Awful Announcing CEO Ben Koo on Sports Media, the State of the Media Industry, Social Media Aggregators, and More

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 267 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Ben Koo, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Awful Announcing
and The Comeback.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 267: Ben Koo

Ben’s Career Path
“I came from a business background and studied marketing at Ohio State, and was
basically working in startups in Silicon Valley, where I was born. About a year out of
college, I kind of, just through gumption and being proactive, started to do some
writing on a popular Ohio State website. I think at that point it was owned by FOX. I
liked doing it, it was a side hustle. I was getting a little bit of money, like a couple
hundred bucks a month maybe, and it was interesting to me as someone working in
startups. I basically said, like, ‘What is the business behind these sports websites?’ And
this is like 2006, 2007. ‘How do they make their money?’ Because I knew that
journalism at that point was not going to be a lucrative field, but I was interested in it,
and I liked doing it, but I wanted to know more about the business. And that's kind of
one of the cool things about living in Silicon Valley is that there are startups that you've
never even heard of, and if you look around, you might find something that is a startup
in whatever you're interested in.

“I looked around and I found that Bleacher Report and a company called
Yardbarker had raised millions of dollars in venture funding…I read more
about Yardbarker. They had Greg Oden and Santonio Holmes and Mike
Conley…[and] they had Donovan McNabb as athlete bloggers — this is pre-
The Players Tribune — they were blogging about their experiences. And I'm
like that's awesome, this is so cool, and I just sent an email saying, like, ‘I
would love to work for you. I don't know what you have open or whatever,
but I think it's awesome.’ And I went up a couple times and they hired me
to do some business development and marketing for them.

“Then 2008 happens. It's a crazy year where startup funding is cut to the bone. A lot of
layoffs. And I partnered with another guy on a company called Bloguin, which was
trying to be a lot like SB Nation, where every team or school would have its own blog.
And in that period, we acquired the site Awful Announcing because I loved Awful
Announcing. There was a guy who had run it for about two years, and I thought it was
so cool to learn about the business. Back then, most of the sports media coverage and
business coverage were in actual magazines. The Sports Business Journal was more of
a magazine that your office, if you worked in sports, might get and you had to get it and
read as much as you can during lunch and someone else would grab it. And Awful
Announcing was really kind of explaining why sports rights deals were going from
ESPN to FOX or FOX to ESPN, why certain people were leaving networks. I just
thought it was so interesting. Then the site, the guy who was running it, basically made
the decision that he had a more lucrative full-time opportunity in a different field that
he wanted to pursue more. He didn't want to run the site, and it just went dormant.
And I said, like, people love this site. You can't be dormant. I'll buy it from you.

“So we bought it through the company I was at Bloguin, and then, for a
handful of years we operated it and it grew and I was really hands on there.
Then in time, me and the Bloguin fit was not working out like I thought it
really could have and I basically left the company but took Awful
Announcing with me to start a new company. It's been almost 15 years with
Awful Announcing. Almost half with the other company and more than
half under my sole ownership to a certain degree now…

“The Comeback was, you know, I'm hiring writers, we have a good team, but
there wasn't always stuff for us to cover in sports media. So I said, ‘These
are good writers, they like sports media, but they still like sports. We need a
second site so people can kind of do stuff when it's slow in sports media.’
Over time that property has grown considerably and we're still kind of
figuring out where we fit because there are so many sports websites like,
you know, if Saquon Barkley goes from the Giants to the Eagles, how many
articles are there on that? 200, 500. So we're still kind of figuring out what
that site is going to be and how it's going to be different. But it does well.
And yeah, those are our two sites. Awful Announcing is now a lot bigger
than it's ever been. I’m really happy to still be doing this in a time where a
lot of familiar sites have been kind of going away or running into trouble.”

On learning how to start and run (and acquire) a business
“I will give a lot of credit to where I spent my time my first couple years out of college. I
was at a software company that raised a good amount of money, and there were a lot of
smart executives that kind of mentored me. I read a ton on young Techcrunch when it
was owned by Michael Arrington, and Business Insider when it was under other
people; I would read a ton to just kind of learn. And then when I was at Yardbarker —
the guy who was the CEO, Pete Vlastelica, he would go on to be the head of FOX Sports
Digital. He [also] went on to be the CEO and president of Blizzard Games and
Activision. He really took me under his wing and positively reinforced that I had good
ideas and he would kind of open up to me about the business. So I tried to absorb a lot,
as much as I could, to get a feel for what was possible and really just get a good
understanding of why companies were expanding, who was funding what. I really tried
to get a deep awareness of the industry as much as I could and then I felt kind of
confident enough to do some of these things on my own.”

