Unofficial Partner Podcast

UP545 'Normal Idiots': Reddit, Discord and the Value of 1000 True Fans

• Richard Gillis

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Louis Theroux's documentary about the manosphere didn't at first seem to have much to do with sports digital strategy?

Until you get to the platforms: Kick. Rumble. A whole ecosystem of streaming channels that the sports business conversation barely mentions, yet where significant numbers of young men are spending serious time.

So we brought in Dan Ayers, VP of Transformation Digital at IMG, to ask: is the industry optimising for the wrong platforms?

What follows is a conversation that starts with Kick and ends somewhere much more interesting: in the weeds of Reddit moderators, Discord quiz nights, Iron Maiden's fan base, and what a thousand true fans is actually worth. 

Dan makes a strong case that the non-obvious channels aren't really about reach at all. Reddit and Discord represent a qualitatively different kind of engagement — audience-to-audience, not brand-to-audience — and the sports organisations that understand that distinction are building something that turns out to be genuinely valuable precisely when things go wrong.

There's also a sharp thread running through this about numbers — what a view is worth now that TikTok set the floor at zero seconds, why 15,000 concurrent viewers on a cycling stream is a better result than it sounds, and why the industry's fandom claims may be heading for a Barcelona email database moment.

Dan is a rare guest: someone who's been inside platform change long enough — from Sony Music in the early 2000s through to IMG's YouTube CMS work today — to have real opinions rather than consulting hedges.


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Speaker

Hi there. Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner. I was watching, Louis The's documentary about the manosphere and. I realized that I didn't know many of the platforms that these, uh, so-called creators were on. So I thought Dan Ays will know more about this than I do. So we got him in, um, kick Rumble Discord. Then we get into Reddit and Substack Kick Rumble Discord. And then we get into Substack and Reddit, a whole ecosystem of channels that sports business conversation doesn't mention very often. And yet, I, we suspect significant numbers of young people and older people are spending a serious amount of time. Dan, as Vice President of Transformation Digital at IMG. So the question is, is the industry optimizing for the wrong platforms, which is, might be a bit overplaying it perhaps, but what follows is a conversation that starts with kick and ends somewhere much more interesting in the weeds of Reddit moderators, discord, quiz nights, iron maiden's fan base, and what. kevin Kelly's old truism a thousand true fans is actually worth, Dan makes a strong case for non-obvious channels aren't really about reach at all. Reddit and Discord represent a qualitatively different kind of engagement audience to audience, not brand to audience, not top down content supply. And the sports organizations that understand that distinction are building something that turns out to be genuinely. Valuable. I think this is a conversation that fits nicely with a couple of recent ones that we've done with Dr. Augustine Fu about outrageous claims for engagement numbers that, uh, populate the sports conversation and. Most recently with Craig Hepburn about AI and how that is changing what we think of when we talk about The fan relationship when it comes to the digital side of things. I sound like an old man there, the digital side of things. On Earth am I talking about? Right? So I know someone who does know what they're talking about and it's, uh, Dan Airs. we mentioned Substack and if you are interested in the business of sport, or you work in sport, I would point you towards the Unofficial Partner Substack newsletter, and it goes out every Thursday. If you're on Substack more generally, find us on notes or subscribe. There's loads of places to find us, LinkedIn, Instagram, anywhere. We're out there in the world. Look for the yellow badge and we'll see you there.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

we mentioned chat up my idiot savant, actually, just an idiot. AI So this is what it said about you. I'm just trying to find what the bit that, and I wondered what you thought of it. There's a description of you and it says, Danez is the right guest for this. He's VP of Transformation Digital at IMG with previous experience at Seven League Valencia CF and Sony Music Entertainment. That's Sony Music background matters. It's where he built a genuinely broad digital skillset before anyone had a playbook to follow. He was at seven League when it was still a 26 person company and has been inside every significant wave of platform change in sports Digital, which I thought was quite a nice thing. I have no idea whether any of it's true. That's my problem, but

Dan Ayers, IMG

I mean,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

I'm happy to gloss over it.

Dan Ayers, IMG

No, it feel, I mean, it feels reasonably. I take most of those things as recently flattering. I think. I mean I was there when Seven Lead was a six person company, nevermind, 26. But

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

where's it got that from?

Dan Ayers, IMG

I don't know why, I don't know why 26 would be the number.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

It's just made that up, isn't it?

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah. I mean, it was,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Just lying.

Dan Ayers, IMG

would've been a point in time where it was a 26 person company No, out. But that I. I mean, this is, this feels very old man shouting at the clouds. But I was lucky in a lot of ways kind of fall into a career in digital, a time when it was brand new. So there was no like and doing everything. You had to do it by first principles. So I kind of rolled out of university. I wanted to be a. Or something like that. But I've been the music editor for my student newspaper, and I knew Hannah, the girl who's a promotions, who did promotions for BMG Entertainment as it was

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yep.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And they wanted someone and ended up doing a wonderful group interview for a position as new media assistant in what was the direct marketing department and and the new media and direct marketing. And I got that role and it was my first piece of copywriting was Kenny G postcard that I had to write the copy

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Fantastic.

Dan Ayers, IMG

that database. And there was a phone on the desk that fans would ring and I'd answer it. And they'd be like, oh, do you know where Westlife Art stand? Be like, oh yeah they're doing a signing at the traffic center in Manchester. And like, really CRM, like CRM was fill out details on the insert card in a

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And it was very first principles putting a video on the internet meant you know. it in Adobe, whatever it was in those days, like run it through into a Windows media player version, a real player version. Do a 300 K version, 120 K version, a 56 K version, dos, prompt FTP, them all to a server. And then like code those links into your webpage. And I'm is much better now that I can shoot a video on my mobile phone, press one button and it's on YouTube. That is undeniably better. But I think it helps to have been through that first principle stuff and to know

