Deep Inside The Mind Of Clay Travis: What is His Next Move; ESPN; CNN; Sports Media; & More

Clay Travis has emerged as one of, if not the most newsworthy figure in all of sports media. At the forefront of the anti-PC culture, Travis has separated from the pack due to the topics he touches on, the stances he takes, the theories he believes, and his well-documented opinions on the monolith known as ESPN.

Travis spoke to The Big Lead for an in-depth, three-page interview on a wide variety of topics. Travis goes deep into what sports media has become, how to be successful, his thoughts on ESPN and what they think of him, he gets into what happened during his segment on CNN, where his career is going, what is next for Outkick, and much more:

Bobby  Burack: What has the response from ESPN been? One of their PR reps had tweeted out the number of the times you said the word “boobs” on radio, and you have broken several stories about them. Do you feel as if ESPN is now watching your every step to see what you say or report about them? Would you be interested in interviewing Skipper or Bob Iger?

Clay Travis: ESPN has many outstanding people who love me and Outkick. They also employ many idiots, some of whom hate me and Outkick. Honestly, the number of ESPN employees who are fans of what I’m saying and writing would be staggering, I think, to most people in the general public. After all, the stories I’ve broken about ESPN have all come from inside ESPN.

I was told former ESPN president John Skipper told several people he’d never rooted for anyone to be hit by a bus before, but he’d make an exception for me.

I thought that was a pretty good line.

Having a PR executive Tweet out the number of times I said boobs on one of my radio shows — it was 53, by the way — was absolutely tremendous. I love that ESPN PR somehow thought that was going to reflect negatively on me. The level of incompetence over there is often staggering.

Yes, many ESPN execs read everything that’s on Outkick, yes, they obsessively monitor my Tweets, yes, they listen to everything that I say or have everything that I say monitored. I’m sure many of them also hope I get hit by a bus as well.

But, again, I have lots of good friends at ESPN too. Friends who, in many cases, would love to have me on their shows and they can’t because ESPN has banned me. I think I’m the only person in America banned from appearing on ESPN, which is a badge of honor, honestly.

I’d like to talk with both Iger and Skipper. I’d love to do that publicly, but I’d also be willing to do it privately off the record. I think both men have no idea how destructive their decision making has been to the ESPN brand. I often get branded as anti-politics in sports, but that isn’t accurate. I’m anti one sided politics mixed with sports. I believe if you’re going to argue Colin Kaepernick is a hero you ought to have just as many people who think, as I do, that Colin Kaepernick’s an idiot and his protest makes no sense.

As for whether I grew up a fan of ESPN, of course. I’m the exact same age as ESPN. I doubt there is anyone my age who loves sports and didn’t grow up loving ESPN.

Burack: Clay, right now you are a radio host, a writer, and the host of an afternoon live internet show. That leaves off television. With the media constantly changing, how do you see the four mediums in terms of importance over the next five years?   

Travis: I believe that over the next five years all of these mediums will converge and what we’re moving towards is an era when people will simply say, “Give me what Clay Travis (or any other content creator) did today,” and the most recent show I’ve done will appear for them in their home, their car, or on their phone. That content could come via audio or video or it could be in written form. People will choose which type of content they want to consume by picking one of the options in front of them.

In the coming era I believe distribution will matter much less than the quality of the content. Right now there are people with audiences entirely because they are distributed by powerful companies. I think that era is ending.

That’s what ESPN used to say, right, that they could let talent go because the network was the star, not the individual people on the network. I think Colin Cowherd and Skip Bayless, for example, have proven that model isn’t true anymore. If you’ve created a tribe of people who care deeply about what you say or do then they will find you. I made that gamble in 2011 when I started Outkick, that my audience would find me online even if I wasn’t on ESPN or CBS or NBC or Yahoo or any of the powerful Internet distributors back then. At the time it was a little bit risky, but I’d seen the growth of social media and I believed that people who liked me would find me. And if they were only reading me because they’d been reading the site I was on? Then those weren’t “my” readers anyway. They were the readers of that platform.