On the emergence of social media and what that was like for blogs and the
blog business
“That's a really great question because I feel like people get so used to [it].
Like the last few years it's hard to think of life before. I'll give an example
here outside of social media. The NCAA Tournament's coming up, and
people love it, and they watch all the games. But it was like, I don't know, 10
or 12 years ago where very often three of the four games you could not watch
because only CBS had the contract for it. So they would do these these live
look-ins — which we've done an article [about how] people missed the live
look ins of what's going on in those other games. People are nostalgic for not
being able to watch the game that they might want to watch and getting a
look-in. And that wasn't that long ago, but it feels forever ago.

“So when you think about social media in the times of 2008, nine, ten, 11
when I was just kind of getting started, I ran the Facebook page for many
years for the Ohio State website that I wrote for. Back then, Pages were not
part of Facebook like nowadays, where you like your pages and they put
out info or content or links and that feels natural to the Facebook
experience. But back then you would be, like, whoa, this isn't my friend
talking about his hangover, because back then Facebook skewed younger,
your parents were maybe not on. Or like some photo or video of someone
hitting a beer pong shot — it was more intimate and personal and people
oversharing. It wasn't corporate.

“So I ran the Facebook page for that Ohio State site for many years. And I remember
Yardbarker getting on Twitter, and we didn't exactly know what to do because there
wasn't really a template of what to do. I think around 2009, ten, 11, some of that stuff,
like the best practices started becoming more known. Back in the day, you'd put your
links up, but I think it was really used primarily by writers to kind of promote their
work, to look for story ideas, to get feedback from readers. I remember it as a place
where, like, I love reading this person and you could just find them talking about their
articles or commenting on things that they might not write a full article on, but you
loved getting their little joke or their analysis about something in Twitter form. So I
think back then it was a way for you to connect with personalities that were in media
and for us to do that ourselves and get our content out there. I think at a certain point,
it kind of it became natural for Facebook pages to be part of your Facebook
experience. And I think Twitter kind of evolved into, like, it's a quick distribution for
viral content if it's like photos or video. So that became more of the emphasis there.”

“There's a lot going on and I've been on some webinars about this topic [of
referral traffic from social media]. Someone said it was kind of sad to hear
it's still Facebook, Google and Twitter that are driving the most amount of
traffic. It's just that they're all down a lot and nothing has come and
replaced it. And I was like, yeah, that's exactly what's going on. So with
Twitter, you know, it's under new ownership, it's a little dicey. We have
Threads and Bluesky kind of growing a little bit. And there are some great
articles about how Silicon Valley has turned against publishers. Facebook
has become anti-news, they don't want news in the feed, they don't want
divisive stuff. You can see this in your news feed where you like these pages,
but you're not seeing their posts as often. There's been a noted decline in
publisher traffic from Facebook considerably just in the last year.

That decline was there before, but it's accelerated recently, and I hate going
through my Facebook feed and there are suggested pages, and it's something
that you have no connection to. It's a dumb post. And oftentimes it's a
screenshot of a tweet or something that someone else reported; and sometimes
it's a made-up quote, like they're putting meme pages front and center, and the
only reason they're doing it is because you're not going to click a link where
you're going to leave Facebook. They’d rather show you something they think
you might like, just kind of dumb, and that you have no interest in as long as
you stay there and I think it's such a stupid thing. because they're not even
showing stuff relevant to me, and a lot of the times it's like fake stuff. It's like
they've found something on a message board that a player is about to be
traded. It's not been reported anywhere, they put it in like a cool graphic that's
clickbait, and then it gets spread everywhere. It makes no sense to me.

“So yeah, we do have to kind of compete with that in terms of finding ways
to get people to click to our sites when Facebook or Twitter does kind of
put us in their algorithm. You're also seeing on Facebook, I don't know if
you've seen this trend, a photo of something from a publisher, no link to a
story, though, and then the first comment they'll be like read more here
because Facebook scans the post and says no link, let's send this to people.
So, you know, publishers are already doing things to try to get links. It's
crazy.”