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

How that bit works. And I think that has benefited me over over my career and, and,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Well, you're into a, you're into a different podcast. But again I completely agree. It is a bit like, you know, writing anything, you know, you sort of think it can bypass the hard bit, which is sitting down actually doing it and getting through it and we're learning as you go and all of that stuff. But it doesn't actually help. If you haven't done it, you don't, you need something, as I say, I'm amazed that it takes stuff extrapolates and then you've got, it takes, it is as much time to go back in and then say, no, that's wrong. That was, that's wrong. That's wrong. Start again and whatever. Anyway, that is another podcast So just let me bear with me. So as you know, I've shared with you a sort of AI generated document and I just wanna put some context on that before we start talking about, you know, the subject that we really talk about, which is sort of non-obvious or you know, I dunno how you describe the minority channels or whatever. But I'll set that up in a minute. But one of the things that I've done is podcast wise, we've done. Nearly 600, probably 500 and I can't remember how, 50 odd. And then we've also, so that's about 900, a thousand guests, maybe more from across the sports industry over seven years. And I've been thinking, okay, well that's, it's sort of, that's an interesting data set to start with. And you've got a, it's a messy data set. You've got a lot of people, talking, chatting. And we said, right, okay, well let's run that into Claude and we'll set up a sort of place for it. And over the last few months, I thought, well, actually, it's quite a useful way of generating prep materials for podcasts. You know, and I don't publish anything. I don't write using Claude, so the output that comes out is me. But I think there's a sort of, you know, it'd be daft to ignore the moment that we're in. And it's does some things incredibly usefully. So that's how I got, that's the sort of context. And then I run in and I'll write I'll read you my prompt into Claude, what I wrote, or what I call chat up. You see? So I productized it already. Yeah. You see, and, you know, always thinking of the next move. Always zigging and zagging. God, it's tiring. But here's the prompt. Let's see if this, okay, so I'm pla This is the problem. I'm planning a podcast on non-obvious media channels. This was prompted by Louis TH's documentary on the Manosphere. It features several streaming channels such as Kick that I didn't know much about ADD in Reddit, substack, and a few others. The premise of the podcast is that the sports business conversation focuses hugely on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, et cetera. And I want to ask the, whether the audience, mainly young people are actually somewhere else. The guest is Dan Ayers of IMG, a digital media expert, former of seven Leagues. So that's what I gave chat up and I like quite like the idea of chat up being a sort of third person in the in the, is like, is sort of idiot in the corner of the room. A clever idiot who is then sort of supplying supplementary material. And I'll sort of share on the Unofficial Partner blog. What it came back with.'cause again, it's, I'm just trying to be as transparent as we can. So the stuff that you got, what did you think of it when you, first of all, because there's a, there's inevitably with ai, there's loads there and

Dan Ayers, IMG

So interest, I mean, you can see, I guess, when you use AI tools for any questions like this, so I mean, as I do in, in, in a number of different areas. It's maybe not today's topic, but I do think that the, we will undoubtedly talk about creators and the kind of

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

ecosystem in, in the context of this. And I have a theory that the next wave of creators, so obviously have people who create content and and distribute that content, and that is the stuff they create. The next wave I think will be people who build things

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

the AI coding tools, because they make it so unbelievably easy to do things quickly. in a sense that I've, over, over 25, 26 years of my career, I've always been. Close to the building of websites or apps or things like that.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

a developer, but I have asked people to build things. I have brief

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I have run RFS things. I.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

So is that wall broken down, do you think?

Dan Ayers, IMG

The big caveat around this is security, obviously. So, If I was building something business critical I would not want to just, you know, vibe, code that, and and launch

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

the world in that sense. But I think the, ability to build proof of concept, your ability to kind of just really compress the time in which it takes to build things into my it's brief insight into my personal use of these things.'cause I have a mix of personal, professional projects, but,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I've built my, I've got a 9-year-old son. I've built him a catalog site for his Pokemon cards. So you can imagine across Pokemon cards, you have a photo of the cards. It has a number of data points on it, a health value of various different types that, that a Pokemon can be. And in that, I built a system to kind of log, just collect all that stuff together. And when you think about the type of things that you wanna build for that kind of product, ev even things like a login system so that I In and be an admin and ad content and edit content, but somebody else can only be a viewer that, you know, that would traditionally be one, one and a half days. Dev time to do that sort of thing. And it's 15 minutes here. Like you, your ability to go to sort of, to roll out features at the drop of a hat in minutes. And then if they're not right to fix them in a few more minutes is just incredible. I think it's that time compression

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Is one of the big features of ai, of just your ability to test hypotheses in a in other contexts. So, for example, has, we have a YouTube CMS which I am involved in administering and a YouTube CMS. It's like a, it's a bit like a parent account that other channels can be linked underneath then and kind of it collates or the kind of ad revenue comes into one place and you pay it out to people and it gives you, unlocks some additional features like the ability to geoblock live streams

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Or other content and and run content ID and things like that. So. One of the things it does is give you the ability to access YouTube's reporting APIs on a larger scale. So if you want to do analysis of data, then

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

you can then sort of access in this method, you can then access kind of, you know, 20,000 videos worth of stats rather than the 500, which is

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

if you're just working in YouTube studio and you want to export a bunch of videos. So, you know, my journey on this was and a lot of this is kind of exploratory and I would not qualify myself as a competent Python coder or anything like that, but, you know, I have chat GPT giving me the python and code to write to then run through terminal on my desktop, a

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I never ever open

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

But you know, you can be guided through. It all this data out. You get this 20,000 record kind of CSV at the end of it, which is all the titles. Few counts, watch time, revenue, and so on. So on, throw that back into a chat, GBT or anything like that, and go right now, find me. Now find me common outs between terms that are used in titles and, you know, click through impression, you know, impressions

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

To click through rate, and are the commonalities, is there anything in the structure of the title? And you still have to be careful. You have to really quickly kind of, you have to check it regularly to go, told me this. Are you certain about this? What about this? But but so long as you're robust in doing that, you get very quickly into like some really solid and good insights of going, okay. When you're doing highlights, lead with. hook, then put the team names in, then put the kind of round data or so on and so on,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and that's sort of thing. And there is a statistically significantly better result from doing that than there is from you know, doing it in a different way. And I think one of the things I like about it particularly is that, you know, its ability to, you know, run quote proper stats, tests for you on this sort of stuff, because I feel like an enormous amount of analysis in our industry is, you know, people will say, well, this number was bigger than this number, so,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

this number was better. And, you know, not I mean, it's a long time since I did proper stats at, in as part of my degree, but but you know, there are things like confidence levels and there are things like random data that can affect that. So I your ability to do things quickly is unbelievable, I think with these tools. And so when I saw what came back from what you'd did done, I mean, it was it is funny how you can see where it's come from sometimes, can't you?'cause there's Of things that I've clearly put on my LinkedIn at some point, and you're like, oh, I haven't thought about that for some time.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah. It's also incredibly obsequious and you know, it's like a sort of, you know, oh, Richard, that's such a great idea. You know, and I can see how people fall in love with these things. If you are sort of just chatting with it all the time. It's it's much nicer to you than lots of other people. But there is a so Fed that in, and then we've got a, you know, an output back and then we'll talk through what it is.

