Clay Travis divulges own grift with media criticisms
If it sounded like Clay knew a lot about the "fansite" business model, it's because he's built a career on it
As some of you may know, an organizational restructure at my place of employment resulted in the loss of my main source of income. Ideally, I’d love to make the writing here and our coverage of Clay and other right-wing ideologues my primary focus. To do so, of course, means financial support. If you’d like to help, please consider a monthly or annual subscription here at Exposing Clay. I’m also working on alternate forms of infrastructure (Kickstarter, etc.) - if you have any suggestions, drop us a line! Exposeoutkick@gmail.com
Remember message boards? In the internet’s pre-social media days, these were the bookmarked, go-to spots for discussion on virtually any topic under the sun, bringing people together and driving them apart one post at a time, 24/7/365.
One of the niche corners of the message board universe still exists to some extent, with the topic being college football — recruiting, specifically. Personally, I’ve always found the obsession with decisions that seventeen and eighteen-year-olds whom you will never meet a bit odd, but I digress. Clay Travis lives for this. Before he decided to dump sports for right-wing politics, the majority of his Outkick the Show live streams were on the very topic of Tennessee and SEC football news and updates. He professed this week that he remains a paid subscriber to many of these forums today.
So, it was a bit interesting when Clay’s weekly outrage honed in the very business model that he has publicly supported for years on end as a college football fan. It started on his solo live streams and bled into The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show later in the week:
“The entire business model of the Washington Post and the New York Times has turned from speaking to a big audience and telling the truth to basically a fan model of media consumption. You know what those fan sites never do? Break negative news stories about the teams that their subscribers support. Do you know why? The fan site’s business would collapse.”
- Clay Travis, Outkick The Show - July 21, 2023
Here, Clay is surmising that the Washington Post and New York Times avoid reporting on stories that negatively affect left-wing politicians and causes because their subscribers would leave if they told “the truth”.
While it’s hard to argue that much of the press slants left, the idea that major stories with merit are going uncovered by the “mainstream media” is simply untrue. Yet, Clay and his ilk are compelled to push the narrative forward because THEIR stories, mostly without corroborating evidence or sources, are rightfully ignored.
I don’t know about you, reader, but I saw substantial coverage of Hunter Biden’s appearance in court this week in the Post, Times, and throughout the cable news lineup. Hell, when Biden’s plea deal was dropped, Travis and Buck Sexton suddenly dropped their media blackout narrative in favor of celebrating a “great day for justice” in the country, and *literally* playing clips of supposed Democrat-aligned media covering the story en masse.
Besides shooting his own narrative in the proverbial foot mere minutes after introducing it, Clay’s introduction of the “fansite” narrative to the discussion presents another fascinating avenue to explore.
Isn’t that model precisely what Clay Travis built his website, Outkick, and his newfound career as a political talking head on? Doesn’t the Clay and Buck Show serve as an audio fansite for right-wingers?
Yes, to both. While Outkick may have begun as a relatively harmless and unknown college football-centric blog, it rapidly became a right-wing pop culture and news haven with the arrival of COVID-19 and Donald Trump’s futile attempts at reelection and insurrection.
Suddenly, Clay Travis and his band of “staff writers” were only reporting on political stories that portrayed Joe Biden and Democrat politicians in a poor light. Figures like Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, among others, were being lionized. New hires included Tomi Lahren, Curt Schilling, and Dan Dakich.
Sensing a pattern here?
Outkick became, and still exists as, exactly the “fansite” that Clay Travis was talking about this week. He found a niche audience in right-leaning to far-right aligned, middle-aged, American white men and began exploiting it. You won’t see a negative story about Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, the two most likely candidates to snag the Republican nomination for President, or a damning feature about corruption in Christianity. Why? If Outkick suddenly started telling the truth about Trump and the things that their readers held dear, they’d simply stop reading. If readership shrinks, ad sales dry up and the site’s value collapses. This was the business model that Clay used for the site’s best performing years, right up to when he sold to FOX over two years ago, and the Murdochs, of course, know this playbook quite well.
What about Clay and Buck? Stepping into the shoes of the (dead) Rush Limbaugh doesn’t exactly bode well for legitimate, level-headed political talk, but Travis and Sexton have seemingly gone out of their way to attack those who don’t agree with them and stuff three hours of airtime with misinformation labeled as “the front lines of truth” and “ team reality” on show sweepers. They are overtly playing to hard-right republicans who have no intentions of polite discourse with anyone but their own.
We’ve already seen what happens when you go against the grain with Limbaugh’s radio following. Immediately after the 2022 midterms, the radio duo simply levied the possibility of some blame towards Trump for putting forward weak candidates. The result? An explosion of anger on social media, plummeting podcast numbers, and the complete loss of Donald Trump as an ally of the show - he hasn’t called in since.
Just last month, a picture of a Ron DeSantis donor event went viral and featured Clay Travis sitting in the front row. Although he claimed he was attending as “media”, multiple sources with knowledge of the event say he was there as a speaker, donor, and supporter of the DeSantis campaign, despite publicly saying he would not take the side of a single candidate during the GOP primary. A video released this week confirms Travis spoke on-stage. As you can imagine, the pro-DeSantis crowd once again took aim at Clay and Buck, proving that they are very much an audio fansite with subscribers not afraid to cut ties when they’re made to look like fools.
Clay Travis knows clearly knows a lot about the college football fansite model. As well he should, after all, his entire post-COVID career depends on it.