How Awful Announcing is thinking about staying strong amidst the decline in social media
referral traffic
“We're figuring it out because we're like a half year into Silicon Valley shanking news publishers
in general. So we're trying to do more in video, we're trying to be smarter about headlines where
we get people interested, but we don't give away, like, the full story; you know, where we're
putting out the most interesting thing about what it is hoping that people want to see more. I
think for Awful Announcing, since we're one of a few sites who kind of do this, and a lot of the
people are in the profession and want to know more we're less affected than a general sports
website like The Comeback, where, you know, Saquon Barkley signs with Eagles, someone sees
that [and] that's all they needed. They got it, Saquon Barkley signed with the Eagles, we're done
here. They saw it in the feed. Are they going to want to know the deal breakdown? Did another
publication say Saquon Barkley in the headline signs with Eagles for [whatever] years? You
know the appetite for anything beyond that is pretty minimal from the general public. So for a
general sports site or general news site that doesn't have a niche, I think it's going to be
extremely problematic.

“For us, since Awful Announcing is kind of creating content for a specific
audience who's thirsty for more details it's not as big of a problem. But it's
still kind of discouraging because we think more people want to find our
content and see our content ,and when it's being kind of throttled down,
just because of new initiatives algorithmically, I don't think it's serving the
users of those social platforms who have opted in to see our content but are
randomly seeing, like, the For You page for Twitter of crypto bots and what
have you and, you know, Facebook meme pages. So I hope it's a trend that
reverses.”

On ensuring Awful Announcing is a destination as the accounts and publications
reporting sports business headlines grows
“I think original content and original voices and being accessible on more platforms,
which is something that we're slowly kind of prioritizing more and more, really good
quality voices, and being on more platforms, whether that's a TikTok, Instagram, we've
been promoting our content a lot more on Reddit, because I think some people have
kind of moved from Twitter to Reddit in terms of content discovery. So yeah, we have
to spend more time being in more places. If you've ever watched Mad Men, there's a
quote that Bob Benson, this character, says to this guy, he's having like a breakdown, he
says, ‘You can't be at the right place at the right time, you got to be at the right place all
the time.’ So we're putting in a lot more energy into trying to be at the places where
people are because, you know, the existing traffic mix has decided that it's not good for
them for other people to kind of drift away from those social media platforms.

So we need to be on more platforms. We need to have like more original
voices. We need to have direct relationships, not only from the site to
people, but also writer to readers. So more people following our personal
accounts. It's a major effort and it's going to affect really everyone in
media, so we're trying to figure out the best we can.”

On having writers build up their brands and balancing their owned
audiences vs. capturing audiences for the publication
“I'm totally fine with and encouraging of people building their own
following and having their own fans. I actually think that it kind of sucks in
that we haven't seen some upward mobility of some of our people going to
some places, but it's just tough right now to kind of move up the ladder and
find your next thing. We've had people leave and come back, and I wish
that wasn't the case. I think some of the the examples you had or like Mark
Titus has bounced around from 4 or 5 things.

“But no, I encourage people to really have their own voice in our content,
engage with people. There was a writer who left the Athletic about a month
ago and is already freelancing for us. I imagine that they wanted a good
place to write and it will be a matter of time before they're at the
[Washington Post], you know, and I'm honored to have them…I think it's
probably just like, you know, we're a temporary home for them, which is
fine.

“I still do a decent amount of writing, probably not as much as I'd like, and I
get it. I think you need to keep building and connecting with your own
people and we’re the parent brand, and if that halo effects on us, that's great.
You know what you're going to get from us. We've been around for a while,
but in this type of media climate, writers should be thinking about building
up their following and distinguishing their voice. I will say that we hired
someone in the fall, Ben Axelrod, he's doing a great job; he has a very large
Twitter following. And Pat McAfee twice has called him out. On ESPN, he
calls it — he's like ‘Axelrod and the boys are probably blogging this one right
now.’ So we have an inside joke that Awful Announcing is now Axelrod and
the Boys. But, to me, that's a good example of someone who's being name
checked on ESPN instead of, you know, not even Awful Announcing, it's just
Axelrod and the Boys, and I love it.”