I saw this repeating itself anew in 2016 or 2017 when Facebook turned on the author spigot. One of the things I saw with the rise of the Facebook algorithm was writers bragging about their millions of pageviews. And I always thought that was backward because those weren’t “your readers”, they were the algorithms readers. It’s seductive to believe two million people read what you wrote and make you believe that makes you of greater importance than you are, but that isn’t important, what’s important is how many of those two million people will read something else you wrote and continue to follow you in the weeks and months ahead. Most of the time those huge pageview rushes didn’t create any staying power. Because, and this is the additionally important thing, most of the time the author doesn’t matter on the stories that go viral. If a kid gets hit by a deer, everybody would have up the same article. Most people don’t look at who the writer is for a story like that. You, the writer, literally don’t matter.

My advice to writers is simple, don’t just write what people read, write what people read that you can provide better than anyone else. Otherwise you’re expendable.

So I think the power of the individual content creator will rise and the power of the distributor will decline in the years ahead.

Now distribution and support from major companies with money will still be massively important, but I think the days of creating stars simply because they’re on your sports network are over.

I also think the size of audiences will become less important and what will matter much more is the depth of that audience’s engagement.

I’ll give you an example of one of the things I’m wrestling with in my current business. Our Outkick the Coverage podcast of my Fox Sports Radio show does in the millions of downloads each month, but we’re not monetizing that very well as a podcast right now. So one of the things I wonder about is this, should I not put the podcast behind a paywall? I do a live radio show every morning for three hours from 6-9 am eastern and you are free to listen to that show live on nearly 300 AM/FM affiliates nationwide, on satellite radio, and via streaming on FSR or Iheart apps. As soon as that show ends we also put up the entire show as a podcast, except that entire show is stripped of all the ads that aired during commercial breaks during the three hour show.

So people can then listen to the entire show without a single commercial break, knocking it down to around two hours.

What sense does that make from a business perspective? Shouldn’t the people who want to download the entire podcast have to pay for the convenience of not having to wait through the commercial breaks and being able to listen to it at their convenience? I think so. Now my opinion might be different if I wasn’t doing the entire radio show live for free, and if I weren’t doing an afternoon show on Periscope and Facebook for free and if wasn’t putting up every article I write for free, but isn’t there a strong argument that everyone should be charging for the podcasts of live radio shows?

I get not charging if you’re going direct to podcast and your show is only distributed that way, but from a business perspective wouldn’t I rather have 10,000 people paying me for the podcast of my live radio show each month than a million listening to the podcast for free?

So I don’t claim to have all the answers here yet, but I do claim to probably spend more time thinking about the business side of what I do than most in sports media do.

*More Clay Travis on the next page:

Burack: What is it that the audience wants from the sports media in 2018? There was a narrative that it was not highlight shows, but since two of them were replaced (6 pm and mornings) the audience seemed to prefer the latter.

Travis: I think it’s hard to predict exactly what people want, but my focus since I started writing online — and since have expanded into radio and TV — has been to try and be smart, original, funny and authentic every day. I don’t always pull it off, but that’s my goal. I think if you can pull all four of those things off there is always going to be an audience for what you do. That’s why my model for a long time was Tony Kornheiser. The guy was, and still is, phenomenal at writing, radio and TV. In five or ten years, if ESPN didn’t hate me and wish I was dead, I think I could do Kornheiser’s PTI role really well, maybe better than anyone else in sports media. It won’t ever happen, but he, to me, still is the most talented guy to ever work in sports media. He’s done it all, and he’s done it all better than anyone else before or since.

Right now I believe PTI is the only show in sports that consistently draws more than 500k people on a daily basis and that show is over 15 years old now so they got in and built an audience back when large audiences were still possible. None of the original sports show unconnected to an actual game have consistently produced an audience anywhere near that since.

