By now I’m sure everyone has heard of Barstool Sports. In case you haven’t heard, Barstool is a sports and pop culture blog that was founded by Dave Portnoy all the way back in 2003. Barstool was originally founded in Milton, Massachusetts and started with humble beginnings as a print publication distributed around the Boston metropolitan area. In these early days, Barstool offered online gambling advertisements and fantasy sports projections and eventually moved into more topics across a broader spectrum. Barstool did not reach the internet until 2007, but when it did, it took the world by storm. Barstool’s popularity gained the attention of The Chernin Group and in 2016 The Chernin Group purchased 51 percent of Barstool’s stock, making them the majority owner of the company. Today the website contains a mixture of podcasts, blogs and video series featuring Barstool staff. The topics covered by Barstool are now ranging from a variety of content, offering almost anyone on the internet something interesting or funny to view. 
Barstool has since moved into many of the popular social media platforms. Barstool has an Instagram page, Twitter page, Facebook page, Snapchat page and YouTube channel. Through these platforms, they offer much of the same content as their main website, but in a manner that is more accessible for their users and easier to use on mobile devices. Since their push into social media, Barstool has become even more popular, especially with high school and college-aged viewers. Barstool has become a staple of social media for almost anyone in college and they have become the go-to source for discovering popular trends and movements among the younger generations. Despite its raging popularity in recent years, Barstool has faced several controversies over the years, with their biggest one being in regards to the various comments made towards rape. Following these comments, Dave Portnoy released a statement that included, “...It’s not our intent, with jokes, to poke fun at rape victims” and then went on to point out the satirical nature of the site’s content. While this does not excuse Barstool from their actions, they have since stopped creating content with jokes of this manner because they realized how offensive and demeaning these jokes could be.
In this last year, ONU has adopted not one, but two Barstool social media pages that create content unique to the ONU campus community. The first page they created was a Barstool ONU Twitter page. This page gained some popularity among the campus community and now has 512 followers. The second Barstool page created for ONU was the Barstool Northern Instagram page. This page was created only a couple of weeks ago and it already has 863 followers. If Barstool Northern continues this trend, it will easily become the most popular social media page that is directly associated with the ONU campus community.
Barstool has become so popular in past few years and it’s really cool how ONU adopted one of these.
ReplyDeleteI feel the reasonings that Barstool got so large, so fast, is because of the multiple channels that it seeks and engages. Their content strategy is something that companies could grasp for the future.
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