We saw some rare intracompany conflict this week, with Fox Sports’ Katie Nolan using a segment of her Garbage Time television show to blast a FoxSports.com piece from co-worker Clay Travis’ “Outkick The Coverage” vertical. The piece, entitled “How To Land A Husband At The Masters,” was written by Rebecca Johnson (who some figured wasn’t real, but does in fact exist). It’s drawn plenty of scorn from across the internet, arguably even more than we’ve seen with previous controversial pieces from Travis and his site.
The more interesting issue here, though, may be what this says about Fox’s overall deal with Travis, in particular their agreement to license Outkick The Coverage’s content and run it on FoxSports.com with apparently little to no editorial control.
Travis said in the past that his current OKTC/FoxSports.com agreement ends June 30, 2015; we don’t know when his other arrangements with Fox, in particular his TV deal, expire. Is Fox Sports likely to keep a lightning rod like Travis around and potentially even expand his role at the network (in a page out of the Skip Bayless playbook) even if there is public criticism that comes from colleagues? Is it wise for Fox to give Travis the amount of editorial freedom he says he has? And could Travis’ outspoken and controversial pieces hurt the network’s ability to attract and retain talent and/or future rights deals?
There are obviously some benefits for Fox in being associated with Travis. For one thing, he has a significant profile in the sports world and his OKTC posts seemingly bring substantial traffic. Last summer (the interview was done in May, the pieces ran in July), he told Nate Rau of The Tennessean that “We’re probably going to do 2 million unique readers in the month of May, which will be the biggest month we’ve ever done. … By the time it gets to be August, September, October and football season is up and running, we could be 4 million uniques.”
Those aren’t numbers that can be easily written off, and controversial pieces like this Masters one only enhance that, if anything. That’s why Travis tweeted Monday that the hate makes him rich:
The more hate I get, the more money I make. It's remarkable. Pardon me for a bit, I'm going swimming in my vault of gold doubloons.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 13, 2015
Are the numbers as good as Travis told Rau, though? Their interview was about a year after he joined Fox, making those numbers not easy to verify independently as OKTC is now part of FoxSports.com’s overall traffic. According to Travis himself, though, it seems the expected growth during football season didn’t materialize. In January, he wrote about various sports websites’ December comScore numbers, saying that Fox Sports and The Sporting News (they teamed up in July 2014) had 56.65 million unique visitors and that “Outkick typically run [sic] between 1 and 2 million uniques a month on our internal numbers.” Traffic may have grown since then, but that’s not 4 million, and it also doesn’t make OKTC the site’s central pillar.
That raises questions about how much Travis is getting from this Fox deal (he told Rau OKTC has made him a “multimillionaire,” but that doesn’t appear to have been independently verified, and that may be a valuation of the site for a potential acquisition rather than a description of its revenue) and whether he’s worth all the criticism and controversy that comes with those pageviews. Having that traffic is certainly nice, but OKTC regularly stirs up significant controversy that hurts the image of Fox Sports. Consider the way Travis gave credibility to the Jameis Winston point-shaving rumor while at Fox, or the comments he made before joining Fox about current co-worker Erin Andrews (although they now appear to have patched things up), or his infamous boob draft.
Travis’ work is far different from what you’d find on most major mainstream sports websites, like this March mailbag about dildos, blow jobs and more. Imagine that appearing under an ESPN banner. It gets hits, though, and that feeds into what Travis told Rau in response to those who see his work as lowbrow:
I enjoy low brow, would be an answer. Two girls get in a fight at Steeplechase, a cat fight, I think it’s the best. It’s awesome. The butt-chugging press conference at UT – almost all of our most popular stuff is not really technically sports. Our top-10 dumbest fan bases, millions of people read that stuff. It’s entertainment and most people get it. I would equate it is running a site is a lot like on a tiny level being a movie studio. If you’re going to do ‘Shakespeare In Love,’ what gives you the opportunity to do that is that ‘Godzilla’ is going to do $4 billion in revenue. It’s not like ‘Godzilla’ is redefining what is possible with cinematic art, but it makes so much money it gives you the opportunity to do whatever you want. The funny papers are not exactly the same as editorial page, but they allow the opportunity for everything to exist.
It’s not just Travis’ own work that should be discussed here. Running pieces from OKTC contributors on FoxSports.com, such as the Johnson one on the Masters that kicked off this firestorm in the first place, also carries issues. OKTC obviously doesn’t print every piece they’re sent, and there’s presumably editing involved (from Travis and/or Lori Kelly, OKTC’s second staffer; the submit button on OKTC under “The Bullpen” sends an e-mail to her), but they approved this Masters one. That approval wasn’t out of left field, either: Johnson’s piece fits with some of OKTC’s brand (which is likely why some wrongly assumed that Travis himself wrote it) and isn’t that different from other things they’ve posted about the Masters. Thus, even though this was something Travis didn’t write or even necessarily edit himself, it wound up on his site, and it fits in with that site’s content.