I think the marriage between ESPN and Bill Simmons might need counseling

Fine. Let him go Howard Stern. Out of sight . . .

 

Per month? Really?

I bow to the prospect of him finding 20,000 people willing to spend that per year, which would still gross $100K just from the subscriptions, with advertising sales at whatever his readership would be worth to the clients.

A 100,000 people willing to pay $60 per year? Gotta think a lot of them would just copy-and-paste to their pals.

But if achievable, those numbers would be awesome. He ought to fly solo then.

 

Joe, I probably exaggerated the numbers, albeit unintentionally.

But say even 10,000 per month pay about $5 per pop. That rakes in about $50,000. Say you spend half of that on site upkeep... still have $25,000 to pocket. And it's probably close to what he's making now.

The guy's got a loyal readership. That can't be disputed.

 

Thanks for the update, wicked.

I'm not doubting you. Even if it was $5 a year times 100,000 readers, that's pretty good dough. (I know I'd drop $5 without thinking twice on an annual basis, but monthly, nah, I'd pass. Already have my life parceled out in monthly installments, so I'm sticking to annual payments nowadays.)

 

What do you suppose is the contractual side of this? Can Bill Simmons submit content to ESPN and then put that same content on his blog where another host garners ad revenue?

Simmons' picks column has always been one of his strenghts, IMO, because it works well with his mailbag-friendly style. If you're stuck in a lame joke, you can easily skip to the next game and try your luck there. It ain't abot the picks (are any picks columns?), it's just a structured format to spout off, which a lot of people seem to enjoy reading.

And an intersting thought from my brother, a Simmons fan: Seeing as he merely placed his picks on the blog, it's possible that he wrote a long column on the Red Sox or the NBA and tossed in the picks as a breakout graphic.

 

Maybe he wrote a political column to keep up with Reils and Boomer, and it got killed.

 

I think we're getting warm.

 

Agreed.

 

Exactly what I was wondering. Dude's got the best gig in sportswriting at the worst time ever for sportswriters and he's trying to get fired.

Re: what wicked was saying...I would be shocked if people are as willing to pay to read Simmons as they were seven years ago. A lot has changed since then. A lot. And he doesn't have nearly as much to say as he did back then.

 

He needs some new flicks. He's all Shawshank Redemption, Karate Kid, Hoosiers, Victory, Boogie Nights and Rocky.

Long of tooth, that list is.

 

Simmons only strength has been talking about Vegas, the NBA and mailbags, which frankly shouldn't count because his readers write those for him.

And I seriously doubt Simmons is allowed to post anything he submits to ESPN, on his own blog. Otherwise they wouldn't pay him. The stories wouldn't be exclusive to ESPN and therefore would be pointless.

 

You may be right, BYH, but I'm convinced there is a market for Boston fanboyism. (And New York fanboyism, and Philly fanboyism ... ) Of course, the whole Red Sox-curse-is-no-longer-worth-bitching-about-3,642-times-per-season may diminish the potential audience of self-loathers who would fork over the coin.

But in his "prime" (I'd say '99-'01), he was gold. He brought it. It wasn't just Karate Kid stuff, he also brought a specific point of view. His NBA passion was top-shelf and was appreciated at a point of time where the Boston papers barely covered the Celtics. He hit on the perfect niche, was hungry, made crap for doing it. He was a blog before there were blogs.

I would get to the computer lab every day before class and read his site for 20, 30, 45 minutes. I wasn't alone. I was 500 miles away, yet I still felt like I was at Fenway, at the Fleet every night.

Friends of mine read him now, and they rave about him. Non-Boston friends, even. So there still is an audience for him where he is. But I would rather think of his stuff from 10 years ago. Maybe it's the anti-establishment side of me, but I much preferred him when he was lobbing Molotov cocktails at the Boston press. It made them cringe. But for someone who was on the fringe of the scene, it was great reading.

And that's maybe where he lost it. He went Hollywood. He's no longer Joe Q. Public ripping on Will McDonough. There are too many toes he can't step on. The Kimmel thing totally killed that outsider vibe for him.

So you're probably right, he can't go home again. But he still could get people to pony up and read him, of that I am convinced.