Barstool Sports is launching a 'premium service,' and Stoolies are already mocking it as 'officially dead'

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy

Barstool Sports is becoming the latest media company to put content behind the paywall to grow direct consumer revenue.
Barstool Gold will cost $50 a year and offer exclusive content including podcasts and documentaries to its young male devotees, called "Stoolies."
Many media companies are trying to diversify because they're having a tough time selling advertising, but Barstool has the added challenge of having controversial content that can scare off advertisers.

Barstool Sports is joining the stampede of publishers trying to drum up more revenue from readers.

The 15-year-old company known for its bawdy take on sports and culture is launching a new premium service in January called Barstool Gold. The existing content will stay free, but for $50, people will get exclusive material like new podcasts and documentaries.

The service will kick off with a documentary about Barstool founder Dave Portnoy himself and how he started the company as a print newspaper in Boston, supported by gambling ads, before expanding to the web.

Barstool already has a diversified revenue model that many digital publishers likely envy. Majority owned by The Chernin Group, it has branched out to podcasts like "Fore Play" and "Chicks in the Office," video series, TV and radio shows like "Barstool Sports Advisors," and events. The company makes its money by selling advertising and directly from its rabid fan base of mainly young guys, who buy its branded hoodies and other merchandise and tune into pay-per-view events.

But Barstool’s foray into a premium service isn’t just motivated by the need to diversify its revenue further in a tough climate for digital advertising. Its no-holds-barred tone also has lately gotten it negative press including a scathing report by the Daily Beast that detailed incidents of harassment and cyberbullying by the company and called Portnoy a "misogynistic troll king."

Barstool's controversial content may limit its growth

Portnoy said Barstool didn’t lose any existing advertisers as a result of the Daily Beast article, but that the controversies may make it harder to win new advertisers. He said controversy had also hurt the brand’s TV ambitions. In 2017, ESPN canceled a Barstool Sports TV show after one episode when it became known that Barstool had published derogatory and critical reports on ESPN journalists. Portnoy said Barstool had three other shows lined up that backed out.

“We have a long history of our reputation speaking for itself,” said Portnoy, who goes by the moniker El Presidente. “It’s affected us in, will we end up with a TV show on a third-party network. Those guys will end up with cold feet. ESPN canceled; we had three other shows lined up.”

Right now, advertising makes up around one fourth of Barstool’s revenue and growing, Portnoy said. But, he said, he doesn’t want to be in a position where he has to tone down Barstool to placate advertisers.

“The motto is, control our destiny, do new things, where we talk directly with our consumers and aren’t dependent on ad revenue,” he said. “Ad revenue is important, but we want to be self-sustaining. We just don’t ever want to be in a situation where the next Daily Beast article comes out and advertisers are like, ‘We can’t do this, and we better apologize and change what we’ve done for 15 years.’”

Barstool enters the paid-content fray at a time when the market is getting crowded with lots of publishers trying to get consumers to pay for their content. But Barstool arguably has a better shot than most because it's built up such a devoted following.

Case in point: Barstool has gotten more than 400,000 downloads of a pizza review app, One Bite, that grew out of a video series of Portnoy reviewing local pizza joints. It had a Black Friday sale on its merchandise in 2017 that led to 35,000 orders totaling single-digit millions of dollars.

Still, if the 244 comments that followed Portnoy’s announcement of Barstool Gold are any indication, the program might not exactly be a slam-dunk. Portnoy for his part dismissed those comments, saying they're just from trolls who don't represent how the site's true fans really think.

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