the league (“nfl”).

But “aaron” and “rodgers” alone might be inflated with references to other people (e.g., Aaron Jones; Amari Rodgers). Looking at pairs of words in clip titles is a better way to diagnose if McAfee & Co. are discussing the Packers’ QB. Just as the standalone names were among the top five terms in the clips’ titles, “aaron rodgers” is the single most frequent pair of words in clip titles. The second most mentioned individual, “tom brady,” follows far behind. Even among oft-discussed topics, the future first-round Hall of Famer from the green and gold tops The Pat McAfee Show’s content.

A bar graph depicting the frequency of the top ten pairs of words in clip titles. “aaron rodgers” accounts for nearly 2% of all pairs of words, outpacing mentions of the second most frequent pair — “tom brady” — by a factor of two.

And why wouldn’t McAfee’s editors clip segments from Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays or riff on his recent escapades if that’s what the viewers want? Below you’ll see a list of YouTube’s most common metrics for clips that include “Aaron Rodgers,” “Tom Brady,” or neither in their titles. Clips with either Brady or Rodgers far surpass all other clips on every metric. Whereas individual clips with the former Patriots/current Buccaneers’ QB in the title yield slightly more average views (primarily because the channel publishes fewer clips of Brady that each bring in more views), clips with or about Rodgers overwhelmingly rake in more likes, comments, and dislikes. Viewers clearly engage with clips about Rodgers more than any other clips, a major avenue on YouTube for including commercial spots and accumulating advertising dollars.

A bar graph depicting the average number of comments, dislikes, likes, and views for clips that include “aaron rodgers”, “tom brady”, or neither. Across nearly every metric of engagement, clips that include “aaron rodgers” outpace clips with either “tom brady” or no other top mention.

Conclusion

Across daily live streams and clips, Aaron Rodgers dominates The Pat McAfee Show. His regular Tuesday appearances catapulted the channel into a fast-growing entertainment and journalistic outlet, facilitated by clips from the long-form segments. Undoubtedly TPMS’s channel growth spurred talks about and an eventual close on a multimillion dollar deal with FanDuel in 2021’s last quarter. Although I’ve loved hearing Rodgers directly address swirling offseason rumors, review season highlights, and share his experiences with aliens, Nov 5’s infamous “interview” turned a corner for his reputation. Even more, it appears to have intensified the channel’s success: the standalone interview already neared a million views when I extracted these data on Nov 6 and tipped over 1.4 million views less than a week later.

I do not mean to impugn McAfee & Co.’s show. I love their camaraderie and would HAMMER DAHN on The Brand’s continued rise. I also don’t mean for my criticisms of new media to raise mainstream corporate media’s stature, something I’m sure legacy outlets would love for readers to conclude. In fact, I hope McAfee & Co. remain thorns in the side of established stations, commentators, and journos who for too long kept out and continue to sideline “smaller” (but increasingly numerous and louder) voices.

However, McAfee and his crew’s failure to press Aaron Rodgers on his COVID-19 misinformation & vaccine skepticism follows a pattern long familiar in media circles: platforming major personalities to say the dumbest shit imaginable without serious challenge. We know elite journos refuse to hold accountable their class compatriots like politicians to maintain room for rubbing elbows and soliciting quotes, a pattern that appears to follow in related fields. Questions of journalistic ethics don’t just date back to stodgy ivory tower debates, though; they recently plastered headline news when a leaked trove of NFL executives’ emails revealed their editorial power over mainstream sports journalists.

If McAfee & Co. want to heed Rodgers request to have a “conversation, not a controversy” — a dubious argument that, alongside calls for “balanced” coverage, other hucksters and corporate charlatans have weaponized against scientific consensus — then they should avoid emphasizing the latter as they did in their post-interview debrief and challenge the substance of his arguments. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports full vaccination for most individuals — including top-tier “healthy” athletes — and fails to find any support for ivermectin’s use as a prophylactic against or treatment for COVID-19. But publicly challenging their main draw for viewership and engagement might ignite friction and jeopardize access. And as these analyses have shown, diminished access could spell doom for their primary VODs’ and clips’ content, and so too the advertising and sponsorship revenue that keep such ventures like The Pat McAfee Show viable.

For similar thoughts, see Pat McAfee isn’t blameless when it comes to Aaron Rodgers’ anti-vaxx stance