On the temptation to engage in polarizing hot takes for the sake of engagement
“We've been around for a while, and I think we generally have a fair to positive
reputation. I think some people can get annoyed by that. I think some people are like all
coverage where my name, if I'm on a show, and they [keep seeing] like once a week, they
find something either positive or negative thing that they're surfacing. I think there's
some people who get annoyed, but I think the majority of people like the coverage. It
keeps them relevant, it keeps them noteworthy. I think we're generally pretty fair with
our coverage. And I think that when we're really kind of going after someone it has to be
warranted and it has to be factual. I don't think we’re known for having people who are
too kind of incendiary and too hot take-y. But I do know we get on people's nerves. We
hear from PR often. Sometimes PR is a little legitimately annoyed. Sometimes there's an
executive or a personality who has thin skin and yells at PR and they have, like, a gun to
their head to yell at us, and we can tell that they're not genuinely annoyed, but they've
been told by someone important to make a big stink out of it.

“So I think it would probably be long-term-negative if we really were just
trying to be dishonest with our opinions for the sake of chasing it. I know
that some people accuse us of that. Like, you know, when we covered
Barstool [Sports] — well, we still cover Barstool, but we'd write about
Barstool, and we always do make it a point to do a follow up, second and
third tweet, sometimes of our hottest articles and the Stoolies are the most
tribal, and they'd be like, ‘Oh, you're tweeting it again. Look at you guys.’
And it's like, we we did that like once a day for our hot stories every day.
Most nine times out of ten it has nothing to do with you guys. People like to
kind of chirp a little bit that we have favorites or this and that. But I don't
know, I just don't see that. I think our reputation is generally neutral to
positive with some nitpicks here and there.

“But we write so much content it's impossible. I mean, we pissed off
Stephen A Smith at South by Southwest. He said last night we should kiss
his ass. And then he says Awful Announcing, first off they do good work
most of the time, and then he went into some fucking thing. But it's the
first time I've ever heard him complain, and it just comes with the
territory, and I think we do a pretty good job having opinions, covering the
space, but not succumbing to, like you said, the temptation of just hot takes
for clicks.”

On forming a legitimate understanding of public sentiment amidst the noise
of the vocal minority on Twitter and social media in general
“That's a really good question. And I think Twitter, a lot of people said, you
know, the real world is not Twitter, especially a handful of years ago. I think
in 2016 you really kind of saw that fray when Twitter was kind of a more
progressive place that was very turned off to culture. And we saw that —
when we were coming up, like Curt Schilling and Colin Kaepernick and that
world, Twitter was a place of like, this is ridiculous — or not ridiculous, but
like, I can't believe Curt Schilling said that. Why are people so mad about the
anthem? Like, those were the opinions that rung out on Twitter, but that was
not kind of the shared general sentiment. I think Twitter has become a little
bit more balanced in opinion.

“I think the thing that you're asking about, like opinions and just realizing
where does the real sentiment lie? One thing is it's good to have a good
group and a diverse group in your own newsroom and on Slack, kind of like,
do we all hate this person? Oh, there's 3 or 4 people who who don't, and
there's seven people who do, that's interesting. So that is always helpful. I
think if we were to put a Twitter thread or a Facebook poll or whatever on
just about anyone — Tony Romo, Gus Johnson, Joe Buck, you're going to get
a big cluster of people who are fans, a big cluster of people who are some
type of neutral and a big group of haters. So something like announcing is
super subjective. I love it when my mom emails me and she has opinions on
announcers. ‘Do they get paid by the word?’ she'll text me. ‘Hated his
tie.’ ‘They were horsing around too much in the booth.’ That was like
another thing.

“So having a good newsroom with diverse opinions, being fair when we do
write an opinion piece or critical piece, or, you know, putting other people's
comments — like people hated how this person called the end of the game.
Another thing is just trends. So sometimes we do polls and we get like
4000, 5000 replies and we'll say rank the four NFL A booths that are not
Amazon. So ESPN, ABC, CBS, FOX; like which one's your favorite. And if
you saw Romo and Nantz a few years ago when that thing was at like 40%,
where there's four options and then a few years later they're in second or
third and they're at like 20% there's a trend that we can kind of talk about
that more people are getting annoyed with Tony Romo. So yeah, trying to
see it both ways and trying to figure out what are the trends in terms of
how people are going over with people.”