Dan Ayers, IMG

yep.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

What I think is quite useful. I was talking to Alex Balfour about this the other day and we were, you know, we were sort of throwing ideas around about what to do with the transcript archives and all of those things. A really interesting stuff. And one of the bits was that you get to quite interesting premises. It just purely from an editorial perspective, without venturing into, there's a whole world of selling intelligence as, you know, white papers and reports and, you know, all of that palava, which I can see this revolutionizing, but actually just as a. Publisher, journalist, podcaster, writer of stuff. it gets you into new areas quicker, which then you can then say, right, okay, is this interesting? Is this not interesting? Do I have a view on it? Do I not have a view on it? And you then sort of do what you do on top of that. But I found, I do, even in the sort of six, well, maybe three months that I've been doing this usefully, I found it actually quite good at getting into sort of, again, places that either I would've taken a long time to get to, just subject matter wise and, or it's quite good at, you know, flagging bits that I had, I wouldn't have got to. So again it's useful from that point of view. But you do see the flaws, don't you? And actually, one of the worries that I have is that when you put stuff in, I'm the only person that can see the flaws quite often. You know, come, sometimes it picks up a newsletter that I wrote in 2022 and and it makes a big thing of something that was either ironic, a joke or a mistake, and blows it up, and then builds on top of that and extrapolates on top of that, and then suddenly you are miles away from the initial premise. But the premise was wrong.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah. And I think, I mean in that data analysis example as well, there was a point I'd done this over the course of a week, and there was a point where I said, oh, I've I asked it a new question and it said, oh, well, I've lost I can't answer that because I've lost access to the original data file that you've uploaded. I was

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

How come? They're like, well, it's caching and it's, you know, storage and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, hang on a minute, but we've been talking about this for like an hour today already. Like, can

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

anything that you've told me today? And it's like, no, you shouldn't. Okay.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

And you should never trust me.

Dan Ayers, IMG

but on, on the publishing piece I definitely agree. I typically author kind of a couple of the trends that we do in the IMG digital

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

that comes out ev every year. And the one that came out at the end of 2025 was it was the first one that I've, where I've written anything where it was aided by. AI chat

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and I agree, the ability to put in and ideas and go, look, here's my hypothesis, but like, what's wrong with this? Is there supporting evidence for it? And it quickly, again, it's that compression of time piece. It very quickly gets you to a place where either your idea feels validated or it doesn't, definitely doesn't feel validated and it changes and so on. So, yeah I think it's hugely helpful for those sorts of topics.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

So. Let's go through, let's sort of talk about what we are gonna talk about, which is channels. So again, lu through talking to Hs, ticky to his bloody name is, and it's just a view into a world that I probably should know more about than I do. I'm a very, you know, I've followed it Andrew Tate type areas, and I've sort of looked at documentaries, so I'm not I'm not completely naive about it, but it was an interesting sort of little journey totally to the side of that was the platforms. And kick was one that sort of, they appear to be on. And I guess the sort of question is why, how many there are what. When you are looking at, from a, you know, because people listening to this, a lot of'em will be on the sports side or working on, you know, somewhere in the sports world and we tend always to go to the sort of hierarchy canon of pla new platforms in new inverted commas. But just gimme your sense of what's out beyond, I dunno what you would include in the canon, but it would be ob obvious ones, you know, Instagram,

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yep. Yes. Well, we do on our digital trends piece, we do a platform power ranking. So we have a whole list and we have a

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

right.

Dan Ayers, IMG

of these. But u with YouTube YouTube and Instagram at the top typically o over the last couple of years. But Pat like Reddit have been moving up in that, in, in that sphere and discord as well. And I guess kick is an interesting one. I think it is a very different type of streaming to the type of streaming or video publishing that most sports right holders would do. Like it is very much, and not exclusively in all cases. It's never the, it's never just one thing, but. It is more typically kind of streamers who have a sort of, you know, just follow me round for hours at a time in my life as I go to places and set up situations and talk to people and do pranks and kind of, you know, create content that is about following me around. And there are fewer kind of moderator guidelines on the on, on platforms. I mean, I'm not, wouldn't allege that kick has no moderation for example, but like in general, a number of these kind of platforms tend to have less moderation, partly'cause moderation is expensive. And that's the reason that sort of, you know, meta and Google are able to do that more to to, to higher scale. But that kind of streaming and that kind of content publishing is really very different to what most sports organizations would be able to put out in a, even if they tried to do it in, in, in a kind of. I think so I do think that you have these community platforms that are smaller and

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah. Well, where does let's do that now. So just give us a sort of sense of, so kick, we just landed on kick, but where does that sit in your top 20 list?

Dan Ayers, IMG

it hasn't done so far. No, it hasn't done so

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Justin

Dan Ayers, IMG

but I mean, we discussed in in, in the notes prior to this session that it was obviously King's Nations League World Cup was successfully done. And that when was, you know,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

I.

Dan Ayers, IMG

but it was part of their broadcasting. My understanding is it certainly wasn't the sole channel. And again, I think where they, I think the stack for their 2025 competition was that they had, they broke kind of a million concurrent. Right. And that's a good big number. Like I genuinely for live, I think there is a general sort of issue with numbers on, around digital, which is that there are so many enormous numbers because we are measuring impressions and we're measuring views, and those numbers are in the billions and the hundreds of millions. Once they're aggregated into lots of places that

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yep.

Dan Ayers, IMG

comes out to you and says, oh, we've got 15,000 people at this thing. It doesn't sound like very many, does it? And, but I, my argument would definitely be like, that is way worthwhile if you can get even like a thousand people concurrently watching your live stream of something. I genuinely think that is a good result. So to get a million is excellent. My understanding is that I was broken across a number of streamers. Cumulatively, essentially. So it wasn't one broadcast that had that, but it was kind of multiple streamers on the platform. And I think that the biggest one had around 300,000 concurrence at one point and so on. So it's a kind of an amalgamation of streamers who've been given access to content who then built up into that kind of concurrency figure. But yeah, I mean, we one of the, one of the partnerships that we have at IMG is with British Cycling and the Tour of Britain last year. I was I was involved in kind of the digital work that we did around the tour of Britain cycling year, and that involved streaming on YouTube and a number of territories. I the the job of pressing go on the streaming software. And then when you press go on the streaming software on, on, on YouTube, it's replaced by a really massive button that says stream now. it's very nerveracking to just move your mouse in that. But essentially, obviously you track those numbers as you go through. And these are six stage events around, around the Tall Britain. And, you know, you are looking at as the race reached its climax and, you know, it might be a couple of thousand and then it's 4,000, then it's 6,000. And the final of the men's events Peter 15,000 live concurrent viewers as as Grant Thomas kind of finished his cycling career in coming into Wales. In Cardiff and that, that was the peak of 15,000 and I genuinely delighted by that. I'm very happy with 7,000 and you know, pretty happy with 4,000 and delighted by 15,000 concurrence there. And I thought, well, I'll look at what else is live on YouTube at the moment in the sports area and see what the numbers for those are. And you know, like, I think Chelsea at the time were running a sort of 24 hour live stream of just archive games and that had a few hundred viewers and then there was kind of, things like badminton and from Malaysia and things like that which was maybe six, 7,000 and feeling pretty good about what were, you know, actually comparing pretty well there. And then I was like, oh, what's this one? Who's this? That's got 45,000? And that was. A content creator in the F1 world who was streaming. There was a, an F1 race going on the same time that afternoon, and he was just streaming telemetry data from the race. So all the stream was just data from the data from the cars in the race and him chatting with his audience about it and the 45,000 people on there. And you think, well, that really is quite a different broadcast experience and a different kind of content experience that the audience are looking for.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

