Tiffani Amber Thiessen Prepares To Turn 50, JJ Watt Gets A Pump In & Let's Analyze The Sports Illustrated News
The slow death (or maybe you think it's already dead) of Sports Illustrated and my journey with the brand and those at SI who now hate me
Where do I even start with my reaction to the news Friday that Sports Illustrated was laying off pretty much all of its staff as the license owner, MBG, and the publishing company leasing the license, The Arena Group, engaged in a war over a missed payment?
Let's start with the fact that Sports Illustrated didn't have to go down this path of destruction.
It has a swimsuit issue.
It had, during the early 2010s, two of the most-clicked pop culture columns on the Internet in the AM & PM versions of "Hot Clicks." Jimmy Traina was the editor. The columns were based on beautiful women, sports, pop culture, fun news nuggets, cool stuff going on in the world.
There was even a college version of these columns that was huge. Andy Gray was the editor and he was one of the guys who is responsible for where I'm at these days.
As someone who grew up on the Internet in 2007, a link in either of those columns could change your life. In those days, I was lucky enough to be in Google Groups with publishers of some of the biggest independent pop culture sites on the Internet. We had a pact that if one of us got a link in "Hot Clicks" we would add links to our post that was being inundated with Sports Illustrated traffic.
And because there were so few of us doing pop culture content, it meant group members were cashing in on Sports Illustrated traffic daily.
Combine that with advertising networks -- I was in the Break.com Ad Network and the CPMs (ad rates per 1000x website clicks) were incredible because Break was connected to the movie industry and the movie houses were buying full-page takeovers where they would advertise a movie with one giant skin on my website that I founded, Busted Coverage -- that were ahead of Google in those days, and you had a phenomenon.
I was working a full-time newspaper job and by lunch, I would've already made more money on the Internet than I would make all day at the newspaper. Sometimes it would be 3X the money by lunch.
At some point, I remember a peer of mine who was running an independent pop culture site out of NYC -- there's a good chance you've seen this guy trying to sell his self-help courses on LinkedIn -- telling me he finally made it over the mountaintop and was grossing $10k a month via his one website.
I believed him because I was nearing that number myself. The money was incredible. I was taking so many personal checks to my credit union to be cashed that the tellers would freak out and call the branch manager who would then come out of her office to say hello. We knew each other on a first-name basis. She would have to approve all those checks I was depositing. Meanwhile, I would get updates on her son's Olympic dreams in the high-jump. Erik Kynard eventually went on to the 2012 Olympics where he was cheated out of a gold medal by some Russian for doping. In 2021, Kynard got his gold medal.
Anyway, great memories. Those were some incredible times in my life. I was incredibly fortunate.
Eventually, I sold my site to an NYC media company which allowed me to leave the newspaper business to work on the Internet full-time.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the wheels fell off the "Hot Clicks" brand. I was able to find a 2016 version of the column that was completely half-assed, so I'd say the column was dead by that year. Jimmy Traina had taken a job at Fox Sports around that time and was fired in 2017. He eventually returned to SI, but by then Hot Clicks was dead.
It's not clear whether management decided it was time to pivot out of hot women and shit that guys actually cared about, but it was one of the most tragic business decisions in Internet history.
By 2021, Sports Illustrated had a biological male playing the role of a woman on the cover of its swimsuit issue.
The brand was a mess.
And it hasn't gotten better.
The following year, the YAAASSSSS QUEEENNNSSSSS got their hands on the SI swimsuit edition and Yumi Nu was selected to appear on the cover.
The equality and diversity crowd heaped praise on SI and celebrated this great moment in the history of YAAASSSSS QUEEEEENS.
The brand went from giving guys a world of hot women, sports, fun, record-setting NAIA kickers via its "Faces In The Crowd" to the swimsuit issue blathering on about "Be the Change You Want to See."
Now here we are with the change setting in.
Sports Illustrated might not be completely dead -- I checked its monthly Google traffic numbers and the site is still healthy from an organic reach standpoint; it did 58M visits via search in December, which is second only to ESPN in sports reach -- but where is the buzz with SI?
What is my reason to go to SI these days? I don't have any.
At the end of the day, Sports Illustrated has been incredible for my career and that continues to this day. They actually decided to get out of this lane that Screencaps plays in and now 80 staffers are gone.
I hate to see people get fired, but this is an eat-or-be-eaten world we're playing in here and I'm not going to sit back to be picked apart by the coyotes one piece at a time. That's why we attack with Screencaps, TNML, Nightcaps and OutKick as a whole.
We cannot sit back and live the fate of Sports Illustrated.
My message to my fellow OutKick peers is simple: Eat or be eaten. Your choice.
Footnote:
I went back into my email archive and pulled this from 2014 where I was being called out by Traina for breaking the Johnny Manziel rolled $20 bathroom photo news.
Traina was talking about me indirectly with all the Big Js of the time and I cherished it. I was living an outlaw blooger lifestyle on Busted Coverage.
On July 6, 2014, I blogged Johnny rolling the $20. By July 7, it was all over the Internet.
I was reporting what people wanted to see from the world of sports: The freshly drafted Manziel rolling a $20 in a bathroom.
If that made me the scum of the earth, then so be it. Everyone jumped on it once I hit publish.
Eat or be eaten: Your choice.
That's it today. I had to do a little inside baseball on this occasion with SI flopping around for dear life like a fish out of water.
Now I'm going to go have myself a weekend. I have indoor golf planned on Sunday with Canoe Kirk and who knows what else I'm going to get into.
Be safe. Have fun. Bring back stories Monday morning.
Email: joekinsey@gmail.com