On the metrics that Awful Announcing pay attention to and drives an
online publication
“Page views is still probably the number one thing because it pays the bills
for us. And one thing is that we're a unique media company in that we
don't have any institutional backing or investors. We are not aligned with a
Vox Media or a Penske Media or whatever, and I think other companies
have been able to kind kind of invent metrics that are super good for long-
term but are maybe not a value right now. And I would love to do that. I
would love to be spending more on long-term things, but we just don't have
the institutional backing to kind of be thinking as much long-term as we
are short-term.

“So we are making investments in video and hiring and whatever, but we
are probably more locked in to page views because that's just what keeps us
paid. We do like front page home page traffic as a big indicator where
someone either typed into their [browser] Awful Announcing.com, or they
read a story and then clicked on the logo or the home to see what else they
could find. Pages per visit is always encouraging to see if we're doing better
there. Time on site helps us with advertiser retention and higher
programmatic ad bidding. When people see that people are on here, they're
seeing your ad units for 45 seconds or 2 minutes or three minutes as
opposed to 17 seconds.

“Retweets, impressions on Twitter — how much did this tweet about an
article or a piece of video get seen? Generally, as long as we're profitable
and growing, we're happy. And I try to not have our team too focused on a
million different statistics, but I think for us, we're a little bit different
because we're not part of a larger entity. You're looking at the basically 90
something percent of the ownership group right now. So there isn't a
secret. Like, we can't invest at the scale we'd want to invest in finding new
ways to have success.”

The future of business models for media publications
“I've evolved my opinion here considerably. First, like you said,
everything's burning down, what's doing well. The New York Times two
days ago or yesterday did an article on here — ‘We tried to find something
positive happening in media. We have found these like six companies’ and
it was like The Ankler, Semafor, Punchbowl — so niche things that have
subscriptions and events seem to be doing well. I think what hasn't done
well is scale for the sake of scale, and that's like BuzzFeed merging with a
bunch of things. I think Vox Media got really big. Complex just sold to a
new place.

“I told you I worked at Yardbarker, which was later acquired by FOX
Sports. Back then Bleacher Report was three blocks away from us and SB
Nation was just SN Bation; Vox had not become a thing yet, [SB Nation]
was just a sports company, and they kept raising. Everyone kept raising
money and getting bigger. And like, we have a CTO, we have a CFO, we
have a Chief Marketing Officer, and we have this new platform that we're
rolling out and we're hiring this Head of Video. I was so jealous…I was like,
these guys are getting so big, they're shaking it up. Sports illustrated is so
far behind, ESPN is still kind of struggling — the major sports channels
were not — and this is 2008, 2009, 2010, they were behind on digital. And
I was like, look at them raising money, they're taking over the world, and I
would love to just have a big tech budget and all of this.

“What I've noticed is SB Nation’s platform and Vox Media's platform, they
recently let go of all the developers and engineers and said we're going to
publish to WordPress. And you have basically seen all of these jobs that have
been taken away and infrastructure at companies chasing scale for people
who were not creating content. And I look at us and it's like every dollar that
comes in, almost every dollar, a huge percentage goes to people creating
content. And when I take meetings with like a potential partnership with
another media company and there's like four dudes in their 50s or 60s and
I'm like, you know, that could be $1 million salary [each] and they're not
creating content. If it works, it works, and you gotta have some of these
dudes, but my ambitions of having a big company and smart people and
engineers and all of that — if all these other companies couldn't make it
work, I don't know if it really will work well for most companies.

“So now I'm kind of like, you guys create as much content as possible —
good content, and I will, with duct tape, handle the website and the
advertisers and the hosting and the photo licenses and the taxes — just do
your thing. So that I think is a big part is that our budget for outside of
content is minimal.”

