Barstool Sports is Doubling Down on Livestream Content

A little over a month ago my coworker Stephen Douglas penned a post on this here website comparing the drama between Barstool Sports employees to reality television and observed that Dave Portnoy's company has become very good at framing that drama as content. A standard workplace spat between two bloggers about who works on a Friday ends up getting widely aggregated, bringing clicks and eyeballs to the Barstool operation. The often-venomous nature of that drama can make it feel like the company is cannibalizing itself in order to feed the ever-hungry content machine.

It is, if anything, an effective way to get attention in an extremely crowded media ecosystem. It now seems Barstool is taking that idea to its logical extreme with a content strategy that isn't new, but is being scaled up to a degree we haven't yet seen. That strategy? Livestreamed content featuring Barstool employees going through extremely difficult tasks and challenges.

If you spend even a fraction of your time on sports Twitter recently you've definitely come across some sort of discussion about the latest crazy thing Barstool is streaming. As I write this, an employee named Chris Klemmer is in the middle of a 100-hour stretch in "solitary confinement" after voluntarily being locked in the basement of the company office building on Monday. He has no access to the outside world but has a camera on him at all times. On Wednesday, Portnoy decreed Klemmer wasn't being entertaining enough (he fell asleep for more than 10 hours at one point) and shut off the livestream. Then he demanded that Stoolies work to get the hashtag #Klemmer trending No. 1 on Twitter before he'll turn it back on. And just like that, some guy sleeping in a New York basement is capturing the attention of hundreds of thousands.

This was one of two big livestream events for Barstool this week. On Tuesday night, the personality known as Jersey Jerry was locked in a gym and forced to break Caitlin Clark's all-time scoring total (3,685 points). The only rules were that he needed to total at least 509 threes and 762 free throws, while making enough buckets to break the record. Remarkably, it only took him five and a half hours.

Those are just this week's examples. There have been a few such livestreamed events over the last two months but now it feels like a switch has been flipped. That this is the new thing for Barstool going forward.

In retrospect, you can see how it unfolded. When the calendar flipped to 2024 it felt like Portnoy started to more firmly imprint his personality back onto the company employees and especially how they operated every day. He wanted to turn it back into a pirate ship, and one aspect of that under Portnoy has always been that they do what works. When the Stoolies latch onto a person or an idea, Barstool immediately hammers it over and over until it has no juice left to give. Which is a tried-and-true content strategy for any media company, but Barstool has always been the loudest and most shameless about doing so.

With that in mind we probably should've seen this coming after the Jersey Jerry hole-in-one challenge that launched these Barstool livestreams into the stratosphere. He spent 37 hours (!) in early January attempting to get a hole-in-one on a simulator. A day and a half of hitting the same shot, over and over and over again. It grew to the point where Tom Brady and the PGA Tour tweeted about it. Brady has long been a fan but interaction with a big corporation like the PGA has been a rarity for Barstool due to the perceived risks that come with interacting with the company's brand.

Jersey Jerry transcended that risk with his hole-in-one challenge, and the lightbulb went off. Livestreaming these challenges that can push employees to the limit but are otherwise harmless is an incredibly easy way to gain attention. Especially when the rallying cry goes out for Stoolies to start tweeting. And it's not like the company's Rough 'N Rowdy series, which feels like the embodiment of what Barstool has been about -- ring girls and fist fights, masculinity dripping from the rafters. These livestreams feel ... sanitized. People who wouldn't normally touch Barstool content with a 10-foot pole happily enjoyed watching a guy named Jerry try to get a hole-in-one because it is, objectively, funny and clever. You don't need to be Barstool-pilled to enjoy this stuff.

That has been the biggest difference between this and the previous iterations of livestreamed content Barstool has put on. These marathons on-camera are not new. In the past they've done Survivor, Barstool Idol and all sorts of shenanigans but it was hard to find it entertaining if you were not deep into the company's extended universe. Now the company has found the formula, the way to do what it has always done, while still appealing to a broad audience that may not have the most positive perception of Barstool.

Portnoy has never cared about appealing to that audience and, in fact, still spits in their faces whenever possible. But he is a businessman before anything. He knows the wider the audience for anything Barstool-related, the better things will go for partnerships -- like the one the company announced with DraftKings in February.

Who knows if it will persist or fade away, but Barstool seems to have found a new path and is happy to quadruple down on what's getting attention. Until it doesn't. We've seen this story before with the company but it does appear this strategy is here to stay. So don't be surprised to see Klemmer or Jersey Jerry trending again soon.