Brandon Perna was early to YouTube. Back in the platform’s “Broadcast Yourself” era, long before Pat McAfee or Dude Perfect showed what it could be for sports media stars, Perna helped develop pioneering YouTube shows like =3 and Tijuana Jackson alongside the platform’s earliest adopters.
A Denver native transplanted to Los Angeles, Perna kept up with his beloved Broncos while cutting his teeth in the blossoming digital video industry on the coast. When a job in the sports world opened up at Bleacher Report, Perna took an interview. The move to New York and early hours made Perna decline, but he saw the future.
“They offered me the job, and I didn’t take it, but I thought sports and comedy was maybe where I could do something,” Perna told Awful Announcing. “There wasn’t a lot of that on YouTube at the time.”
Perna turned the camera around and began his own channel focused on the Broncos in 2013, capitalizing on Peyton Manning’s move to the Mile High city. A recap video of Manning’s seven-touchdown masterpiece in Week One against the Ravens opened the floodgates.
Before long, a fortuitous job opportunity in Denver for his wife led Perna back to the mountains. Odd jobs in local sports media paid the bills while Perna continued growing his YouTube channel. The videos kept hitting, a management company helped him find sponsorships, and a career blossomed.
After a while, Perna expanded his scope to cover the whole NFL. A few years back, he started a live morning show covering NFL news with another comedic football analyst. Recently, he brought on more writing and editing help to try his hand at more longform video and mini documentaries. But Perna believes his most significant break came not from keen networking or a tech breakthrough, but from a decision the NFL made.
Last fall, when YouTube bought the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV, Perna and his fellow football creators rejoiced. At last, the league was seeing the potential of digital platforms. Even better, it was bringing a massive audience of NFL fans right to YouTube, a “game-changer for football creators.”
“There’s more people who are passionate about football who are going to YouTube to watch games, who are spending more time on YouTube and are now getting recommended more football videos and watching them,” Perna said. “I feel like I’ve been doing the same f***ing thing for like three years, and finally the videos are doing well for whatever reason.”
YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, a mini economy of its own, and increasingly, where sports fans get their content. Beyond the podcasters who have descended on the platform in recent years, hundreds if not thousands of influencers, instructors, educators, thinkers and artists have turned YouTube into their workplace.
Sports YouTubers must be not only entertaining and knowledgeable, but savvy and patient. Making videos on the platform for a living can be a bit like playing audience whack-a-mole, but it beats a desk job working for The Man. The platform evolves, viewers’ tastes change, and creators must keep up. But if you can navigate it all while keeping a north star of what sports fans crave and consume, you can make it.
For years, sports content on YouTube meant highlights or video game walkthroughs. Over the past six or seven years, sports creators widened the aperture of what YouTube could be, and fans followed suit.
That’s when Dominique Willis came along. Willis loved the original YouTube sports gamer Chris Smoove and tried his hand at NBA 2K content while in college, filming PlayStation 4 gameplay with his phone and posting it to his channel, Dom2K. After a video on LeBron James’ triumphant NBA championship in Cleveland hit big on Facebook in 2016, he was off to the races.
Willis quickly turned the analysis channel where he posted the LeBron video into his main content feed, casting 2K to the side. He joined the NBA Playmakers Network, gaining exclusive access to game tape and other digital assets for his channel and eventually sorted out copyright challenges from the league. By 2019, sponsors were knocking on the door and Willis was making a comfortable living making videos about basketball.
But finding an audience hasn’t always been easy.
Early on in his career, Willis could churn out a Top-10 video per day and watch the views roll in. Lately, features like Shorts and long-form videos created a hiccup in his normal mix.
At the same time, Willis has to appeal to the young people he knows watch his videos and balance the basketball content that he’s known for with other interests. After trying different platforms including Twitch and podcasting as well as other forms of content like streaming the video game Uncharted, Willis is facing reality.
“I have the time between when they’re in school and the time the games start at night,” Willis told Awful Announcing. “So if I’m on Twitch and I’m trying to play something totally unrelated to the NBA, it’s very, very difficult for me to get streams off that don’t feel like I’m just kind of doing something random. So I feel like outside of streaming 2K specifically on Twitch, I’ve been spinning my wheels trying to get to these other platforms and avenues. The NBA season is just so aggressive, it is really, really difficult to break out and do other things.”
It’s a balance Bailey Freeman is intimately aware of.