It's interesting you mentioned there kick is about streaming people drive, you know, walking around it was, and that it completely bears out the sort of through documentary where they're walking around sort of Malaga you know, abusing women

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

doing, you know, just sort of meeting people and that whole shtick. So that's about all. What is that about? Is that about audience expectation of why they go to this channel and is that, who is framing that? So if I want to, heaven forbid, want to get into live streaming and I wanna, I dunno what it would mean me walking around, but that sort of, just the idea of that makes me smile, but that then would shape my choice of channel. So there's a sort of form versus form and channel question.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I mean, look, TikTok Live and Instagram live like a definitely

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

of those platforms. And that's one of my points around these kind of more platforms, I think would be like they have features which also exist on, often exist on the major mainstream platforms. And whilst you definitely get dedicated communities that are on these smaller platforms, you know. Trying the right way to phrase this, but most people in, in, you know, distribution of any population, most people fall somewhere around the middle of kind of

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

What, whatever you wanna call it, normal, vanilla kind of, and

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I don't think that there is a concern to me that, oh, actually the industry is really missing out on an audience here, because you can only find that audience on these platforms that you're not really engaging with at the moment. Because I think that there may be some examples of that, but in general, of the people that you want to reach, I think, are typically on the mainstream platforms as well, because they are mainstream platforms.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

And one of the points of it really is that it is exciting to be not on, you know, it is counter-cultural and just being on it feels. Like your outside and no one wants to feel like they're in the mainstream. You know, everyone wants to feel like they're a sort of maverick playing the system from the outside, you know? So there's a sort of just a, the buyin of just being there that brings with it a certain expectation, I guess, of what the content is gonna be. I guess it then leads to the question of, sports place in this ecosystem. I think you've got, as you say, everything if it's whether people are in the middle or are dragged to the middle, or are, you know, whether the algorithm pushes everyone, flattens everything into the middle, and then the sort of opportunity for a kick a sport coming out and I'm using kick as a proxy into sort of, you know, channels. I don't understand, but I could sort of see, well, okay, if I was a, if there was a map there. And always the temptation is, do you go where the audio, you know, you go to YouTube right at the center of this map, but then what do we do around the outside? And then the question then becomes, is it worth doing the stuff around the outside?

Dan Ayers, IMG

Well, so the, is it worth it? Bit is a really interesting point. Right. And I guess I'll lean more on, I'll probably lean more on platforms like Reddit and Discord

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

The kind of community sort of platforms that are built for community essentially for

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And I think that, for all that you can talk about engagement on

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

I.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and on Instagram and channels like that to me is often a kind of, it's a one to many engagement. It's between you, the creator and your audience. There is not a lot of. Audience to audience communication there. Like, I don't feel like people really make friends in the comments of Instagram thread for

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

whereas when you're in a Discord channel or you're on a Reddit community, like you get to know the other people in there because Posting regularly and friendships are made, or at least affinities built and you can see people. So I think that's, it's a different type of engagement in that you are talking to quote normal people. The way I

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

sort of characterize Reddit and I should say it's my favorite platform for discussing things on the internet partly because it is one of those the ones that's left, where it is mostly, not exclusively, but mostly talking to what I would call normal idiots who are

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and smart and kind of interesting and you can find useful information and you can have fun and there's things that make you laugh. And are people that will come on and sort of defend are very reasonable, essentially. There is a lot more reasonableness. One, one of the one of the sports that, that IMG has a partnership with is Rugby league in the in, in the uk. And I've worked on that for two or three years now. And that's probably one of the, one of the ones where Reddit has been a really interesting part of kind of growing out the digital activity around, around Rugby league. So we work centrally with the league with Super League and with Rugby League commercial. But there are obviously we work with the clubs as well as need be. Rugby league is, I mean, I really like it. As a sport now I've I live in the right place for it. I'm in both promoted teams at Super League this season where either York and Bradford are both both brought the sport closer to me where I live. So, so I enjoy it, but I think it's sports that are of that size where they're not the kind of absolute premium top Global sports really have a lot to benefit from these platforms and from a lot of the sort of shortcuts that AI things.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

well see it. It was interesting. So I'm, I sort of dabble in Reddit. I don't, I'm not a big user. I sort of end up there sometimes.'cause again, quite, it's quite interesting how often chat up sends me there, you know, my idiot friend in the corner is quite often reference is Reddit in a and so you end up sort of going through and finding the source material sometimes. And so I'm not a natural Reddit user, but the way you are describing it sounds a bit like Twitter in sort of 2012, you know?

Dan Ayers, IMG

I would agree. And the second, so the rugby league example, I mean, it's very straightforward the way you know, because just what do you do? And I think that clubs and leagues and have kind of shied away from getting involved in community platform community platforms over the years because it's messy, right?'cause you're dealing with

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and people are messy and this topic of brand safety comes up where actually I think on, on, on Reddit, there's pretty low risk of any brand safety issues. But but it comes up when you're doing anything around community moderation and if you're running your own forum, et cetera, and so on. But, you know, there is r slash Super League, which is the, you know, the Rugby league subreddit. And actually the sport can sustain a really nice league subreddit with 60,000 members or so in it At the moment, it probably can't sustain individual club subreddits as same degree. So actually this is a good melting pot of, you know, lead rhinos fans, Wolves fans, whole Kingston Rovers fans

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

in one place. And like the way you get involved is really simple. Like, I sent a message to the moderators saying, Hey, like we've, like, I'm representing the league in this situation. Like, do you even want us to get involved here? Because

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

they might not they might not, right? No, nobody you know, people.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

They might be Unofficial partners.

Dan Ayers, IMG

well, exactly people in the same way that people love clubs, but maybe hate the business of the,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Club.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and it's hard as a, it's hard to be loved as a league, I think, ever or as

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

As a federation. But actually the Andrew in this case, the guy who, who largely moderates that like nice guy was like, oh no, it would be great to have great to have more involvement. And what that involvement means is clubs bringing players in and coaches in to do ask me anythings, which is Reddit's kind of main sort of talent vehicle where essentially the community gets asked questions to. To, to sports people. But also, like, they're treated like media now. So they're, they get press releases, they're invited to the lead to the season launch event where they get access to interview coaches and players and so on like that. And there was a you know, a hundred we had for the grand final last year. We had a hundred people from that community at the Grand Final in a hospitality area for the Reddit sub-community.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

What was that like? Were they, what were they like as a sample of Rugby League fans?

