Interesting sports media story here.

From Ben Strauss at The Washington Post:

Outkick, a media company focused on conservative politics and sports gambling, was acquired by Fox Corporation, founder Clay Travis announced Wednesday.

….

Outkick, which Travis founded in 2011 mostly as a blog covering the Southeastern Conference, has also become a clearinghouse for conservative political opinion, regularly rebuking athletes like LeBron James, for their activism. Travis conducted multiple interviews with President Trump during the 2020 presidential campaign. The site recently published a lengthy interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Travis has also been a regular guest on Fox News in recent months.

“Who could merge all the disparate pieces of daily Outkick: sports, politics, news, opinion, pop culture and sports gambling video, radio, podcast, and written content into one cohesive media experience?” Travis wrote. “The answer, after much debate, consultation and consideration, was Fox …”

On paper, this seems like a perfect match. Travis has taken a much harder conservative turn in recent years, railing against the idea of “woke media” and “Coronabros” and other assorted leftish things. I can still remember when he was at Deadspin and then took on more prominent roles in the ensuing years, where he always stood out politically from his colleagues, but had yet to fully embrace the persona he currently has.

Regardless of what you think about the dude and his political and social thoughts, this is a classic story of brand building. He identified something that people want, something that fills a niche in a sports world that has gone uber-political over the past year or two, with a healthy injection of legal gambling on the side.

He writes this at Outkick:

After ten years of being owned by me, OutKick is being purchased today by Fox. With Fox’s purchase will come a profoundly massive investment in new content creators and in our existing employees and infrastructure. OutKick is going to get much bigger and much better immediately.

If you already loved us, you should be thrilled. If you already hated us, you should be terrified. Because with the power of Fox’s distribution network and investments in our people and products, OutKick is poised to dominate like never before. Today, we begin our newest and best chapter.

It’s intriguing. Curious to see what they do with the site and whom they decide to hire. I don’t really have much to say beyond that, so we’ll end the story here.