Freeman runs the YouTube channel Foolish Baseball, famous for its “Baseball Bits” video essay series and intricate, nerdy commentary on America’s pastime. Perhaps as a result of covering a less nationally popular sport, Freeman is even more deliberate about how he crafts his content offering for his audience.
“For me it’s a constant balance between serving the audience and self-indulgence,” Freeman explained to Awful Announcing. “So I might make a video that’s for me because I might find it entertaining, and then I have to turn around and think about what the audience might want. And often there’s overlap, and often there isn’t.”
While a video on Justin Verlander in 2019 gave him his big break when Verlander shared it on social media, today Freeman often works backward from a title and thumbnail in order to maximize the attention a video can generate.
“You can make a truly excellent video, if you don’t get anyone to click on it, it’s not going to do anything for you,” Freeman said. “Clickbait is different. Clickbait represents a promise that’s not fulfilled. You click on something expecting one thing and you don’t get it. What I’m trying to do is entice people to click while still fulfilling the promise.”
The give and take of what the audience responds to, what the inanimate lines of code powering the internet will feed them, and what a creator is passionate about is as old as media itself. The medium is the message, after all. The difference for a YouTuber is that for the most part, they are the CEO, CTO and CMO all in one. They make and they must adapt. The difference for a sports YouTuber is that they are barnacles adhered to a ship constantly swayed by the current and the winds. They can’t simply make good stuff and package it well. They are constantly reacting to results on the field or court, who’s up and who’s down, and where the action is.
Trail blazers like Smoove, Tifo IRL, King of the 4th Quarter and Jon Bois parlayed personal YouTube success into jobs at places like The Athletic, ESPN and SB Nation while long-timers like Brett Kollman or Ben Taylor continue to kick butt independently. It’s possible to make it big, but it’s not easy.
“I don’t look to my left or my right to see what’s working for people,” Willis said. “To keep it going or keep it interesting for me, it’s quite literally, what video do I want to make, what do I want to talk about? It’s way more along those lines rather than, this channel popped up and they’re getting 400,000 views from this type of video, let me try that … you can never control if the results are the same for you or not.”
A moving target you can’t see? That’s life for a sports YouTuber.
All three of Perna, Freeman and Willis have been full-time content creators for years, but that doesn’t mean they’re comfortable. YouTube remains old faithful for online content creation, but it can be tempting for branding and income purposes to expand. Willis traded in Twitch for the streaming startup Playback, while Freeman opted for a Patreon community. There’s also podcasting, Substack, Discord and even YouTube memberships.
“It can really stagnate if you don’t promote it regularly, and that’s something that I don’t necessarily do,” Freeman said of his Patreon, where he posts exclusive videos and other goodies.
For Willis, the NBA’s presence online has helped immensely. The league has contracted him to do live gaming activations and digital content for years.
While Perna hasn’t expanded beyond YouTube, he takes full advantage of all the platform’s features, streaming live, pumping out Shorts and producing mini documentaries with a contracted writer and editor. It is creatively fulfilling and more lucrative to branch out.
“It’s just about hitting every sort of avenue that YouTube offers to build and grow an audience, and all of those audiences are different,” Perna explained.
Just like in the influencer economy, which is worth tens of billions today, YouTubers often don’t have to do much work to get sponsors once their audience reaches a certain mark. Most will hock knick-knacks like phone cases or sunglasses early on before the big brands come knocking. Then, a YouTuber must decide whether to hire management and who to trust.
That’s where the community comes in. YouTubers are competitors, sure, but also colleagues. It’s not as if an active YouTube user only watches one channel. So they help each other out, and often share managers.
When Perna heard Kollman signed with Table Rock management, a Southern California-based company that early on mostly repped beauty and fashion influencers, he decided to try them out as well. They quickly struck a deal for him to do ads for the men’s hygiene brand Manscaped, and he has never regretted his choice.
“I was really hesitant to work with them because I didn’t know who they were. It wasn’t like they had some big presence, I didn’t know anybody who worked there,” Perna said. “I just had to take a leap of faith, and then once I got my first few checks from them regularly, I was like, ‘OK I think I can trust them.’”
Where the biggest sports YouTubers learned these lessons five to ten years ago, today the biggest stars in sports media are entering the digital world. Colin Cowherd launched The Volume in 2022 with an emphasis on live YouTube streams. The main place to watch Stephen A. Smith and Dan Le Batard’s shows these days is YouTube. Athletes like Micah Parsons and Draymond Green tuck away in their offices or closets to record monologues and start beef. Sports media execs are just late to the party.
