From Sports Network to Niche: Josh Pate on Thriving in the World of New Media

0:00In today's new media era, the rules of distribution have been rewritten, and few understand this shift better than the host of the number one college football show in digital media media media. Josh Pate. On this episode of Right About Now, Josh and I dive deep into how a no-spin approach and hyper-niche focus can dismantle traditional media empires and build a bulletproof personal brand. Get ready to learn how to weaponize direct audience relationships to turn personal influence into a powerhouse business that legacy networks can no longer ignore. I may not like what a guy I said, but I would appreciate the information.

0:37I didn't need the affirmation because I already knew how I felt. I didn't need anyone to stroke my opinion. I just wanted information. I wanted logic-based viewpoints. I'll determine, I'll run it through my own filters. I'll determine whether I like it or whether I approve of it or not. And I always thought to myself, hey, if you ever get in a spot where someone puts a microphone in front of your face, just do it like that. Do content the way you appreciated it being done. I don't think it's a radical concept, but not a lot of people practice it. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

1:08We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. Hey, we're always getting right. We're always talking about what's now and you know we talk about media but look you see a smile on my face yeah i love every guest they're all my children my babies i love i appreciate every one of them but when i get to talk college football and media all in one and that's why i'm going to the source he is the host of the josh pate show and he is a cbs analyst for college football what's up josh man you got me excited now because i love to talk about both of those things as well brother we got to figure out the college football playoff it is an exciting time on all fronts to be in my little corner of the media industry.

2:00I ain't buying that little corner shit.

2:08Josh has made a name for himself with college football. I do have come to find your judgment to be some of the best in college football. It's unfettered by any one team. And even when I don't like it, I agree with it. When you set that standard, if it has hurt me, I've had to watch is you've been brutally honest and I feel like brutally accurate. You know that you're only a prisoner of your own success. When I was growing up, I used to immerse myself in sports talk radio. I worked construction for a little while. I worked heating and air installation. So you're on the job side all day. The only way to make 8 a.m.

2:43become 5 p.m. is your lunch break and then what you're listening to. I'm just listening to sports talk all day. And I remember my buddies would get just pissed off because everyone wasn't praising Georgia or praising Auburn. And I'd listen to it. And I may not like what a guy said, but I would appreciate the information. I didn't need the affirmation because I already knew how I felt. So I didn't need anyone to stroke my opinion. I just wanted information. I wanted logic-based viewpoints. I'll determine. I'll run it through my own filters. I'll determine whether I like it or whether I approve of it or not.

3:13And I always thought to myself, hey, if you ever get in a spot where someone puts a microphone in front of your face, just do it like that. Do content the way you appreciated it being done. I don't think it's a radical concept, but not a lot of people practice it. If you remember this and people that listen to talk will remember it. One time you have the no spin zone. Josh, you are the no spin zone for college football. And anyone thinks that you're not, it's because they're a fan of whoever you might be beating on that day. Because the reality is sometimes your baby's ugly. Yeah. Boom. Boom. And you know what?

3:41You know what? You don't have to be a doctor to spot an ugly baby. One of my favorite things is they'll come at me and they'll say, well, you never coached. How could you call this out? And I'll always tell them, man, I've never been a doctor. but I know an ugly baby when I see one and you do as well. Josh, set the table for everyone and kind of give them your background and building up to today. I grew up down in a rural Georgia. I had no family in the business. When I graduated high school, I was very directionless. If you asked me, if you asked me, who are you? When I graduated high school, I could never give you the answer.

4:11I'd be able to tell you my height, my weight, my eye color, the birth certificate stuff, basically. But I would not be able to tell you what my talents were, what my passions were, Where do they overlap? What's your direction? What's your purpose? What's your why? And it took a long time because I didn't grow up dirt poor, but I didn't grow up rich. I was just kind of a tweener kid, closer to the poor than the rich. But I just wasn't shot out of a cannon the way some of my peers seemed to come out of high school. And I wasted a couple of years in college and ended up dropping out and going and doing, like I said, construction work.

4:38I did all kinds of different manual labor jobs and slowly but surely got my act together a little bit. Slowly but surely, the right people just continued to beat on me and beat on me and beat on me until I got back in school, but that kind of coincided with the rise of digital media. What I did was I just badgered a radio program director that I listen to every day. And I said, can I come in and observe? I think I want to do that stuff. I immerse myself in it. I think I have the God given ability to do it, but I don't know because no one's ever given me a shot. Can I come in and watch you produce radio?

5:10So he let me go in there and a couple of a few weeks in his co-host calls out sick one day. So I just got put on the air one day and it's afternoon drive sports talk radio. in the deep South in the middle of college football season. I mean, live bullets flying and I love it. I've never had more fun in my life. And we got off air at like 7.01 PM that afternoon. And he said, where have you worked before? And I said, I've never done this before. I've just pretended to do it driving around in my truck for years, but I've never actually done it. He said, well, man, I'd love for you to just stay on the air.