As for shows on TV, I think there’s an argument to be made that the days of any sports show not directly connected to sports drawing over 500k viewers are done. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that idea since I’d like to get a chance one day to have full creative input on a “sports” TV show and see if I could make a run at a good number over a couple of years, but if you look at the data right now the argument that there will never be another sports show as popular as PTI is certainly a plausible one given current market conditions. But until I’ve actually had the chance to see if I could do it, I don’t want to say no one can do it. Regardless, I’m also much less focused on total numbers now than I used to be because what I’m focused on is the diehards. I want to give the people who really like me, however many of them there may be, more of what they like and spend less time worrying about the size of the audience and more about the depth of the audience. Who can you monetize directly? Who will buy your book or show up at your events? If I had to choose between an engaged smaller audience or a massive apathetic audience, I’d take the former.

If I were programming ESPN or FSI or NBCSN or CBSSN and wanted to create something outstanding, I’d swing for the fences. For better or worse I don’t try and get on base with a bunt. So I’d try to create something truly great that lasts for decades as opposed to an ephemeral game discussion on a morning show that no one is craving. For example, WokeCenter AM, aka Get Up, has a $35 million yearly cost. For $35 million couldn’t you create three or four really unique, compelling shows relating to sports? Imagine how much different people would talk about ESPN if they’d created and aired Friday Night Lights, for instance. The great thing about shows in the 21st century is if people love something they evangelize for it and will ride or die for your brand. Whether it’s Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Mad Men, or Game of Thrones, great, original shows win. And they win not just now, but for decades to come.

When’s the last time you heard someone truly excited about a sports show the way they’re excited about their favorite TV show? A time when a friend of yours came up to you and said, “Man, you have to watch this!” I remember it happening when PTI debuted, but I can’t recall it happening in a long time. Maybe that’s partly because we have so many more entertainment options, but I think it’s also because sports networks don’t take very many risks nowadays.

Go read up on the launch of PTI, it was a huge risk, a big change, something seismically different than had existed before. And it hit in a massive way. Even Around the Horn was pretty revolutionary. Those shows looked and felt different than everything that had come before them. When’s the last time someone even attempted a new show like that? To me, in order to truly succeed you have to take a big swing. People might love it or they might hate it, but in order for either of those emotions to really take root, you have to risk something.

Sports TV, to me, doesn’t seem like it’s really risked very much in the last fifteen years.

Now maybe that’s because we’ve reached the logical extension of the medium, the end of sports history, and it’s just going to be a white guy and a black guy talking about sports with a pretty girl sitting in between them, but I tend to think there’s still an opportunity for something more, that a great show is still out there waiting to be created.

Regardless, I think the future is in owning and distributing your own content. That’s why I’d try and buy WWE if I ran a sports network. Did you know WWE Raw is either equaling or beating the first round of the NBA playoffs in ratings? The WWE TV rights cost around $200 million a year right now — which will go up in a big way — and the entire company is valued at $3 billion. That means the entire WWE company is valued, right now, at just a bit more than the $2.5 billion ESPN and TNT pay to rent the NBA every year.

That’s insane and why I’ve been telling people to buy WWE stock for the past three or four years.

I think WME probably overpaid for the UFC when they bought it, but their idea was right, why rent a product when you can buy it?

Right now most sports networks are in the rental business, I’d want to be in the owning business. And I’d also want to be in the risk taking business. But I’m not sure many people are making the decisions I would.

But I do know this, my Periscope and Facebook show from my house with no staff and zero production budget is something ESPN’s $35 million a year morning show isn’t — profitable.

Burack: Let’s talk about the next chapter in your career, you radio deal with iHeart is up on June 30, do you plan on continuing hosting your show? You had mentioned running for Senator; could you do both? Where do you see yourself and Outkick in the coming years; do you plan on expanding? 

Travis: We’re two years in now and the growth has been tremendous, we’ll see. I’ve got a lot to decide in the next couple of months.

On the Senate front, I explored the legalities of running for Senate while keeping the radio, but that was legally tenuous because of the equal time doctrine. Plus, honestly, I think I have the best job in America and I don’t want to give up what I do now. At some point in the future I may run for office here in Tennessee, but for the next several years I’m going to focus on making as much money as I can. Neither of my parents ever made $50k a year — and I didn’t make much money for a long time either — so I want to build up a really big nest egg.