“I'm not seeing media as a great investment. Like, The Athletic talk this big game
about being a $1 billion company — and I love The Athletic. But they kind of sold
early-ish. They raised some money and they're like, we'll be profitable soon. We're
going to open up in other verticals, we're going to open up in other countries. And
then something happened and they're kind of skittish on why they suddenly
sought to sell so quickly, but Bleacher Report was kicking ass and they sold for
$200 million-ish; but they raised a good amount of money, too. So even the
successes in our space, which are few and far between, if you look at the price tag
and what they thought they were going to be, they don't really kind of [turn] out
as big successes, to a certain degree. So yeah, content's going to be an interesting
place because it definitely helps to have money given to you to become something
big and notable and influential, but do the economics work for investors to get
their money back. A lot of places have come and gone. The Messenger was just
this whole mess.”

About aggregation from an ethical and value perspective
“I think aggregation, it covers a lot. And I will say there are some things about
aggregation I have an issue with. I think we need be better — instead of saying
aggregation is bad, I hate the aggregators, I think we need to focus on some of the
worst practices because I think there's a larger group of people who would be
interested in that. So I think the first thing is that you have aggregators,
particularly on Twitter, I think they're also on Facebook, who are like sports
specific. They just kind of regurgitate transactional news, and they do it quickly,
and they don't do any reporting of their own. So I think one thing I have issue
with is like, if you're a huge popular account and you are aggregating other
people's work and putting your own spin on it, you need to put a name on it. I
hate content that has no [attribution], and people called out Dov Kleiman and
there's like 3 or 4 other NBA and NFL accounts like, who the fuck is this person?

People are kind of annoyed where like, you took my words and they're out
of context. And if we do it, you can find me. I'm right here. You can find
Awful Announcing. Stephen A Smith told us to kiss his ass yesterday, and
that's fine. But when you don't put your name on it — I think platforms
should look at, you know, just like they suppress content that takes people
offline. You shouldn't. And if you're a major portal like Yahoo or Google, if
you go to their front page or you search for something and if it just says
something generic like ‘staff’ or, you know, whatever, it's an alias — I don't
think you should be pushing content where you don't know who wrote it.
You know, you don't know who this person is. Sir Yacht was a source for
Big Ten expansion, who was this idiot, so that's my first thing.

On pulling out quotes or stories from others’ original work and using it to drive metrics
on one’s own platforms
“I think as long as you're referencing where the quotes are from, that's kind of fair.
You'd like to see some links if they use it in an article. I'm going to give you a story right
now that I've not told that many people, and I think you'll find it pretty interesting. Two
years ago, fall of 2021, the Bishop Sycamore scandal happens, and Awful Announcing,
not to brag, and me specifically but also with some help from the team, were publishing
2 to 3 Bishop Sycamore stories a day that were breaking news. We had a string of of
really good people were like That’s some of the best work our guys have done.’ And the
website Complex took some of our quotes and put them into like Instagram and they
referenced us and I think Twitter did this too, and the algorithms, because they're
Complex and they're trendy and it gets engagement and they did it in a smart way, it
rose to the top of trending for Bishop Sycamore, and it was basically our work.

“In the days after the Bishop Sycamore story broke, there is kind of a story
that I haven't told in which there was a massive rush of Hollywood trying
to own that documentary story. Michael Strahan's production company
won that race and they partnered with The Athletic. That's one of the first
steps is [to] partner with someone doing this, and people are staking out
their claims in real time. When anything viral happens behind the scenes,
there are different studios, production companies, agents circling. My
inbox blew up. Kevin Hart's production company reached out to me and I
said, ‘I'm still kind of covering this. Can we touch base next week when it
calms down a little bit?’

But then a day later, they reached a deal with Complex, who had just done
a quote graphic of our work because they want Complex in the press
release being like, ‘We're doing this documentary’ because they're trying to
build their case. And they had done a little bit of reporting, but I think that
reporting is because they were trendy and player or two had reached out to
them. But like, it's crazy that one quote graphic placed them at the top of
trending, I think on Twitter and maybe Instagram got them one interview
with someone and now they're in a project with Kevin Hart. It didn't come
to fruition. Rich Paul was involved in that too. So that's part of the game.”

On getting tips and clips sent in from viewers/readers/listeners
“Yeah, we get tips frequently in the DMs, through email, and it's helpful
and we certainly appreciate it. Sometimes someone's like, you got to check
this out and we're like, this is a nothing burger. But most of the time, a
good chunk of our stories usually come through someone tipping us off,
and we appreciate that. One guy recently told us of a story, we did the
story, I said, thank you, and then he sent me, like, a Venmo request for $15.
I was like, what?...So I don't know, this new generation, they don't want
their account called out or whatever, they want $15 on Venmo.”