Dan Ayers, IMG

I mean, I'd say like, like a, just a normal cross section of of Rugby Leaf fans. But what was interesting was that ahead of this time, so, you know, I guess the way the grand final works is obviously it goes on sale before you know who the exact two teams are gonna be the

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

you tend to get fans of lots of clubs that, that, that will be at the event anyway. And it's

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

enjoyable event to go to. So you had a mix of fans from different clubs there anyway, but what was interesting to me was that you have all these people who are voices on the subreddit and chatting in the community and taking the mick out each other and so on. And when it got to this point of like, you know, a hundred of us can go out and, you know, just a, we'll do a ballot for tickets and so on, and the winners were drawn and you had a few people going, wow, look, lads, you know, I'm looking forward to this, but. I'm coming on my own and I and I don't know anyone, like, is it gonna, am I gonna be okay?

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and it was quite interesting seeing

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

step over onto, and then they went, and of course it was fine. And they had a good time. And what I think this, and add like the overhead for the league or the club or whoever's involved in this is really low. Like, you're not, like the community probably doesn't want you in there every day posting to stuff.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Well, one of the things you said, just to just to pick up on, you said that it, the league as a whole can sustain the channel, but individual teams probably can't. And I'm thinking of, so again it's a really useful conversation because all the time, it's okay. The other day I was talking about to Fiona Harold about netball and or, you know, or we talk about the WSL or we talk about the hundred, or we talk about various, you know, sports and teams that are not the Premier League, not Formula One, not the NBA, all of that. So this is why this bit is really interesting and useful, but talk to me why, what is the line of sustainability and what teams need to do? Because it feels like, okay, the readout of this conversation is, okay if I'm a, I need to be on this and I, I need to be on Reddit. I need to build something there. If I am in charge of a sports property on,

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

you know, that, that is outside of the massive the top one. So, but talk to me about that sustainability question. I don't quite understand what sustains it and what doesnt,

Dan Ayers, IMG

Well look, the fir the first thing is that you probably don't need to build anything.'cause if you have a sport like there, there will be a, a subreddit out there for your sports

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

right?

Dan Ayers, IMG

for your league. I think clubs within like, kind of the, sort of the not massive sports. Like you,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

have smaller ones. And what, when I say like, can't sustain, like if you're talking about something where, you know, any, you know, there's a couple of posts a day and they're getting two or three replies,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Okay.

Dan Ayers, IMG

kind of, that's a bit low. Really, but

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

So it needs a bit of energy for people to be drawn to it to be worth getting involved in it.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I mean, but again, when we talk about numbers, like when you might look at the number of up votes on a popular post and it might be like 142 or something. With and again, in the context of like. 500 million video views of this

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

feel like a lot, I promise you. It is like

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

of like with the community ones, you sort of almost invert you invert the metrics of, you know, when you're thinking about when we measure impressions, when we measure video views and things like that. been a real sort of race to the bottom, if you like. Kind of pushed by a lot, pushed by the. The mainstream platforms really to kind of really reduce the length of what counts as one view, right? So in, in

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Right.

Dan Ayers, IMG

the it's between zero and one seconds now in most cases. And it wasn't always like that, but you had sort of, TikTok was kind of, has always sort of been like that since it launched. And then kind of you saw Musk take X in that direction of really reducing it down. And then kind of follow meta followed. And YouTube were the kind of final holdouts, but do now kind of, particularly on shorts just have a zero effectively an impression. So some parts of this video was served on Of a screen in front of a person for you know, more than 0.0 seconds is counted there. I think there is a huge difference between that and obviously a post in a place that is, it might only be, it might be upvoted by people, but

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

the scale of people that will see that is is, you know, is 10 times that comfortably. I

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

is sort of a bit, it's a bit of the conversation, sorry. But there's a bit of the conversation that we had with, or I had with Augustine Fu recently about

Dan Ayers, IMG

one of my favorite ever.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Brilliant. He's, he is it is, it's really, you know, and again, it's sort of jaw dropping how. The, just the frame of what success is has just been so distorted in terms of the numbers that are required to take, get people's attention all the way through the supply chain and it's interesting the influence of TikTok and how that changed what a view is and therefore what a fan is. You know, and you get to, well, okay, I don't, I've lost all sense now of what a fandom is and where they are and, you know, how many is good and how many is poor and all of that. And trying to get back to some reality. We're gonna have a problem where, the claims, enormous claims of fandom that are made for sport in, in various places has to be recalibrated. But how you do that, I don't know.'cause you're gonna get a moment where everything falls off a cliff because you go from this absurd numbers, you know, in completely. Absurd nonsense numbers to something closer to reality, and it's gonna be a massive jump down and everyone, and it'll be a period of, oh, okay. It will be like the sort of Barcelona when they found the email database of, you know, below the acclaimed international fandom. That sort of moment.

Dan Ayers, IMG

how apocryphal that story is. Now

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah,

Dan Ayers, IMG

I use it as well often, but but in, in that sense, like the for Spotify to go, oh, we found out it was only 3 million people, and you are like million is really big in, in most sort of fandom contexts like that is still

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

because the reason that people, like, I could follow Barcelona and be a really devoted fan of Barcelona without ever having to give them my email address. Like, and unless they, they have to really work to do that, right? They have to build something that makes

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

to give them my email address. Whereas like, it's just a fundamental part of using Netflix or Spotify or so on. Like the reason they've got 500 million of these is because like, it's just a. They have a good product and people want the product. And I think that's why you see in sport where that data collection piece comes in is it's almost always driven by good products. Fantasy is massively the driver. A anyone that

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Right.

Dan Ayers, IMG

we've got a massive database of people like it's Premier League or any other sport fantasy is always a huge driver of that because it's a product that people want to play and that and nobody thinks, well, I'm exchanging my email address for something here

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yes.

Dan Ayers, IMG

At that point they just think I wanna play fantasy. And it's part of the process because of course it's'cause you need to do it. And so I actually don't think that, I definitely don't think 3 million is a.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

No, and it's also the, you know, you're getting to the, as you say, the value exchange of the email as a proxy for my. Time and identity that I'm gonna give to an organization varies from, as you know, okay, it's fantasy or it's a Disney plus login all the way down to some crap that I've just gotta have to click to get to something else. And, everything in between. And so trying to sort of establish, it's interesting the again the what constitutes commitment, and proper value at the other end, I wanna talk to you about Discord because a few years ago I remember having a conversation being quite keen on Discord.'cause someone said, told me and they were sort of American digital type person. Can't remember who they were. That, today's publishing businesses, and this was in 2022, would have a, is a podcast, a newsletter, and a Discord community. And I thought, okay, well I'll have a look at Discord.'cause again, I didn't know much about it. And then I sort of got a little bit of the way, but it was so confusing and it felt like such another world that I just, I probably gave up. I tend to do that. But Tell me about Discord.'cause again it, my idiot friend says 40% of Americans use discord with nearly one in five paying for access to at least one server. Discord is popular with younger generations. 50% of Gen Z use it. I have no idea of the veracity of those numbers. This is me talking now, not chat.

Dan Ayers, IMG

So. It's, I mean, again, if you want mainstream adoption, why call it a server? Because that sound, that,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah. Yes. Good point.

