Why Barstool Sports pivoted to stock market trading

Simon Owens
The Business of Content
3 min readJul 3, 2020

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Why Barstool Sports pivoted to stock market trading

Why it’s interesting: “In only two months, [Barstool Sports’s] Davey Day Trader has become a more-searched term than Jim Cramer.”

Barstool’s pivot to stock market trading makes sense when you consider that stock trading is an elite form of gambling.

How musicians can grow their YouTube following

Why it’s interesting: Are you a musician who wants to grow an audience with online video? You better be ready to produce lots of song covers.

A cool story about a niche news startup

Why it’s interesting: “Both Sur and Ramachandran spend one day a week just on calls with subscribers to learn more about what they like, don’t like, and what they’d like to see more of.”

Sometimes you have to do things that don’t scale.

Disney’s quite sudden dominance of the streaming video space

Why it’s interesting: According to back of the envelope math, ESPN Plus is already generating $470 million a year. Combine this with subscriber revenue from Hulu an Disney+, and it’s obvious that streaming has very quickly become a huge business for Disney.

Substack has become the new freelance “anchor” client

Why it’s interesting: This article makes a good point that even if a platform like Substack doesn’t produce enough revenue for a full-time salary, it can generate enough side income to help replace freelance gigs.

Cloud infrastructure will play a huge role in the gaming wars

Why it’s interesting: An interesting look at how the gaming wars won’t be just about who offers the best games, but also who has the best cloud infrastructure.

How The Daily Show came to dominate the internet

Why it’s interesting: During the Jon Stewart era of The Daily Show, the internet was an afterthought, a place to distribute clips after they’d run on TV. Trevor Noah recognized early on that, in order to remain relevant, the show needed to become a creature of the internet.

Quibi should have tried to hire away more famous YouTubers

Why it’s interesting: I agree with the thrust of this article. If Quibi wanted to actually succeed at short form content, it would simply hire the people who already excel at short form video: YouTube stars.

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