The Bill Simmons Thread

allstonite

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The Schur-Meyers Red Sox story about 03-04 was beautiful and hilarious. The rest was great as well. I wish they both were on more often.
 

Swedgin

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The Ringer losing those guys feels important. It has not been a good couple of years for Simmons. He not only better get back to writing, but he better get back to actually writing decent columns.
Who knows but I see this the other way round. The Ringer/Bill had the foresight/good luck to put Dan and Lovett on a podcast. I wish Pod Save America all the luck in the world, but I suspect their numbers take a significant dive (ala 538) as we move past the election. (Some) people love election stories, gossip news, etc. The number who tune into the day to day grind of governance is far smaller. Maybe Trump changes that dyanimic, who knows. His election has demonstrated that I along with the hosts of Pod Save, have limited predictive capabilities.
 

DieHardSoxFan1

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With the injury to Bell I half-expect BS to degrade his toughness by citing a player from 25 years ago and saying "you'd have had to chop his legs off to keep him out of that kind of game."
 

ElUno20

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With the injury to Bell I half-expect BS to degrade his toughness by citing a player from 25 years ago and saying "you'd have had to chop his legs off to keep him out of that kind of game."

Followed by an odd number ranked list (top 7) of the top toughest players from very specific period of time, say 9 months.
 

MyDaughterLovesTomGordon

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No, no, no - they'll be separated out into separate animal categories: Rhino, Armadillo, and Bull, and then Bill will debate with himself which players absolutely HAVE to be in each category, and then he'll make a special exception for one player to be a "hybrid" of the Rhino and the Bull and then he'll make references going forward to how such and such player is just about ready for full Armadillo status.
 

ElUno20

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Bill's been doing a decent job of mixing comedy/sports recently. The newest episode is up with Bill Blur. It should be good...
 

Dummy Hoy

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No, no, no - they'll be separated out into separate animal categories: Rhino, Armadillo, and Bull, and then Bill will debate with himself which players absolutely HAVE to be in each category, and then he'll make a special exception for one player to be a "hybrid" of the Rhino and the Bull and then he'll make references going forward to how such and such player is just about ready for full Armadillo status.
Amazingly accurate.
 

SidelineCameras

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I am enjoying the podcast with Rembert Browne, although it's actually causing me to have a little sympathy for the Atlanta sports fan. I am sure that will be well washed away by Sunday at 6:30 but they have had it rough.
 

ElUno20

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I may be in the minority but I've thoroughly enjoyed the sports movies hall of fame series he's done with Chris Ryan.
 

johnmd20

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I may be in the minority but I've thoroughly enjoyed the sports movies hall of fame series he's done with Chris Ryan.
No way you're in the minority, those are utterly awesome. All four have been a riot and Ryan and Simmons are very entertaining together. Ryan, in particular, is a great podcaster.
 

allstonite

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I love those too and that they're more evergreen than his normal podcasts. I can skip around it until I have a long drive and then knock out a few in a row. They're fun and light
 

Foxy42

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Bill is an amazing pussy. He kicked off his podcast today talking about how he couldn't write a Super Bowl mailbag because he had strep throat.

I can't believe what a younger Bill would say about a writer that can't do a mailbag when their team is in the Super Bowl because of a sore throat.
 

nattysez

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Lengthy interview with Peter Kafka of Recode.

Deadspin's takedown of the interview is that Simmons is lying through his teeth about how well The Ringer is doing financially.

I still haven't read through the whole thing yet. His discussion of AGW is a bit hard to parse, but my impression is that his position is that he wanted to do an "interview show" and HBO forced him to do the stand-up bits. FWIW, I'll go to my grave saying that his basketball show on ESPN was quite good, and had a lot of funny bits incorporated into the show without being so stand-up-y. I wonder why he didn't try to do something similar at HBO.
 

jimbobim

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Lengthy interview with Peter Kafka of Recode.

