Barstool Sports and ESPN have been under the microscope this week thanks to the debut of PFT Commenter and Big Cat’s new Van Talk show on ESPN2 late night that is an extension of their wildly successful Pardon My Take podcast. It’s brought up some of Barstool’s unseemly past when Sam Ponder brought up the things written and said about her by the company over the years and given additional scrutiny to ESPN’s relationship with the upstart company.
As for the show itself, well, it’s far different than anything ESPN has ever aired on its family of networks, which is probably exactly what Bristol is looking for. As for the ratings? The numbers are in and the show drew a .05 overnight rating and 88,000 viewers at its 1 AM ET timeslot.
0.05 Overnight Household Rating for @Barstool's ESPN2 premiere…@SportsTVRatings @richarddeitsch
— Brian Krasik (@bkrasik) October 18, 2017
88K Total Viewers for Barstool's premiere of @barstoolvantalk on ESPN2. 65% were P18-34. My claim is that majority was streamed on OTT.
— Brian Krasik (@bkrasik) October 18, 2017
Average P2+ Viewership for 1:00-1:30am time slot on ESPN2 is 108K. A 20% difference, not spectacular numbers for the premiere.
— Brian Krasik (@bkrasik) October 18, 2017
Now comes the fun part. What does that exactly mean? Ratings and viewership numbers can often be complicated and always come in context, which is why the spin around ratings is the most intense in the sports media industry. (As I can attest from hundreds of calls and e-mails from network PR flaks over the years.)
While five figures sounds like a low number and was down from previous weeks, Barstool wasn’t helped by their lead-in, which was a paltry 61,000 viewers. That means that Van Talk improved on what came before, which is an encouraging sign for them.
Lead in for the show drew 61,000 viewers. Lead out was 39,000 viewers. So BVT improved on both.
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) October 19, 2017
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge proportion of the audience were in the 18-49 demographic.
For Barstool Van Talk: 53,000 of the 88,000 were Men 18-49
13,000 of the 88,000 were Women 18-49.— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) October 19, 2017
As far as those people who wanted to seize on that number to take down Van Talk and Barstool, Clay Travis took a break from his Alex Jones-Breitbart-Alt Right quest to continue his feud with both Barstool and ESPN.
So ratings for @barstoolsports new show on @espn were awful. 88k total viewers. Jalen & Jacoby radio show had 139k last week in same spot.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 18, 2017
ESPN is so desperate to be watched and liked they are desperately trying anything as business collapses. And all of it is failing.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 18, 2017
There may be nothing more ironic then going through the mentions of those tweets and seeing his followers criticize “MSESPN” as being overly PC and marketing to social justice warriors for partnering with Barstool Sports. I don’t even know anymore. PFT Commenter, one of the stars of the show, defended the show’s ratings in one tweet.
Is this bad. pic.twitter.com/sXxUh10jRa
— PFT Commenter (@PFTCommenter) October 19, 2017
And then entered into a Twitter back and forth with Travis that poked fun at his own viewership numbers and his getting kicked off a flight because his kid had lice.
There probably going 2 be very large numbers sorry if this offends. Our lopsided goldfish outdrew u by several thousand viewers
— PFT Commenter (@PFTCommenter) October 19, 2017
A rerun of The Goldberg’s on Nick at Nite at 130 am outdrew you guys by 360k. Need to buy more goldfish.
https://t.co/khN1X70BnX— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 19, 2017
Yea but 2 be fair they count every pair of lice eyeball's on ur kids as a different viewer
— PFT Commenter (@PFTCommenter) October 19, 2017
This is not elite lice humor. I expected better.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 19, 2017
This is sports media in 2017.