5:39So I stayed on the air and that turned into a television general manager calling me up a couple of years later. Hey, do you want to do what you do, but do it on TV. I said, sure, I've never been on TV. Is that a problem? Oh, no, man, it's easy. TV ended up being the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And then I elevated to being a sports anchor and then a news anchor, and I'm doing the college football stuff on the side. But that brings me to what I was just saying. This is mid-20 teens. This is not that long ago. This is less than a decade ago. I will so vividly remember for the rest of my life sitting next to our chief meteorologist one day after a newscast, and his computer screen's like in the background.

6:12He's sitting here, computer screens in the background. He's got his Facebook feed pulled up. And I saw a live video playing on his Facebook feed. And I said, what's happening there? He said, oh, it's just a Facebook live feed. I didn't know that they had just launched that software. That was a Berlin Wall moment. And then YouTube shortly thereafter introduces live capability on their platform. So to me, I've been sitting here thinking the whole time, the whole key to this game, as you know, is overhead and distribution back then. You got to have the big fancy studios to make your product look the way it's supposed to be.

6:40And then you've also got to have the distribution so that someone can see you in L.A. and Seattle and Miami and New York all at the same time. And if you don't have those or you don't have syndication deals, you don't have a nationwide audience. Then the Internet gets weaponized and leveraged the right way. And overhead and distribution are literally if you're holding your phone, it's at your fingertips. And I realized at that point, man, I got a shot. If I really am what I think I am, if I've really got the ability, if I can really appeal and mass communicate this stuff in an entertaining way, I've got a shot.

7:08And so we started to immediately, I started to conceptually put that together. And it was a fight. It was a multi-year fight, but finally got to where I was willing to work as an independent contractor instead of an employee at that news station in exchange for getting access to that studio a few nights a week. We started producing a college football show on YouTube, started it from scratch, and we started doing it in a couple of years in. I was already making more money on the YouTube channel than I had ever made in local news. And it was at that point that CBS hit me up and they said, we're not doing anything like you're doing.

7:38And we know we should. We know that's the direction it's going. Would you like to come here? And so I came to CBS in 2020. And when COVID set in and everyone else started talking about everything other than sports, I just stuck to sports. because that's what I know. And our numbers, man, they just shot through the roof because a bunch of those networks alienated their audience because of what they were trying to present that the audience wanted nothing to do with. And so then when football came back in 2020 and beyond, we've never slowed down. And we got the number one college football show in all of digital media now.

8:06And you're excited by that and you love it. Now I get all kinds of opportunity. It's amazing. It's a dream job. But I know 2024 still looks like the infancy of this whole thing relative to what 2034 will look like. And so you call it new media. I remember not too long ago, they called it alternative media. It's not the alternative. It is the way. I think a lot of folks, if you watch the way that the election was covered from either side, left or right, the way it was covered this past cycle, it wasn't covered in a legacy manner. Far more people went to those alternative new watering holes than they did the traditional.

8:41And that's not going back. And that we are downstream, Sports media and any kind of little niche industry that you could be in in the media world, it's all downstream of that. If that's the way an election is going to work, I promise you it's the way any other form of content is going to work moving forward. Bingo, Josh. Literally, that is the way it's moving. And I don't think people realize. I think you're right. We're still in the precipice of all of this. The democratization of distribution that this thing has allowed. The way that distribution and awareness has been democratized through the smartphone, through YouTube, through now the apps all being on the television.

9:15The only thing keeping cable companies alive is live sports. And those deals are getting undone. We're moments away from probably every station being an app just about. You're packaging those things. It's crazy what's happening in that field. The only thing holding that whole bundle together, if you will, is live sports. And then in my business, what that does from a talent perspective, what it does from a representation and agency perspective is it makes you realize I've got to have dual roles or I've got to contractually define myself in two different lanes. If you've got networks that are spending the billions that they're spending, that the Big Ten makes$8 billion over the next seven years for their TV deal, if you're going to invest that kind of money, whether you're CBS, whether you're Fox, whether you're NBC, do you not look at the ecosystem of commentary that exists around something like college football and think we need to invest in that?

10:11We need to leverage that because we just have them on Saturdays for four hours right now. Those people have them the other six days and change. Why are we not investing more in that? Now, I expect those conversations have been happening. In fact, I know they've been happening. This is kind of a put yourself in the right place and then the right time will find you sort of ideology. When you first started on YouTube, you went live, started doing your live show on YouTube, and you said you started making more money than you made in broadcast to that date. Are we talking about direct from YouTube, like ad plays or whatever, or just you were immediately doing sponsor deals on your channel?

