Brandon Tierney didn’t wait long to get back in the game. Three days after his WFAN show ended, he launched “BT Unleashed” on YouTube from his home office.
And two weeks in, while the show is still rough around the edges, the Brooklyn native is already thinking about the finished product.
During an appearance on the Awful Announcing Podcast, Tierney laid out his vision for making the YouTube show not just comparable to his radio career, but better. He’s planning a complete studio redesign, bringing on a producer, integrating phone calls, and landing major sponsorships. The infrastructure isn’t there yet, but the ambition is.
“I’ve got some things that I’ve got to do to get there to have like that ultimate fulfillment, and I’ve got to integrate calls, which I will do,” he told host Brandon Contes. “I’ve got to first find a producer. I’ve got to do that. There’s checkpoints here.”
Tierney’s already bought the phone number for the show. The studio redesign is in the works. He’s in talks with potential sponsors. It’s all coming, Tierney insists. It’s just a matter of when.
“Will it be as fulfilling? Yeah. And it’s my mission to make it more fulfilling,” Tierney said. “It’s my mission to make it more profitable. It’s my mission to do everything at my speed when I want to do it and how I want to do it, and the concepts of the show and the sponsorship, the ultimate sponsorships of the show, which is something we’re already pretty deeply in with a few big companies, like that’s going to come.”
The early response has been encouraging. Tierney launched on Dec. 23 and already has 13,000 subscribers with 150,000 viewing hours. Videos are getting between 8,000 and 20,000 views despite rough thumbnails and less-than-polished production quality. That’s enough validation to keep pushing forward, even if it’s not yet covering the mortgage.
The decision to launch immediately rather than wait for everything to be perfect was intentional. Tierney wrestled with whether to go live with an antiquated-looking setup or delay until the studio was dialed in. He chose to start grinding.
“I made the determination, and it was an easy one for me,” Tierney said. “People have asked me, ‘Wow, you’re just jumping right into it, huh?’ I said yeah, I’m jumping into it. I got a lot to say.”
That approach came with inevitable growing pains. His wife helped set up the YouTube channel because he didn’t know how. The audio hasn’t always been great. People messaged him asking if he’d had dental surgery because of how he sounded. The studio isn’t soundproofed. His son had to explain what Super Chats were.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a show on MySpace,” Tierney admitted. “That’s how antiquated it feels.”
But he’s viewing this stage as building a foundation that will eventually make him prouder than reaching WFAN ever did. When he looks back six months or a year from now at those early basement broadcasts with bad Wi-Fi, Tierney thinks that grind will mean more than anything he accomplished in traditional radio.
“I believe that even more so than the satisfaction of getting to WFAN, which was always a massive, the number one professional priority for me from day one, as I build this out and I look back at the early videos, I’m going to be very proud of that because it’s not easy,” Tierney said.
The WFAN exit still stings. Tierney admitted during his final show that he would’ve happily stayed for a few more years. Craig Carton’s return to the station pushed him and Sal Licata out of middays, and there wasn’t a spot to keep them. But Tierney also acknowledged he probably wouldn’t have had the guts to leave WFAN voluntarily to start this on his own, not with two kids, a mortgage, and financial responsibilities.
“Sometimes the best things in life are almost forced upon you, where you’ve got to re-evaluate,” he said. “And if you’re timid in that evaluation, you’re going to drag your feet and probably not try something that could be even better than anything that you’ve ever done before.”
The 13,000 subscribers answered a question Tierney had been carrying since the show ended: How much of BT & Sal’s success was him specifically versus the WFAN platform? The immediate interest suggests there’s a real audience for what he’s building, independent of the station.
Tierney thinks part of why the show is connecting on YouTube is his delivery. He’s physical, animated, and expressive in ways that don’t translate to pure audio. He compared himself to John Ritter from Three’s Company, noting that Ritter’s physical comedy made him special beyond just the dialogue.
“I am a very visual, I’m a very, I won’t say theatrical, but a very physical deliverer of my words,” Tierney said. “I talk with my hands. I’m from Brooklyn. That’s just the way it goes. And I do think that that plays on YouTube.”
The ultimate goal isn’t just to build a sustainable YouTube show. Tierney wants to align with a company that views what he’s doing as economically viable while still controlling his content and how it’s distributed. He wants to eventually sell it while maintaining creative control. The model exists — personalities building independent platforms before partnering with bigger entities on their own terms.
Right now, Tierney is grinding through the early stages without a guaranteed paycheck or corporate safety net. But he’s got a 13-second commute from upstairs to his home office and a belief that this could become the best thing he’s ever done.
“I’m going to grind through it, and I’m going to continue to lay that foundation,” Tierney said. “And I believe I really believe this with all my heart. I believe that even more so than the satisfaction of getting to WFAN, which was always a massive the number one professional priority for me from day one, as I build this out and I look back at the early videos, I’m going to be very proud of that.”
Listen to the full episode of the Awful Announcing Podcast featuring Brandon Tierney beginning Thursday, Jan. 8. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. For more content, subscribe to AA’s YouTube page.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.