Jamie Horowitz Torpedoed The Fox Sports Website On His Way Out

Besides the fact that he completely embarrassed the company with his sexual harassment allegations, Jamie Horowitz also wound up torpedoing Fox Sports’ website with his pivot-to-video launch.

According to Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina, the fall from grace for Fox Sports Digital has been epic. Compared to August of last year, Horowitz’ brainchild is down nearly 300 percent in unique visitors, from 26.4 million to nine million. Time spent browsing? Also down, from 136 million minutes to 56 million minutes.

The numbers are staggering, but is anyone really surprised? For me, it’s as expected.

People still like to read good writing. It’s the reason why Longform regularly draws over one million visitors each month and why the New York Times, New York Post, and Washington Post are among the Top-50 American websites.

Video, in general, is fine. But normally, folks will flip over to YouTube if they want it on their device or dial up an app on their Fire TV Stick to see it on a bigger screen.

Overall, sites like Fox Sports and Vice Sports should have kept things the way they were: lots of solid writing with video sprinkled in here and there. If someone wants to watch a video, they’ll find it. Not the other way around — especially when there aren’t any good articles to even find. Instead, these sites are driving their traffic elsewhere for words, with places like The Athletic and The Ringer happy to pick up the readers.

The whole idea behind ‘pivot-to-video’ was for monetization purposes, as video ads are more appealing to advertisers than the ones found surrounding regular articles. However, with video numbers also down, and a steady decrease in respect for their website, Fox execs are stuck picking up the pieces of Horowitz’ mess.