Deadspin's takedown of the interview is that Simmons is lying through his teeth about how well The Ringer is doing financially.
.
IMHO it's not outrageous to think that he's thought through things enough that he can keep the company going on his own dime/HBO seed money/ Podcast revenue for at least 3 years. It also seems like he's negotiated some pretty favorable podcast ad agreements
 

Marciano490

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He's friends with some big time VC guys, so I'm sure he's still working off his ample funding. Highly improbable that his ad sales revenue is paying off salaries and turning a profit.
That's an odd definition of doing well financially.
 

nattysez

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Maybe he can parse podcasts from the rest of The Ringer in his mind so that it's truthful to say that the podcasts are making money even if the site overall is not, but he seems pretty emphatic here that the whole site is making a profit.

So I’ve had this question since you launched, and I still do: You have some money from HBO. You have money from the podcasts. Can that support a staff that size?

Fuck yeah! The one thing that’s not a problem for us is money.

You’re generating enough revenue to cover your costs? You’re making money?

Yes. I don’t know why people are so surprised by that.


Everyone is surprised by that. Because no one believes that there’s that much money in podcasting.

Really? Go ask some people. We have really successful podcasts. Not just mine. But The Ringer NBA show is like 140,000, 150,000 listeners per show. Channel 33’s like 125,000 per show. Ringer NFL is like almost 100,000. You go on down the line ...

It’s not that people don’t believe that people don’t listen to podcasts. It’s that it’s a really young industry.

It’s not anymore.

We’ve talked about this. But the advertisers are just coming around to it ...

It’s already happened. We had Dunkin’ Donuts, and Buffalo Wild Wings, and all these great things. The biggest reason we’ve had success this first year is we’ve had brands that wanted to do business with us. Like SeatGeek. They’ve been an unbelievable partner for us. They’ve been presenting sponsor for my podcast last year. This year they are again. Callaway, Miler Lite ... these are deals where we’re in business with these people and we’re figuring out different things to do. Diageo’s another one that I think we’re going to get a lot more involved with.
 

Marciano490

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Maybe I don't get podcast economics. But if a TV show had 150,000 viewers, I could afford 5 minute ad spots on it, and I assume TV being a visual medium it's already more favorable for advertisers. How much ad revenue can a podcast get for only having 150k people tuning in?
 

luckiestman

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Maybe I don't get podcast economics. But if a TV show had 150,000 viewers, I could afford 5 minute ad spots on it, and I assume TV being a visual medium it's already more favorable for advertisers. How much ad revenue can a podcast get for only having 150k people tuning in?

Last I read, could be a quarter million a year in revenue for 100,000 a week in downloads. Seems very high to me, but I don't have great info. It was discussed here before but I don't remember a definitive answer.

Bandwidth can't cost that much so, seems like a profitable endeavor. I don't know how the webpage could possible be making money
 

luckiestman

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Problem is buyers are getting smarter and delineating between listeners and downloads. I don't know what The Ringer's numbers look like, but I suspect a Seat a Geek is negotiating to pay based on actual listens.

Someone, maybe you or slim8nus, said that but I'm not clear on how they know. When I listen to a show on pocketcast, I guess that's easy enough to know I listened but if I download a show through iTunes and put it on my phone, I didn't realize that was easy to track.
 

shlincoln

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But can they tell when I repeatedly slam the advance 30 seconds button in overcast to skip the ads?
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Maybe I don't get podcast economics. But if a TV show had 150,000 viewers, I could afford 5 minute ad spots on it, and I assume TV being a visual medium it's already more favorable for advertisers. How much ad revenue can a podcast get for only having 150k people tuning in?
The biggest difference is the targeted audience. Getting 150k people that you know are interested in your product based on the shows topic makes it a quality over quantity situation for advertisers. It's not just about generating leads, it's about generating qualified leads that are further down the sales funnel upon entry.

Secondly, even though TV is visual, commercials aren't keeping the viewers eyeballs. DVR killed commercials - which is why OD shows force you to watch commercials - and cell phones make getting eyeballs on a commercial much harder.

Considering the cost association and the inability to truly gauge success, the ROI for a targeted 150k listeners over screaming into the void of tv commercials can be much more appealing.

Problem is buyers are getting smarter and delineating between listeners and downloads. I don't know what The Ringer's numbers look like, but I suspect a Seat a Geek is negotiating to pay based on actual listens.
Someone, maybe you or slim8nus, said that but I'm not clear on how they know. When I listen to a show on pocketcast, I guess that's easy enough to know I listened but if I download a show through iTunes and put it on my phone, I didn't realize that was easy to track.
I'm sure it only works with streaming services, no different then knowing exactly which parts of a Wistia video that a website visitor viewed. Once DLed, they can't tell. Still, the sample size is large enough from streaming services to be able to extrapolate and build a pretty good overall expectation.
 

