Sports business guy Joe Pompliano posted a thread about All City, which owns local venture PHLY. He notes in the disclaimer that he is an investor:

We don’t have any way to judge PHLY’s local success other than to look at YouTube and social numbers. They’re up to 20k on Twitter, 24.5k on YouTube, and 7k on IG. Anthony Gargano’s show is doing anywhere from 1k to 2k YouTube views on average. They got off to a slow start with the Cuz lawsuit, which pushed his debut back six months, and there’s pending litigation with an age discrimination suit filed by a former seller, but the staff is complete and it seems like they’ve settled into a groove now. They’ve got Zach Berman and Bo Wulf on Eagles, Charlie O’Connor and Bill Matz on Flyers, Derek Bodner, Devon Givens, and Kyle Neubeck on Sixers, and Jamie Lynch and Renee Washington on Phils. They added talent like John Foley, Tyler Zulli, JP Zapata, Jim Salisbury, there’s Rich Hofmann doing a newsletter, and they’ve got Inquirer veterans Les Bowen and Ed Barkowitz writing stories. It remains a hybrid paywall model, with a $79.99 “diehard” option that unlocks a number of the written articles and provides perks like exclusive merchandise and 20% off events.

FYI “Series B” is not the second division of Italian soccer. It’s the second round of funding for a startup company. Series A is the first round, where you like an idea and put your money into it to help get it off the ground. Series B is the next level beyond the development stage, so in All City’s case, they’ve got four sites in the network and are looking to keep growing. Series C would be a third step for further expansion, scaling, development, and all of that. It’s all very dense and probably means nothing to the average joe.

Here’s Kyle Scott’s response:

This is a really rosy “exclusive” about All City (PHLY) by one of its investors.

The good:

– 8 figures in annual revenue

– cash flow positive-ish soon in all markets (likely once auto annual subscriptions renewals hit in Philly)

– raised $12 million more and are launching in a 5th city (Dallas)

The questionable:

I have a lot of questions, among them:

– How are they counting that combined audience of 100 million? It’s BS. There are 330 million people in the US, no way All City is reaching 30% of them NOT counting social media followers. More likely, this is an aggregate count of all web views, video views, and podcast downloads– many, many of which are of course duplicates, with others coming from one-time viral stories or adding up total podcast downloads (5k per show x 10 shows, for example).

– Why average views per video are so low in Philly (1.3k) and Phoenix (1.7k), and how that impacts what is supposed to be a predominantly ad-supported business that needs to generate 10s of millions per year in revenue to satisfy deep 8-figure investments?

– Judging by that fact, if simply recreating “sports talking radio, but online” is the right format.

– And if it’s problematic that they only have single-digit thousand paying subscribers across 4 markets (and likely only around 2.5k in Philly)? If they are so good at being an ad-supported business, why then is almost all of their web content locked behind a paywall that isn’t generating that much revenue?

…

But rather than deep dive on all of these questions and the long-term prognosis for All City, I think more notable for Philly fans is how few people are actually able to read the undoubtedly quality work being put out by the stable of top guys writing at PHLY. Like, only 1k-2k people, I’m guessing. When you combine that with paywalls at The Inquirer and The Athletic, you end up with a situation where many of the top tier sports reporters in the city are reaching an only very small audience of the best sports fans in the country.

Someone should change that.