Ogie Oglethorpe wrote:
good dolphin wrote:
Is that the old Mother Hubbard's location?
I wish them well as good sports talk content is a good thing for listeners and they have a local component.
It just seems that their business is scattered. How does a sports bar make you better at podcasting?
I'll probably give it a try sometime when its warmer and I can make the walk without jack frost nipping at my 'nads. It seems like an odd location. You may be able to get the one drink after work crowd but most of the successful bars around there turn into clubs, which seems antithetical to what I see of Barstool consumers. This would have played better in Wrigleyville, as they might have been the unicorn in the neighborhood that actually gets people into their bars during the off season. If it were me, I would have bought a building, had the ground floor sports bar and the upper floor Barstool Chicago home. Put a little studio in the bar.
This seems to me like a resteraunteur told them he'd like to start a bar with them, using their name and making them appear, kind of like Ditka did with his restaurants.
It's a fair question on what does a bar do for a company's media content. This bar is just the first one of five that are planned at this time in Chicago and Philly. If they are successful, it will roll out in other cities as well. I believe their other Chicago location is going to be in Wrigleyville, which is also where their office is.
But, again, what does that have to do with content? Here's what it does. It gives the company another stream of revenue that cannot be threatened by advertiser boycotts which allows their personalities to be themselves and try to make jokes in today's environment where it seems everyone else in media is too worried about offending someone with a joke that doesn't land the right way.
They still have a good advertiser base and despite Business Insider trying to bully advertisers away, not a single one left after the BI piece that ended up getting torn apart. However, Barstool can't always expect that to happen so they need to make sure they have other streams as a security fallback so they can continue as they are.
I know it seems weird for me to be rooting for stuff of their brand outside of the content, but there is a reason for it. It's what gives them the ability to be who they are and not be pressured into becoming something they are not as it seems most other media has become. Look no further than Dan Bernstein. I'd bet his metamorphosis was driven more by being marketable to advertisers than his own personal beliefs. He pretty much admitted as much on Twitter a few months ago to one of the guys here when asked about it. I wish I could remember who he was replying to so I could pull that Tweet up.
It's an interesting take, kind of like Tesla fueling Musk's desire to colonize Mars.
Didn't they get sold for hundreds of millions of dollars?
More power to them if they can pull it off. I always thought North missed the boat by not opening another hot dog stand when he was at the height of his popularity, entirely run by his family and people. It does have the feel of a money grab, like Rush Limbaugh selling his excellence in radio chachkis.
My guess is, like I said before, the structure is that this is THE BARSTOOL BAR...owned and operated by the Levy Brothers (or some entertainment group). Barstool is putting up nothing. It is lending its name and appearances/promotion in exchange for a fee. Those concepts work when you have a guy like Ditka who actually is into it and the product is good. The opposite was McMahon's places where the food was mediocre and Jim was disinterested. So, this probably requires whoever are their Chicago people to be in there regularly and the big names of Barstool to be there at least monthly. That takes a lot of work.
In the end, this is probably like the pop up bar trend that is popular right now. Some entrepeneur is renting space on the cheap and throwing something together to ride a short term trend. There are a few places in wrigleyville that become a christmas bar, then an irish bar around st. pats, then a sports bar when the season starts, then a halloween bar, etc. The concept seems to work and it is interesting.
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