Spelunker

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Sometimes. Like, one of the reasons they want you to use an app they control is to be able to track these. But if you're a normal person using a normal podcast app, no.
Does Pocketcast not report data like that back to content creators?
 

Blacken

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There's no way to do that. If it does report back to the app creators, I'll stop using it immediately. I didn't agree to that.
 

Blacken

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May want to stop using the apps then.
Documentation, please? Because I just wiresharked Pocket Casts for an hour and a half (two podcasts and some dead space between) and saw zero traffic coming out of it. It could totally be happening, but I'm not seeing it.
 

jimbobim

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Just like to say listened to Simmons emergency podcast while falling asleep last night and it was pretty much perfect for what I wanted. So props to him for getting it out after laying an egg and being lazy due to strep.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Documentation, please? Because I just wiresharked Pocket Casts for an hour and a half (two podcasts and some dead space between) and saw zero traffic coming out of it. It could totally be happening, but I'm not seeing it.
I actually have no idea. I heard Marc Marron say at one point that he's aware of people skipping his opening segments to get to the interviews based on some numbers, so theres that.
 

B H Kim

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I actually have no idea. I heard Marc Marron say at one point that he's aware of people skipping his opening segments to get to the interviews based on some numbers, so theres that.
Earwolf's parent owns Stitcher and they also have their own app I think, so I think they can get user data that way.
 

Blacken

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Right. Pocket Casts (and stuff like iOS's Podcasts app) downloads directly from the RSS feed of the podcast in question. It has no way to notify content creators because no such thing exists, unless the app developer takes metrics and surfaces them somehow.

Stitcher is its own thing and can do its own internal metrics.
 

luckiestman

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Documentation, please? Because I just wiresharked Pocket Casts for an hour and a half (two podcasts and some dead space between) and saw zero traffic coming out of it. It could totally be happening, but I'm not seeing it.

Thanks for this info.
 

nattysez

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Just like to say listened to Simmons emergency podcast while falling asleep last night and it was pretty much perfect for what I wanted. So props to him for getting it out after laying an egg and being lazy due to strep.
A big +1 to this. I was desperate for something Pats-related to listen to as I fell asleep last night and was surprised that not even Pats.com had a post-game podcast up. Simmons came through.
 

dirtynine

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Overcast is developed by Marco Arment who is also a podcaster/writer/twitter presence. Though he can be grating, I'm pretty sure he's staunchly pro-user and pro-privacy, so I doubt there's any hidden behavioral metric tracking (intended for publishers) built into Overcast. Though I suppose he might be getting some of that data under the auspices of making the app better, and subtly internalizing it as a publisher.
 

DieHardSoxFan1

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Listening to his podcast with Kerr. Funny back and forth in the first few minutes where Kerr, who told BS a few years ago that no team could ever win 73 games, now says no team can ever win 74 games.

Did you guys know that Kevin Durant is a top-22 player of all time?
 

ifmanis5

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By the way, that part about Chris Berman not having an email. He does. He probably lied to Bill to get out of communicating with him but Boomer absolutely has an ESPN company email.
 

SydneySox

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I actually have no idea. I heard Marc Marron say at one point that he's aware of people skipping his opening segments to get to the interviews based on some numbers, so theres that.
Marc Maron makes a running joke about how people always skip to the 11 minute mark. He jokes about it on almost every podcast.

It's even in his (excellent) tv show, someone at the end of season three says it to him.
 

Leather

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He cut ties with the following stars too early (seemingly) instead of too late: Drew Bledsoe, Law, Lawyer Milloy, McGinest, Richard Seymour, Mike Vrabel, Moss, Welker, Vince Wilfork, Ty Warren, Darrelle Revis, Jamie Collins, Chandler Jones, even Vinatieri (and he was wrong on that one)
Um. No he wasn't.
 

Clears Cleaver

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The Durant interview podcast is really good.

Durant in the last 15 mins is great, talking about players in the league. Honest
 
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