Lots of cool things are in the works with Outkick over the next six months. So, yeah, I think there will be a bunch of expansion to come and I’ll be announcing those things in the weeks and months ahead.

The biggest immediate thing that will happen and is already public is I’ll have a new book out this fall. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time writing it this spring and getting it ready for publication. It will be out in September. I’d like to get back into writing a book every year or every other year for the next 5-10 years. That’s one of my goals. What I do now is like being a short order cook, I respond to the day’s news and that’s fun, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to a long shelf life. I’d like to crank out some books with a longer horizon that are designed to last longer than a day on the Internet or the radio.

*The interview continues:

Burack:  Do you regret anything you have ever said or written that has changed a company or group of individuals’ opinion on you? Such as the CNN segment and potentially ruing the chances of returning as a contributor? 

Travis: I’ve been writing online for 15 years now, since all the way back in 2004. That’s a lifetime on the Internet. Along the way I have written millions and millions of words. Then you top that off with millions and millions of additional words spoken on live radio over the past decade or more. If I were to go back over everything that I’ve ever written or said over the past 15 years I’m sure I’d wince at some of it today, but I would imagine that would be the case for anyone who was learning as they went along in a rapidly developing business and media environment.

But I’ve never said or written anything that I’ve apologized for in 15 years and I’ve never pulled an article off the Internet. I rarely, if ever, delete any Tweets unless I’ve retweeted or said something that’s a factual error. I think that’s a pretty good track record of live performance. Now that’s not to say I’m perfect, far from it, and as anyone who speaks for a living on live radio or TV knows it’s like tapdancing on a sharp razor when you’re dealing with today’s perpetually offended society, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job at Outkick of producing good daily content.

I don’t think I did anything wrong on CNN either and I wouldn’t change anything about my interview there either. I thought CNN way overreacted, not me.

What I’ve tried to do in 15 years of being in the public eye is be as smart, original, funny and authentic every day as I can. Even 15 years after I started between 15 hours of live national radio a week, a daily Periscope and Facebook show for a half hour every day in the afternoon, and now a new book coming out, I’m still producing more original content every day, I think, than anyone in sports media.

I tend to think that people like me for all of those reasons. And if people don’t like me for all of those reasons, what do I care? I don’t worry about being liked by anyone other than my wife and three kids. They’re the only people around me 24 hours a day. So they’re my focus. Most opinions online aren’t really about the person online anyway, it’s about everyone else posturing about their opinion of the person online for their own audiences and what that posture says about them.

I started Outkick in 2011 so I could have complete editorial freedom and I still have that today. Our audience is growing rapidly and I love what I do.

I don’t worry about whether someone agrees or disagrees with me, I worry about whether the argument in favor of what I believe is the better argument. Before I take an argument public I’ve already debated both sides in my head for a long time. Once I’m convinced my side is right, I fire away without worrying about whether someone might be offended. If that limits my options, so be it. What more do I really need, honestly? I make a great living running my own website, hosting my own national radio show, talking daily on Periscope and Facebook, and releasing books.

I already bought a beach house for my family. I don’t even know what I would buy if I had more money. Other than the alarm going off every weekday morning in my house at 415 AM, I wouldn’t change anything about my life. 

Burack: What do you believe your legacy will be after all is said and done?

Travis: My legacy? Am I a president or a guy talking about sports every day? I’m 39 so I’m still fairly young for this game and not sure where I’ll end up over the next twenty years, but I’d hope my legacy would be that I made people’s days more fun and entertaining than they otherwise would be. And I also hope that I also made the country a bit smarter. Especially now when I think the country has never had more information and, simultaneously, never been dumber.

Burack: You had mentioned that you had regretted not singing PFT Commenter to Outkick, here today, what are your thoughts? 

