Clay Travis: OutKick Quadrupled Its Audience In The Past Year And Here Is What's Next

OutKick quadrupled its unique website visitors in September of 2022 compared to September of 2021.

Quadrupled.

Every day in September of 2022 was better than the absolute best day we had in September of 2021 last year.

This growth, impressive and explosive as it is, also only reflects the website standing alone. It doesn't count the tens of millions of video views, social posts, listens; all of the content that doesn't dwell inside this website isn't counted. Heck, some of Tomi Lahren's clips from her OutKick show on Instagram alone are racking up millions of video views by themselves. It's wild.

When I started OutKick in 2011, my goal was to have a site where I could freely share my opinions without fear of censorship. And hopefully be able to make $100k a year off the work I would do there. I sold every ad, I wrote every article, I was a one man shop for a long time. I was confident there would be a readership, but OutKick has long since passed my wildest expectations.

Our growth since last year has catapulted OutKick into the top 10 largest sports sites in America. (For people who want to quibble on this, I'm not counting "websites" that roll up twenty, fifty or even a hundred individual sites and try to claim it as one number, I'm talking about actual standalone sports websites.)

By next year at this time, I'm confident we will be a top five sports site. Essentially we're to the point now where we are directly competing with sites like ESPN and CBS, which actually stream live games on their websites.

That's insane.

And it's a huge testament to the loyalty of our audience and the work of our staff.

OutKick Is Just Getting Started

When I started writing online back in 2004, I dreamed of having 100 readers a day — 1,000 readers a day was a crazy pipe dream. Now we have tens of millions of people every month consuming OutKick content.

And I feel like we're just getting started.

By this time next year we should have completed our daily live video and audio network, which will air from six in the morning to seven at night. You'll be able to consume live OutKick programming via video or audio from early morning to late in the evening when the games start.

I can't wait for that to be completed. And we continue to hire for many jobs. (Don't email me asking for jobs, just send in applications.) For instance right now we have an editor job open and we are hiring our first ever PR person. Frankly, that should just be me because I'm the most shameless PR shill in the history of media.

There are many OutKick people to thank for our extraordinary growth, but we're getting big enough now that it becomes noticeable if I leave out anyone in my thanks. So let me just thank all of our writers, editors, producers for all their hard work.

And despite what I said above about not singling anyone out, let me also give particular thanks to three people.

First, to Joe Kinsey and Bobby Burack, who started with OutKick in May of 2020, right at the height of the covid pandemic.

Trust me, it took balls to expand then because most people in sports media were convinced the world was ending and everyone was going to die of covid. The only direct editorial opinion I've ever demanded in my entire life was this, and I'm paraphrasing, but I said, "You can write anything you want except that covid is too dangerous to play sports. If you believe that, you can't work here."

That's literally the only editorial directive I've ever given anyone I've hired. And I hope it's the only one I ever give.

When Joe and Bobby came here to work with me in May of 2020, OutKick was an acorn. If you look at our traffic in May of 2020 and compare it to today, OutKick has grown by 30x. That's just bonkers. Thanks to them for buying in and leaving jobs to come here because they believed in what we were doing.

I'd also like to give Gary Schreier, our editorial director -- I'm not even sure what his official title is. Since he's come to OutKick, we've really began to fire on all cylinders. We aren't perfect, and I'm sure you'll all continue to let us know everything we get wrong, but we're growing so fast it's phenomenal to see. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for the team he's put together and for the processes we have in place to dominate now.

The OutKick Audience Is Expanding

As I've said for years, OutKick exists to serve the 75-80% of sports fans who aren't woke. Amazingly, we still have no competitors because everyone else in sports has gone over the woke waterfall and dashed themselves to pieces on the rocks below.

There's OutKick and then there's every other woke sports company in the country knife fighting for the same 20% of woke sports fans. And, frankly, 20% is probably too generous. It's probably 2% and all those people have blue checkmarks and spend all day long on Twitter looking for evidence of systemic racism in how box scores are tabulated.

Sports media remains a woke monolith. Without OutKick there legitimately would be no marketplace of ideas in any sports media at all. OutKick is, for all intents and purposes, the actual marketplace.

When we initially started, OutKick was an SEC-focused site because I love SEC football more than any sport in the country. But I looked at our traffic locations this morning and was struck by how much of a national demand there is for the content we produce. I started sharing our top markets a decade ago so I'll continue with that trend occasionally.

Here were our 25 largest markets so far in 2022. (Note: these aren't adjusted for per capita market size, just the raw numbers so bigger cities will dominate here).

Thanks to all of you in these cities and those of you all over the country who continue to consume our content.

I don't own the company any more, but I couldn't be prouder of the work we're doing and the audience we're serving.

Thanks to all of you for coming along for the ride.

And buckle up because our dominance is still just getting started. As amazing as I think we are, there are still a gargantuan number of people out there who don't know we exist. But they will ... soon.