Dan Ayers, IMG

So Discord, origins in my understanding was in, in gaming, certainly because people wanted, it came from a desire to have a, when you're playing multiplayer games on consoles on Xbox or PlayStation so on, and you have a headset on and you were talking to your teammates as you're playing you needed something that would reliably give you kind of audio connection and and chat connection without lag. And Skype was the original thing for that. But Skype was too

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Discord was built as to be really optimal kind of audio channel connection. I still, one of the nicest features of Discord, I think is that you can just have, if you have a group of people in your server or in a channel on the server, you can just have the audio line open and it's just like having, you know, if you're doing remote working and you kind of just wanna be able to say, oh. hang on. Tell me about that thing. Like you can just talk into it and it's just an open channel for everybody.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Right.

Dan Ayers, IMG

audio is where it started and gaming is where it started, which I guess is why a lot of the terminology is kind of slightly more technical and people that are kind of,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

comfortable with that. So very, but you will see very commonly on football club subreddits for example. They all have a match day thread, which is when a match is taking place. It's just, it's people are watching, the people are watching the game on TV and they are typing their reactions into the match day thread. And it's

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

hundreds of comments. And it is as about as knee jerky and reactive as you would imagine it to be. But there is also, they also will have a discord, almost always will have a discord server link for people to chat on, on, on there as well. It's a, it's another extension and I guess it's maybe a bit more suited to, to live chat. So our main experience of it as as I'm G's digital business, is a project we've been doing for a number of years with Red Bull Racing and running the Discord community with them. So that is, you know, having community managers who are kind of administering and moderating and running that community. And you do, you are absolutely talking to the most engaged part of of the audience are the people that come into this, like, this is not a reach or a top of funnel kind of game

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah

Dan Ayers, IMG

you are getting much, like having a mobile app. Like it's not, you don't gain audience from having a mobile app, but you do get more engagement from your most engaged fans,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

so the fellow that's streaming telemetry,

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yep.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Data on Formula One, that sort of thing. So I can imagine that sort of level of engage. So you're a proper nerd end of the sport.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah. Very, very passion driven stuff, I think. And look, the, when you go to, going to your previous question of what do you actually need to do to run these things, Reddit, I would say is light touch. You drop in occasionally, answer questions. Just the fact that the community knows that you are there that they kind of feel some closer connection to the club. You're not just kind of shouting into the wind.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

do where we top'em on this as, as well. And the Coi, COIS subreddit you know.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

What's that like these days? Is it a fun, jolly place full of, you know?

Dan Ayers, IMG

again, I would say that in match threads where things are, where, you know, when you three nail down at home's, not in forest, like it's not it's not glorious at that point. But but in general, I would say the of reasonableness of the audience is significantly higher than on other channels.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Oh.

Dan Ayers, IMG

it does still, it does still maintain. And and you know, spur will do you know, amass. Asked me anything with players. And they had the kind of the set peace coach on earlier in the season doing one as well

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Right. Nice.

Dan Ayers, IMG

the our soccer piece as well. And it's just interesting, I am the phrase bringing you closer to the whatever is not one of my favorite phrases, just because it's I feel like, hang on a minute. I'm sure you told us 18 months ago you were bringing us closer than ever before, but now we're even closer than that. And now we're even closer than that. But it does create that, just knowing that I, as a user, I wanna get to the club, well the moderators have a relationship with the club and I can get to those people and they get to that. So if there's something that needs doing

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

like nice stuff does happen, right? So there was a guy that attends a guy posting, say my grandfather's just turned a hundred years old. He's been a Tomlin fan his whole life. Like I wonder if there's anything the club could do to sort of tennis us and you know, saw this and we. DMed them and the club did something. And like, I think that as a I always think honestly that the perception of sports organizations as being somewhat untouchable or unreachable is very misplaced. And actually, if you phone up mo, if you try and phone up most football clubs as a, as an example in the Premier League, you've got a pretty good chance of getting through to talking to someone that can help you out with the thing that you wanna get helped out with. They're far from untouchable organizations really, despite the huge money involved and how big they feel. But but so, so all you're doing is quite light touch observation on Reddit when it comes to Discord? Definitely more active hands-on stuff there. You've gotta run it and you know, the Red Bull racing example, there are, you know, there are quiz nights, there are kind of, you know, it's like running a club run.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

running a, a kind of club for people with interest. We used to, in the old days in music it was very much the way that we would build fan bases was, you know, it's a key part of building fan bases was the old style web one forum

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

band forum. And you would have artists and the way the hierarchy works is, you know, there'd be me in the record company and I would have a relationship with the three or four people that moderated the Casabian Westlife or JLS or you know, who, whoever. Forum and we would push down information that we'd like to be distributed and or we'd like questions back on or feedback on and things like that. And any issues that were happening in the community.'cause those things happen sometimes, right? You know, someone's trying to scam someone about some westlife concert tickets on the forum, like the police phone up. And you've gotta deal with that. Like, when I say it's messy,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

'cause people are messy. But you have these lines of communication and I think just making people realize that they have that channel of communication to the club, the league, the sport, whatever it is, just makes you feel a bit more affinity there. And it creates I don't think that soft power is exactly the right term because, you know, kind of foreign.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

No, but I get it. It's a, there's sort of analogous there, isn't it? I can see that.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And you, I think it's the kind of thing that you really wish you had at the point where something has gone wrong

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And you're like, oh, we don't, like, nobody's sticking up for us at the moment. There's no grassroots kind of groundswell of defense for us. And I think that's really noticeable when you don't have it. And I think that if you've put the work into kind of building this community and people understand a little bit more about, you know, the people making these decisions at the club or the league or whatever, like ultimately they are just normal people trying to do their best for

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

and the club.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

But it's also, I mean,

Dan Ayers, IMG

of that.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

it's the is what's interesting is the picture you are painting is sort of, it feels like a world that I'd like to be a part of frankly. And it's why it's, and it, but it's quite counterintuitive'cause it sort of feels like that. It's, I wonder what. The map of the fan base is, and how it relates to the platforms that they engage with. And again, there's an age thing which you would go to in terms of, is it younger or older? Is there, you know, we of, we always talk about the NBA as being very tech savvy. It's one of the cliches of our sort of industry, but it feels like the sort of, this is where the audience is. There's a significant number of the fans there. I never see clubs promote it. I never, you know, are they pushing people towards that?'cause it feels like a good place to have. As you say, there's a sort of baseline, which when things go wrong, they flare up. And social media, it becomes a shit show on, you know, in terms of, we've had people on who run football clubs who say, well, I wouldn't go anywhere near X or I wouldn't go anywhere. I don't want to go on, you know, it's just too much hassle. It's just endless abuse. Whereas actually this feels a different. World, and I wonder why they're not making more of it. It feels like a sort of easy route in.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I, I would agree that it is there are different levels of effort to these things, but I would agree that it is easier, it's certainly easier than running a social media channel where you're having to maintain a publishing and produce content and investing content and things like that. Like Reddit is absolutely a lighter touch thing than that, but it's a different I think you just have to, well, things one, I would say most sports organizations. Not the, again, not the premium tier ones, but like they're small slash medium businesses. And they don't have a big, the marketing team is two or three people and the kind of fan engagement team is a couple of people. And the PR team is a couple of people. And so you have to pick your battles with these things. I would absolutely argue that doing a community piece, there's a sort of, there's an initial setup piece of work, but if you do that right and you've got fans or trusted fans running it with you then the overhead ongoing pretty low.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