Travis: He’s a really smart and talented guy. We had talked about him working for Outkick a couple of years ago. He and Paul Kuharsky, formerly of ESPN.com and now on radio here in Nashville, are the only two writers I’ve gotten close to bringing in at Outkick that ended up not happening. The reason I would have signed both is I think they’re good at what they do. Needle movers in sportswriting are rare. Most guys and girls don’t want to keep writing once they start making a decent amount of money doing radio or TV. That’s because writing is hard. Radio is hard too. TV is easy. There’s a reason you see people go from writing to radio to TV, but very rarely see anyone go TV to radio to writing. TV pays the most and is the easiest. Writing pays the least and is the toughest. Radio, at least if you do it by yourself, is also pretty tough. So I admire people who can consistently be entertaining writing. Because it’s very hard to do. PFT is one of them. The challenge I’ve had at Outkick in general is I wear far too many hats. I’m doing three hours of radio a day, an afternoon Periscope and Facebook show, writing daily on the site or on my book, and I’m also doing ad sales and planning a weekend in Vegas for Outkick readers. So I’ve just got too many responsibilities right now. The problem is I think I do all of them better than anyone I could hire. So I’ve trapped myself in a series of eighty hour weeks that never really end.

I love what I do, but I wish I could find myself ten years ago and work less.

By the way, it’s an illusion that there’s a tremendous pool of talented writers out there just begging to be paid small amounts of money to write thousands of words a week. Fred Segal is one at Old Takes Exposed. He’s doing good work for Outkick and so has Jason Martin, my producer on the radio show. But there’s a reason there are relatively few guys like me who started off making $0 and are still writing online 15 years later. Most either don’t have the talent or the drive. And I honestly think the drive is more important than the talent. Because the drive will make you get out of bed and work, the talent won’t.

Burack: Where will ESPN be in five years?

Travis: I think the trajectory of ESPN’s business is going to be an ugly one. I believed based on fixed costs for sports and a declining subscriber base that the company will be either losing money or close to losing money in five years. I think they will have had to give up Monday Night Football because they can’t afford it any more — it’s possible they could move it to ABC — and I think their total subscriber base will be beneath 75 million, which will be down from 100 million at the end of 2011.

Burack: The most embarrassing moment you have had in the past 39 years?

Travis: When I was in seventh grade I was on a church mission trip to Panama City Beach. We stayed in this awful bunker on the beach, a place that had been trendy in 1936 and we were out on the beach that day. One of our chaperones was a college guy who seemed so cool and old, he was probably 19 or so, but when you’re 12 a 19 year old seems like he’s so much older than you than he actually is, and he had rented a jet ski that day. He was taking all the kids for a ride. I was hanging on behind him for my turn, it was the first time I’d ever been on a jet ski, when we hit a wave and both of us fell off the jet ski. Back then jet skis were hard to climb back on so we were struggling to pull ourselves back up when a lifeguard comes buzzing over to us on his own jet ski.

He says they’ve spotted two tiger sharks in the area and we need to get to the beach. So there we are panicked, I’m convinced I’m going to get eaten by a shark. So since we can’t get back on the jet ski the chaperone suggests I should hang on to the back of the jet ski and he’ll drag me back to the beach. So he climbs back on and takes off dragging me along the ocean, a huge appetizer for the tiger sharks. I’m thinking I’m going to get eaten at any moment. As all the exhaust starts to roar off the back of the jet ski and all the smoke is in my face and I’m thinking I’m going to die, my swimsuit starts to slide down. Before long, my swimsuit has come completely off and I’m hitting the waves mooning everyone along the length and breadth of Panama City beach, including all the 7th and 8th grade girls in our church youth group. Fortunately I managed to hook my swimsuit on my ankle, but being naked in 7th grade on the beach in front of a bunch of girls your age is pretty mortifying.

Ironically that moment is probably a metaphor for my entire career in sports media. I just ride along mooning people hanging off a jet ski all day long.

One of my gifts, to the extent I have any, is I don’t get embarrassed very easily, if at all. So I share most of these stories on air regardless.

Burack: Clay, finally give us a prediction on anything.

Travis: Marcus Mariota is going to be a first ballot hall of famer.