On the potential of the Awful Announcing content and brand going global
“We've had some stuff that's international, but when we look at our
monthly stats we're like 98% US traffic, 1% Canada, Canada, maybe a little
more. And then, you know, England's the rest of that last percent mostly.
And there's some Australia, New Zealand, and Asian representation there.
So we just don't have the readership. Our readership infrequently in those
places send, stories, it happens occasionally, but we just haven't seen kind
of crossover there. I do think other countries would like the concept of an
Awful Announcing. My wife is initially from England, and I explain what
we do and they go ‘That's interesting. We don't have that here.’ So I do
think the idea has merit, but we just haven't been able to sprawl like that.”

The most memorable game from Ben’s time at Ohio State
“My sophomore year we beat Michigan to go to the National Championship
game. Back then, we beat Michigan and the next game was the National
Championship game. Starting next year, if we beat Michigan, there’s
probably going to be like 3 or 4 games between the National Championship
game. It was a close game and they had gone through a decade of struggles
against Michigan, so it felt great.”

Ben’s favorite story that he’s worked on in his entire career
“I have two that I feel really good about. One, it was a story about a Boston
College basketball player named Joe Streater. And the point of the story
was that someone edited — the Boston College point shaving scandal that
is mentioned in Goodfellas, there's also a 30 for 30 about it. They added
him on the Wikipedia page in 2007 as a player who took money, and there
were now like hundreds of articles that had his name in it. He wasn't on the
team the year of the point shaving scandal and I was able to figure this out
and wrote an article that like, hey, this is all a bad Wikipedia edit that you
guys ran with, which was interesting.

“Then the other one is that there were some layoffs at FOX Sports Digital
about five years ago and I knew about it months in advance. I talked to,
like, 20 people. It was my version of a journalism marathon, and what
came out of it was a really robust story, well-sourced, where I really got to
be a full time journalist working on something for a rare time. That story
was really popular and well received and, yeah, I really enjoyed the process
of doing something for a stretch of a few months.”

The most viral post or story from Awful Announcing in Ben’s there
“We have two that have closed around 2 million page views. One is when
Maria Taylor [when] her outfit was commented on by this Chicago sports
radio host who said she looked like a porn star. She was really unhappy
about that and she quote tweeted our article about it, and that was a big
thing. So that was just kind of us observing something.

“The other thing was from this summer, the Kevin Brown, not the former
pitcher, the [Baltimore Orioles] announcer who was suspended for the
dumbest of reasons, and that was a story that we were able to kind of dig
up and, really went viral, particularly because almost all the Major League
Baseball announcers in their next broadcast brought up the story and said
how offended they were at the Orioles. That story really grew and grew and
also was was right around 2 million page views. So I would think that
Kevin Brown story has probably surpassed the Maria Taylor story at this
point, but it was close when we last checked.”

The country, besides the US and Canada that is most engaged with Awful
Announcing and has there been an international story that has moved the
needle in any significant way?
“England and Australia are the two that come out more. I know that
whenever we've had something maybe related to like Manny Pacquiao we
do get an audience in the Philippines; there's a very big Pacquiao
readership that if there's something pertaining to him will come out, But
it's really England, Australia, US, Canada…”

Ben’s dream interview and also the dream athlete Ben would want to
freelance for the Awful Announcing
“So dream interview, we have been doing really good getting interviews. So
I was thinking like, who is out of reach because almost everyone seems like
within reach. And I gotta say, it's [ESPN CEO] Jimmy Pitaro. He's super
selective. He likes to do conferences. He doesn't really do one offs. I think
there are so many tough questions you can ask him or any CEO of ESPN
that you're just not going to get the interview. And if you do, there's going
to be some probably stipulations in there. So if I had this magic ability to
make someone be forthright and get them, I would have to go the CEO or
president of ESPN.