10:45That would have been just AdSense dollars in the immediacy. To say I was making more money is not a high bar to clear because I was making$27 ,500 a year, multiple years into doing news. What happened was we monetized the channel. We made, to me, really good money at the time. But also what happened one day was there was a guy, he was the representative for Buffalo Rock, which is the Pepsi distributor, Mountain Dew, etc. And he's there to meet with clients at the TV station one day. Now, I just happened to see him and he had happened to see the show on Facebook Live at the time and YouTube Live.

11:19And so he's walking through. Now, look, this is the end of probably his quarterly. He's still got ad dollars that he needs to allocate somewhere. He just happens to have 25 or 30 ,000 extra ad dollars that he probably just needs to put in the 25 to 48 male demographic somewhere. And let's lean into sports. And so I'm having a conversation with him and we're talking about this sort of thing. He says, how would you like Pepsi to be a sponsor on the show? I have no clue how this world works, but that was my first interaction with ad sales for the show. The lesson it taught me was I didn't have a third party go out and do that for me.

11:51And I didn't have an agency bring him to me. That was a direct face to face partnership. And I swear to you, that was one of the biggest blessings that ever happened. Because moving forward, I realized that right there, no matter how high in this industry I climb, is exactly how I want my partnerships to be. So you fast forward to today. I've got a huge deal with Academy Sports. I've got FanDuel Sports on board. We just signed a big deal with Quick Trip, which is a huge gas station chain for those unfamiliar earlier this year. And we just partnered with Zevia, which is a zero sugar soda. I have personal relationships with all of those clients.

12:23I deal directly with all those clients. And what that does is it means they come with you wherever you go. And that along with owning your intellectual property and owning your branding, if you can ever pull it off, and it is much harder done than said, but if you could ever pull it off, that's the brash ring on this new frontier. And the reason I'm so proud about it, the reason I speak so boldly about it is because I've had a lot of whiffs in life. I've had a lot of predictions that don't come true. I could see this coming. I could see that I thought the model was build it the way we've built it, have it prove itself, and then simultaneously get your personal relationships with your clients.

12:58And you need to do that. And you need to select them based on understanding your audience and the people you serve better than any ad agency or any corporate media entity ever will. And if you really have that granular relationship with your audience, ad partners will take care of themselves, the numbers will take care of themselves, and you will be able to empower yourself above and beyond what you could have ever hoped to do in the old landscape. I'm so thankful for you that you experienced that direct sell for yourself because you both made yourself a lot of money. And as much as you made money, you avoided like the pitfalls of just some of the signing with people that aren't really that motivated to work that hard for you, that are just looking for percentage deals.

13:36And you got to learn exactly how it all works. And I can't stress enough for anybody hearing that, that the most lucrative deals are the most personal deals. I'm guilty of this at times with our show and things that we do. You have to be involved with this stuff. When you're building it, especially it's the Josh Pace Show. Right about now with Ryan Alford, it's tied to your personal brand and tied to you. And you can hire and build a team and do all those things. But you got to know this stuff and understand it at a really high level. You've got to be the brand. But then when you say that, you got to understand what you mean when you say that.

14:07A lot of people say that and it's just the most douchebag, like conceited thing imaginable. Like bragging about yourself as you're the brand. That is not the case at all. At least the way that I look at myself. The way I look at myself is I am a total product of our audience and I am a total product of what they've allowed me to do. And the reason they've allowed me to do it is because of the same reason somebody keeps coming back to the same restaurant, because you're serving them what they're asking for. I think two of the biggest pitfalls is, number one, people getting ignorant or self-absorbed enough to where they believe they're the big deal.

14:39And therefore, they're going to stack their show or they're going to produce their content around what they care about. And the audience will just consume it because they're a bunch of clapping seals. That's pitfall number one. Pitfall number two is you do what you do. The audience reciprocates with their viewership traffic or their listenership traffic. Therefore, it props you up. And then you get up on the mountaintop and then you decide, all right, now I'm going to change everything. Now, all of a sudden, I need to add bells and whistles. Now I need to dress different. Now I need to cover more things than I got here covering.

15:09And it happens so often. I've been approached about covering other sports, covering the NFL. There's a reason for that because the powers that be look at this model and they say, why don't we apply that model to the NFL? Imagine the traffic. Well, they're right to think that it would do really good traffic, but it would be so inauthentic and disingenuous. And it would be so pennywise pound foolish to try and merge what we're doing here into other lanes. My response to that is I'm good in college football. If you think what I do is effective and would be effective, then go find the person to execute it in that lane.

15:45Josh, where can everybody keep up, learn more, watch the show, all the call-outs? If you want it on YouTube, it's Josh Pate's College Football Show. It's the same thing on podcast. It's my name on socials. It's pretty easy to find me. It's pretty consistent across the board. Hey, guys, you're going to find us, ryanisright.com. Look for the highlight clips. And it's going to be a masterclass in media from my friend Josh Pate. We're going to have highlight clip score from this show. And look, you know, to find me. I'm at Ryan Alford, that blue check before you could buy it. We'll see you next time.

16:12Right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanIsRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.