That leaves some creators looking over their shoulder while also excited for new opportunities.
“It might feel like content and social media and stuff has been around for a long time, but some of the stuff with the NBA working with individual creators or Bleacher Report or ESPN working with us, that’s all still kind of new,” Willis said. “Because doors are still opening left and right, who knows what they’ll be more open to in a few years.”
Perna praised McAfee as an early adopter but implored brands to embrace creators who know YouTube and live there. He sees big personalities swing and miss on YouTube with massive sponsorship investment while he draws equal or better viewership for his live show and produced videos.
Perna believes individual creators who stuck it out and built an audience on YouTube can deliver better return on investment for the sportsbooks and other big spenders in the sponsorship space. Worse, Perna suspects brands know this. The dam just hasn’t broken to flood real money into the sports YouTube economy — yet.
“I don’t want to sound f***ing pretentious or give off the impression that what I do is on the same level” as national hosts, Perna said. “But if I’m talking about trying to get to that next level, it’s convincing one of those brands or companies to look at us the same way they’d look at one of those established brands and invest in us in the same way.”
While new possibilities emerge, content creation also remains a more practical alternative to a usual entry-level sports media job.
Freeman, not yet 30, first imagined YouTube as a jumping-off point for a more high-profile career inside baseball but has embraced the freedom of being a content creator despite its limitations. He carries a more practical perspective for younger creators entering sports media.
“When I started, and especially when the videos started getting attention, I did sort of think of it as a portfolio or an application,” Freeman said. “I thought, I’ll do this, I’ll get some attention from an MLB team or the league or a publication or a media company, and they’ll hire me.”
That dream didn’t come to pass, but maybe it was always about shooting for the moon and landing among the stars. Freeman wants to make the most of his time in the mix, knowing the future is uncertain around which platforms are hot and which creators are popular.
“The shelf life for online creators, YouTubers is generally quite short,” Freeman said. “It almost mirrors the shelf life of the athletes I’m talking about in terms of when they’ll be popular and when they’ll have high earning potential.”
After hitting big online primarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, Freeman has begun venturing to MLB events like Spring Training and the Winter Meetings more in recent years. It’s important for networking, but also to get out of the house and personally engage with his friends, colleagues and subjects around baseball.
“It’s good to see (other media members) because you see the people who inspire what you do,” Freeman said. “And it’s good to get out of the house every once in a while, because this is very isolating work. I don’t get to interact with people the same way most people in the sports world do interact with their peers.”
While he may not experience the daily ballpark grind of a scout or beat writer, Freeman knows he has it good. He laughs when he sees traditional media chasing viral fame while influencers lurk for roles in Hollywood.
The same is true in sports, where ESPN and other big companies hire digital stars and the biggest podcasters try to cash out on YouTube.
“What I have is the dream of many people who are working more traditional jobs in media companies. They wish they could do this. They wish they could have their own platform,” Freeman laughed. “Everyone’s just kind of jealous of each other, and what I try to do is not be jealous of those different positions in the sports world and just really embrace what I have in my world.”
Through the twists and turns of the YouTube algorithm and the evolution of the sports media business, YouTubers have not lost touch with the original appeal of the platform. YouTubers have independence and a personal audience. They have control and audience loyalty in a way a newspaper or sports network could only dream of.
While Sunday Ticket and the rise of hosts like McAfee or Cowherd on YouTube have boosted sports on the platform, YouTube is increasingly the place for everything. Content will likely always be recognizably YouTubian, with a charlatan ethos and meandering scope. A lack of FCC control and set segments away from the land of cable helps that. But today, YouTube is the video internet, cable television and interactive streaming all in one. Why wouldn’t sports get in on it?
As a mouse in that wheel, a YouTuber can feel pressure to keep up. With the tech, with the audience demo, with the news cycle. The best YouTubers with the longest careers almost ignore it all. They trust their instincts and their audience. They let their creativity and passion lead the way.
YouTube is busier than ever. The sports business is flooded with cash and treated seriously like never before. But the best can’t fake it.
“I’m still around this far because I’m not just trying to make the next video that will get a billion views,” Willis said. “That would be nice, but I’m also trying to make things that I genuinely want to see from start to finish at all times.”
The original “broadcast yourself” mentality that built YouTube’s first stars is still present in today’s best. Sports are no different. Nearly two decades have passed, but the best way to stand out and have longevity hasn’t changed. You just have to be more entertaining and talented than everyone else.
“That might sound convenient,” Willis said. “You’ve got to find a way to get that convenience.”