On Monday, Funhouse posted a Mike Francesa video that went viral outside of the sports bubble, drawing 2.6 million views as of Thursday night.
March 30, 2020 – The day that Mike Francesa's unwavering loyalty to his old friend @realDonaldTrump finally came to an end. pic.twitter.com/KZnpbbsYG3
— Funhouse (@BackAftaThis) March 31, 2020
On Thursday, Francesa threw a fit about Funhouse posting that video (and others) from his show, vowing that he won’t allow it anymore with express written consent from Major Leag…er, Entercom and Radio.com.
Mike Francesa announces that he will no longer allow Funhouse to post clips from his fabulous 90-minute daily show going forward.
Alternate title: Mike Francesa announces that exactly ZERO people will hear anything he has to say going forward. pic.twitter.com/GJKKjYEx7U
— Funhouse (@BackAftaThis) April 3, 2020
Here’s the thing: all this is doing is making Francesa less relevant. The team at Entercom is doing a piss poor job at “marketing” Francesa (unlike what we see in most situations at ESPN and Fox, where if something said one of their shows has the potential to go viral, it’s usually on social media pretty quickly), and without someone like Funhouse calling his segments (both good and bad) to the attention of a national audience, he’s going to only fall even further out of the public consciousness (unless Entercom steps their game up).
Funhouse himself made these points on Twitter after Francesa’s comments before saying he was essentially punting on Francesa content going forward.
That tweet does not have my watermark on it. You clearly see the https://t.co/VFNh6W2SII watermark, and his monkeys working in digital did not post this clip to their site until FOUR HOURS after it went viral. Let's face it, there are no marketing geniuses working for this guy.
— Funhouse (@BackAftaThis) April 3, 2020
If this is what he wants… done! Again, it's not like he's still with Dog or even solo for 5+ hours. He hosts a no-energy, 90-minute show. Half of that is typically an interview that's too painful to even listen to. I'll live. Plenty of other stuff to post. Best of luck to Mike.
— Funhouse (@BackAftaThis) April 3, 2020
For whatever it’s worth, the Mike’s On Twitter account never even posted the video clip in question, which you’d think they’d try to jump on after seeing the attention it was getting. The account tweeted a total of two clips from Thursday’s show, two from Wednesday, one from Tuesday, and zero from Monday. Hey, you can’t go viral if you’re not giving people content!
Of course, Francesa and Entercom are well within their rights to clamp down on video content being posted by third party sources. But when you do that, and you don’t give the people what they want, you risk running into a similar situation that MLB and the NFL have in recent years. Is your product really so interesting and unique that people will still hunt for it, even without clips online? Mike Francesa is not Major League Baseball, the National Football League, or even the Premier League. He’s not a world class athlete performing at the highest level on the biggest stage. He’s a dude in New York who talks on the radio for an hour and a half a day. All this crackdown has the potential to do is bring him less attention and notoriety, and given how often he gets mocked on Twitter, maybe that’s actually the end goal here.