“Who would I want [to write on the site]? I would say potentially like
LeBron, like LeBron's like farewell tour blogging for us. But I don't know.
I'll have to put some more thought into that. I think there are some
interesting people out there who I think are authentic and funny. Back in
the day when Shaq was tweeting, you knew it was him, but now everyone's
got like a social media agency, so it’s like who's actually going to produce
this content? Am I getting an athlete who's authentic or am I getting a
really good social media agency who's ghostwriting? And I think that's
super common.”

The social platform that performs the best for Awful Announcing and the social
platform that Ben thinks has the most potential to grow in the future for Awful
Announcing
“Best performing is Twitter. We have over 300,000 followers. I think in January we
had 31 tweets that had over 1 million impressions. So we ring out on Twitter, we put a
lot of time and attention there. What has the most kind of upside for us? We haven't
even started, but I think TikTok is probably what we're circling next. You know, I think
ten years ago, seven years ago, five years ago, you hired a social media manager, and
maybe they had an underling. And now I think today, big companies are hiring a
Snapchat expert, TikTok expert, a LinkedIn expert — you used to just kind of have a
strategy that you deployed on different platforms, and now the strategy I think has to
be platform specific. And for a company our size, I think that that's tough for us. But I
think TikTok is probably where the juice might be worth the squeeze for us to kind of
really get more invested there.”

The best meal to get in Columbus and where to get
it
“I'm a little bit of a foodie. I think Columbus is a
very underrated foodie city. I think there's some
rankings and lists that say that. I like, on a nice
day, going to this brewery called Land Grant
Brewery, and they have food trucks there. And four
days of the week they have Ray Ray's Barbecue,
which has been on Diners, Drive-Ins and Drives.
Good brisket, good waffle fries, good baked beans.
And I just like being at the picnic tables out in the
sun. Good crowd, good people. There are some
great meals, but there's something nice about
being at those picnic tables in the sun with a beer.”

What advice would Ben give to aspiring sports media professionals today?
“I would say be attentive to detail. Be competent. You know, when someone gives you an
assignment, I think people in management and older people, there are a lot of times when
working with someone new to an industry, they're kind of holding their breath, like, is this
person going to totally nail this or are they going to get three fourths of it correct and I’m
going to come in there? When you prove yourself to be someone who can nail an assignment,
where you don't need over management or over explaining or whatever, people see that and
they want to reward that. And I think if you do that early, you're easy to work with, you're
dependable and you start to distinguish yourself.
“Then I think the next step is show that you can do more than you're currently assigned to do.
Every step of the way, show that you have more talent and you're more qualified, and you
have more drive to do what you're currently doing. But make sure what you're currently doing
is done with minimal instruction and oversight and that you're ready for the next thing.”

What was the pandemic like for Awful Announcing when no sports was happening?
“It was a very big challenge when no sports were going on. It was a challenge. I can tell
you this, it was depressing from a business standpoint. Ad rates went down so much
because they knew people weren't shopping or going places or whatever, so why
advertise? What would terribly depress me was that I would turn on SportsCenter or
ESPN at a time of day where people should be watching Scott Van Pelt’s SportsCenter
or First Take or whatever, and they would go to commercial break. And if you
remember, all of the ads were direct response ads, which means that no advertiser
really bought the ad space. It was ‘Call now and buy this frying pan.’ ‘Get these
sunglasses.’ ‘Get these mirrors.’ So they would [have], in an hour, 20 commercial spots
where maybe none of them were sold. And, you know, if ESPN can't sell their ad space
and they're taking a dime on the dollar of what they should be getting, how is my
company and my website going to do any better? And that was terribly depressing to
kind of see that reality play out.”

Ben’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“One account that I always kind of smile and enjoy is the Twitter account
Art But Make It Sports (@ArtButSports) where they take something
famous or something notable that has just happened in sports and
compare it to a famous painting. And they look so similar and I don't know
how this person does it, I think they got profiled somewhere, but whenever
it comes up in my timeline, I crack up and it's good stuff. So I think they do
great work.”

Where to find Ben, Awful Announcing, and The Comeback and digital/
social platforms
Find Ben on Twitter @bkoo and Awful Announcing on Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook, YouTube, TikTok (@AwfulAnnouncing) and The Comeback
across platforms @TheComeback

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Ben for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Awful Announcing CEO Ben Koo on Sports Media, the State of the Media Industry, Social Media Aggregators, and More

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