It also positions the club in a different way. You know, I think psychologically, I think actually this is a service that is being provided and there is a peer-to-peer relationship because quite often now the whole, you know, football club as publisher media house top down, sending clips and, you know, being in that world. And I think, well, okay, I don't really care whether the clip comes from Tottenham or it comes from somewhere else actually, but this is something of value that they could be delivering and probably are delivering. But I'm not engaged in it. I just wonder. It, it seems to sort of, again, it, it changes the dynamic into something healthier. I think. It feels like.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I would agree. I would agree.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

It is less exploitative, less extractive. You know, I'm not being served content to get something from me, to put me into some database of something that I'll get flogged later on.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I feel like email newsletters fall into that category as well. Like if someone if you think about the email that you get from that is a quote, a newsletter, which is a long read of some sort and all fits in nicely in your phone. You can read it and scroll it and you consume it in the email. Well, that's what Substack is and it's what newsletters are. And it's

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

most of my sources of kind of like good new technology information and sports industry stuff come from those sort of sources. But fairly, very rarely do you see a sports organization publishing that sort of thing. The emails they send out are marketing emails that say, click here for this, and

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

for that. And even if there is good content, you're still clicking here to go somewhere else for it. And I think, again, I think there's a huge value in delivering. Content through these mediums. That is, it's just good for its own sake and it's not asking you to do something different.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

let's finish off on Substack.'cause again, I, Substack is one that I've sort of direct experience of. newsletters. We were very early. I was very early to it. And it's now evolved into something else as a whole thing that Substack, you know, wants to be. And I find it interesting. I'm not loving the direction that it's going in. I know that, you know, there's a sort of space where Twitter was, I used to like Twitter in the early days, but now it's, I don't go on it and. There is a sort of space there for something, but I don't quite buy into, this is gonna be everything. I'm not all in on it. But what do you think about Substack?'cause again, it's, you know, I'm seeing Nike on it. I'm seeing various other, you know, football type properties on it. Certainly athletes on it. And again, you always get to why are they there? Are they actually there? Are they just, is it just someone else writing it for them or whatever. But what do you think, what's your view on Substack?

Dan Ayers, IMG

specifically or the concept of newsletters and long and blogging

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

I think Substack.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting. So I was gonna say, I think I read that Medium turned a profit for the first time, recent, recently, for example. And they've done that by kind of essentially doubling down on sort of features and and creators to.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

I like the idea of something. So the big sell when you hear, you know, Andreason or you know, who's an investor in it and or the Hamish Pringle or, you know, they talk a really good game. A game that should talk directly to me, which is to monetize individual sort of creators. And you essentially, it's a, you know, a pay paywall argument that you can then own your own audience rather than have the platform own it. So

Dan Ayers, IMG

Do

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

that story

Dan Ayers, IMG

that you know their names or just

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

y Well, that's a good question.'cause you know, again, initially the news, the Unofficial Partner newsletter, it was. Something, I mean, literally built you know, one subscriber at a time and people were sort of jumping on. I knew all of them. Now on Substack, it's much more mercurial. They, people subscribe and then jump off and they like one thing and hate the next thing. And then it's much more sort of, promiscuous, which I don't really like, because actually I liked if it, you know, back to your initial point about it's the email as a delivery mechanism. I like because I like the idea that you can have some control over it, and if people want to receive it, they won't block you, you know?

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yeah

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

if that's it, but it feels like it's changing into something else. But I, you know, what do you think?

Dan Ayers, IMG

it's interesting to think about the, when you think about ROI of all of these things and what, why am I doing this? And you talked about you know, it, it's, I, in theory, ideal for creators because you're putting, you've got pay all there and so there's a revenue stream coming in from it, right? And that is definitely part of it. I think it's interesting when you as a creator of whatever it is, you're a sports content creator or you're a technology blogger or whatever it is, your ability to, one, one of the great kind of immutable laws of the internet is the kind of the bringing down of the barriers to distribution and production of

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

You can do it so deeply. Not zero cost, but like very marginal cost of scaling up your distribution. And so your, the ability of any individual. grow an audience is absolutely there. And I think if you look at the moves that all of the platforms make, when you look at the things that YouTube bring out or the new features that Substack bring out, all of their product features are aimed at making the lives of creators better. Whether it is kind of like

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

editing functions, whether it is easier, you know, will automatically clip shorts out of your lives that you've done so that you as the creator, don't have to spend time doing that of like the best parts of it. And similarly substack kind of aims to take to not, as you say, not only be an email delivery platform now, but also bring you I guess network effects

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Being able to build an audience across an out and outside your network. And, you know, the if you like this, if you like this newsletter, you may like this newsletter

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

the commenting and back and forth and so on. If you are an individual, then the revenue you can make from that is, is reasonable. Right?

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

it's not bad if you're a one, two person operation, then you can absolutely make a livelihood from that. I think is interesting is the people that make say that they make their living from a YouTube or from a substack or things like that, my suspicion is that the, where their money comes from, yes, they get a share of the advertising revenue on YouTube. They get a share of the subscriber revenue on, on, on Substack. actually probably the majority of the, once you pass a certain size, the majority of your income comes from the other. Whether it's brand partnerships or sponsorships or events

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

a part of that you do because you have built this brand and you, and that brand is based on

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

quality. Right. So I would say that and even, not to get off you off Substack too much, but the, I always think YouTube and revenue from YouTube is an interesting topic around, Around sport because there's absolutely money there. And again, particularly if you are outside, you know, I guess how important that money is to you is sort of, it depends on how big a sport and how big a club

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah. Yeah,

Dan Ayers, IMG

consultant of many years. One of the most interesting conversations always with any new sport or client partner is like, what's a big amount of money for you to spend? What's a big amount of money for you to receive?'cause it's different in in, you know, you talk to some clubs and getting another 200 people through the door a Sunday is a very meaningful thing to them. But you talk to a confederation you know, work with con Kaf the North American

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Confederation and, you know, we'll we run their champions cup. Club competitions channels. And, you know, you look at YouTube revenue or say, oh, it's good news is the YouTube revenue is up this month, and nobody's displeased with that. But in the context of their overall revenue, like it is not a meaningful

