A few weeks ago, news broke that The Players’ Tribune was being sold to something called Minute Media.
It was news that, honestly, I missed. That a significant part of my job is keeping up with sports media news tells you pretty much all you need to know. None of my friends — people way smarter and more plugged in than me — were talking about it, either.
So I went digging and found a Digiday piece detailing what went wrong with The Players' Tribune over the past five years. From Max Willens’ story:
... the company also produced too little content to thrive in a crowded digital media landscape, which, in turn, hampered the company’s branded content business and subsequent efforts to diversify its revenues. The Players’ Tribune’s website has attracted fewer than 1 million monthly unique users in 14 of the past 15 months, according to Comscore data.
It’s a surprising fall from relevance for The Players’ Tribune, which debuted to much fanfare in 2014. Owned by Derek Jeter and run by fellow athletes, The Players’ Tribune was breathlessly praised by many who cover sports and digital media. This site was going to upend sports journalism: The traditional source/journalist relationship was over. Sports journalists and their handed-to-them scoops were done. They would have to completely recalibrate the way they did their jobs.
Former New York Times sports reporter Richard Sandomir quoted then-Mets ace Matt Harvey in 2015 (that's how long it's been):
“A lot of times, especially in New York, you can read stuff or hear things that aren’t necessarily true,” Harvey said Friday after losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in a spring training game. “So for me to have an outlet where it’s first person and it’s true — everything is from me — it’s something I was really excited about.”
J. Brady McCollough took a broader view in 2018, writing for Nieman Reports:
For the large majority, though, the existence of platforms like The Players’ Tribune has sparked an important conversation. “There is a very serious discussion to be had about the nature of sports journalism today,” says (Jessica) Robertson. “Who maintains control of most of sports journalism?” She adds, “The distrust that athletes have for media didn’t come from nowhere.” The distrust came from the changing economy of the professional sports locker room — from increasingly-flush athletes having to share their sacred space every day with increasingly-edgy reporters having to feed a 24-hour sports news cycle. It used to be that sports beat reporters flew with the team on road trips and inhabited the same hotel hallways. Sportswriters and athletes, in the glory days before cable TV, before sports became such big business, could be drinking buddies. In one sense, that wasn’t good for the ethics of sports journalism, but in another, it guaranteed more authentic stories because a reporter had the access to know what was happening behind the scenes with the player and team. Today, with athletes on guard and access limited, there are fewer ethical dilemmas but also fewer honest personal stories.
(We’ll ignore the dripping condescension inherent the “drinking buddies” line for now.)
So what happened? How did this website that was going to revolutionize sports media fall so flat?
Well, two things happened.
First: The Players’ Tribune was ill-timed in an unlucky way. It debuted during the heart of the social media boom, just before Instagram became a dominant player in the game. In many ways, social media has delivered what The Players’ Tribune promised — a direct connection between athletes and fans. It’s telling that a few years after using The Players' Tribune to announce his move to Golden State, Kevin Durant used Instagram to announce his move to Brooklyn. Instagram is easier for athletes. It’s on their phones. There’s an immediacy there. Rather than work through a website and an intermediary — which, to them, had to feel a lot like talking to reporter for the newspaper — they could post something on their own feed or their own story. They’re able to build their own brands and make money on their own.
Second: The Players’ Tribune’s path to success seemed to be framed around the viral hit. Certainly, it had them — Durant’s decision, Kobe’s retirement poem, Kevin Love’s moving essay about anxiety, Patrick O’Sullivan’s haunting story about surviving abuse. But if you spend any time in digital media, you learn that going viral is not a viable business strategy. Success comes from loyal, regular readers or viewers, not one-time splashes.
That’s what hurt The Players’ Tribune. When was the last time you visited the site to see what was new? More likely, you clicked when a link came across your Twitter feed, and that’s it. Without regular readers and something to draw people to the site regularly, any digital media site is doomed.
Which is how The Players’ Tribune’s sale wound up being such a small story. In the end, no one really cared.