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

in in, in that sense. And I think when you look at the you know, the big kind of golf tournaments or F1 or Premier League and so on, the money that comes directly from those platforms is never

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

No.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I, I think there's a ceiling around about 300,000 pounds a year for most football clubs, and I see lots of football clubs, mid, multiple examples of conversations with kind of mid. ish in terms of size, not finishing

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Premier League clubs where perhaps their YouTube revenue is between 20 and 40,000 pounds a year or something like that because they do the normal stuff of putting highlights up and putting press conferences up and things like that. And you go, we could surely we must be able to grow that. And you go, yeah, you could grow that to 200 grand. Like I think ea it easily. But the question then is like, is that extra 150 worth the squeeze of like ex what you have to invest into really running that channel properly? I would argue it's because I think you get more than just the revenue from that. And I think that again, if you look at people that make serious money from YouTube channels or from Substack or from being in that creator, it's not just the direct revenue from the platform that drives their income. It's it's the other things that you get around it. So, and I mean. You know, from some of the conversations I had with people that have, you know, yeah, 4 million subscribers on, on, on YouTube and running channels and making good money from it, that the portion that comes from YouTube is about 20% and it's 80% that comes from partnerships and everything else. So I think that is much like running any of the other creative channels. Like it's a great place to build an audience that you can prove is a quality audience and that is big enough for you to then be able to monetize in in, in other ways. Back to our point on the numbers and how do you kind of verify what a good number is? Previously, one of my of favorite discussions around that, or was we were doing some work with men in Blazers, the

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Oh yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Soccer podcast. And Yeah. Successful and very good and do doing a good job. And podcast numbers I always think are interesting'cause they tend to be in the you measure those in the thousands and the tens of thousands

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Or whatever. It's not in this, not often in the hundreds and millions so on. And I was, someone said to me think about that audience as if they were in a stadium. If you, if you've got, like, you know, it's the difference between, you know, 400 people in North Northampton road vendors up to, you know. 2000 people in Shepherd Empire to whatever in, when we stadium and stuff like that. Think about it as people in a room and think, would you consider that to be a good amount of people that I'm reaching there? And when you think about it like that, like 10,000 is great.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And 2000 is pretty good. And so that's how, in terms of meaningful numbers of audience that you'd look to like I think those are very sensible figures. And can you get to those numbers with a substack? Like Yeah, for sure. Like, for sure

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Well, I think it's interesting the, I mean, you mentioned podcast is, it is, obviously we have this conversation all the time in terms of first thing people want to hear is what the number is and, you know, how many people listen and all of that. Our numbers are really strong and keep growing and they are in the tens of thousands. So it's not the question is the re the framing of podcasts as video.'cause you've got this, you know, you've got the goal hanger thing where you've got, you know, the rest is, and the news agents and which essentially is cheap television and or radio. and the high production costs that come with that. And then there is a lot of people in the middle. Who are creating wannabe goal hanger type products and the production cost is going up and the ability to sort of appear in that set, you know, appear like televisual in production terms is really high. So that's gonna be a problem'cause they're not gonna get to the sort of revenue numbers that goal Hanger are enjoying. So you've got a big middle

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yep.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

and I think there's a sort of space towards the going the other way, which is more niche. More community. And actually I think there's a sort of, you know, Reddit is quite an interesting bit of this in terms I've not really thought of, but we've got a WhatsApp community and then you've got the podcast. So the model is, okay, the WhatsApp group is made up of sort of C-suite people, well-known people in the industry. They then distribute it on their networks and it sort of goes out. So there's a sort of authority that goes with the thing. So that's quite a precious intangible, I think, in terms of, you know, the whole thing. But I do think there's a play for niche, small community based, and podcasts are part of it that you get to what's the expectation of a good audience? And it could be a few hundred, you know, so if you said, right, okay, a few hundred people are gonna be listening to something on the business of cycling.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Yep.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

What would you do with that? But there's actually quite a nice little business to be done there. If you then wrap events and other things around it and communities and the rest of it.

Dan Ayers, IMG

And also your impact. your impact is bigger than just those 500 people. Right? Because although,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

you know, the terms of advocates and brand advocates and so on is kind of overused probably. But like, some of those people will go out and talk to other people about this

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

Because they care about it. And like it, and I, again, not going back to old school fan base building in the, in, in the music in, in music, but you'd come in a band like Casabian would come in with zero fans. Like you signed, you zero and you'd go, right, well there's c community for a band called the Kuber Temple Clause that we've been working on. And actually, I'll send out a dozen, like, so much of it comes down to manual thing, like manual real world things that, that you do for people. Pick the dozen moderators from the Kuber Clause forum, send them a CD of Sabian. Half them liked it, half of them didn't, the half that did okay, come over, you help me build this. And then, you know, I had them in, I probably still have some of the numbers in my phone of you know. Trevor, can you go to Coventry Coliseum tomorrow night and do like emails on the e collect emails on the door and that sort of thing. And you have 20 people here and you have 50 people here, you have 70 people there, and you had 200

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah,

Dan Ayers, IMG

And oh, sister Bliss likes them. So she's gonna mention'em in the faith that we'll do a competition in the Faithless newsletter, blah, blah.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

this stuff up. And I genuinely believe that is we used to have what we'd call kind of like fan base artists in that would never get mainstream radio play, for example. So,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

could be anything from boy bands to Iron Maiden. Like they're not on mainstream radio, but they're release it, go straight in at number one or straight into top five of the chart. And then by week two there were like number 38. And then they drop out again because everyone goes out and buys it week one. And and because they've got this fan base that exists outside of the mainstream, and I think that is, there is an equivalent and parallel opportunity to kind of, to use community based platforms to create that as well. like the work involved is doing real life things. It is like, well, let's

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

meetup and let's

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah,

Dan Ayers, IMG

quite old fashioned and I think we kind of look to technology for solutions and technology, a great enabler for this sort of stuff. But I think that you do come back to you know, the event, let's go to a game together, let's.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah. Well, I think, you know, the Kevin Kelly was right all along, a thousand true fans. You can do a lot with that again, it gets back to that's good, you know, so,

Dan Ayers, IMG

And in some ways the rest takes care of itself, right? Because

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

if we had 1500 fans, hard, like dedicated fans, we could definitely put a record in the top 20, and then radio and TV would go, oh, okay, this is the thing. We should start paying attention to it. And at that point, the machine rolls into action and it becomes a mainstream thing. And probably some of those people that were there at the start, like, oh, this isn't my thing anymore. Like, it doesn't feel like it used to when it was just

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

But you, yeah, as a band, you're away and you're kind of, you're becoming successful.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Yeah.

Dan Ayers, IMG

so yeah, I, I absolutely think that.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner

Brilliant. Okay, we have gone far beyond the my expectations. It is brilliant. Thank you very much, Dan, for your time really enjoyed the chat and come back.

Dan Ayers, IMG

I will.