Right About Now with Ryan Alford - From Sports Network to Niche: Josh Pate on Thriving in the World of New Media

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Shownotes: The New Media Playbook is HERE! The sports media landscape is changing — and Josh Pate is one of the clearest examples of how new media is winning. In this episode of Right About Now, Josh Pate joins Ryan Alford to break down how he built a dominant college football media brand without relying on legacy networks, hot takes, or manufactured controversy. Josh shares why audience trust matters more than reach, how YouTube and live platforms reshaped sports media, and why creators who own their distribution and intellectual property are positioned to win long term. This conversation explores the intersection of sports, media, and business, offering valuable insight for creators, entrepreneurs, and anyone building a brand in today’s attention economy. In This Episode: Why legacy sports media models are losing relevance How Josh Pate built trust through consistency and honesty The power of niche audiences in sports media Owning your audience vs renting attention Monetizing content through direct relationships What the future of sports media looks like Connect with Josh Pate Josh Pate’s College Football Show on all major platforms X / Twitter: @JoshPateCFB Instagram: Joshpatecfb

In today's new media era, the rules of distribution have been rewritten, and few understand this shift better than the host of the number one college football show in digital media, Josh Pate. On this episode of Right About Now, Josh and I dive deep into how a no-spin approach and hyper-niche focus can dismantle traditional media empires and build a bulletproof personal brand. Get ready to learn how to weaponize direct audience relationships to turn personal influence into a powerhouse business. that legacy networks can no longer ignore. I may not like what a guy said, but I would appreciate the information. I didn't need the affirmation because I already knew how I felt. I didn't need anyone to stroke my opinion.

I just wanted information. I want logic-based viewpoints. I'll determine. I'll run it through my own filters. I'll determine whether I like it or whether I approve of it or not. And I always thought to myself, hey, if you ever get in a spot where someone puts a microphone in front of your face, just do it like that.

Do content the way you appreciated it being done. I don't think it's a radical concept, but not a lot of people practice it. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now.

Hey, we're always getting right. We're always talking about what's now. And you know we talk about media. But look, you see a smile on my face. I love every guest. They're all my children, my babies. I love, I appreciate every one of them. But when I get to talk college football and media all in one,

and that's why I'm going to the source. He is the host of the Josh Pate show. And he is a CBS analyst for college football. What's up, Josh? Man, you got me excited now because I love to talk about both of those things as well. We've got to figure out the college football playoff. It is an exciting time on all fronts to be in my. little corner of the media industry.

I ain't buying that little corner shit. Josh has made a name for himself with college football. I do have come to find your judgment to be some of the best in college football. It's unfettered by 81 team. And even when I don't like it, I agree with it. When you set that standard, if it's hurt me, I've had to watch as you've been brutally honest, and I feel like rudely accurate. You know that you're only a prisoner of your own success.

When I was growing up, I used to immerse myself in Sports Talk Radio. I worked construction for a little while. I worked heating and air installation, so you're on the job side all day. The only way to make 8 a.m. become 5 p.m. is your lunch break and then what you're listening to. I'm just listening to Sports Talk all day. And I remember my buddies would get just pissed off because everyone wasn't praising Georgia or praising Auburn. And I'd listen to it. And I may not like what a guy is.

said, but I would appreciate the information. I didn't need the affirmation because I already knew how I felt. So I didn't need anyone to stroke my opinion. I just wanted information. I want logic-based viewpoints. I'll determine. I'll run it through my own filters. I'll determine whether I like it or whether I approve of it or not. And I always thought to myself, hey, if you ever get in a spot where someone puts a microphone in front of your face, just do it like that. Do content the way you appreciated it being done. I don't think it's a radical concept, but not a lot of people practice it. If you remember this and people that listen to talk, you remember it, one time you have a the no-spin zone. Josh, you are the no-spin zone for college football. And anyone thinks that

you're not. It's because they're a fan of whoever you might be beaten on that day because the reality is sometimes your baby's ugly. Yeah. Boom. Boom. And you know what? You don't have to be a doctor to spot an ugly baby. One of my favorite things is they'll come at me and they'll say, well, you never coached. How could you call this out? And I'll always tell them, man, I've never been a doctor, but I know an ugly baby when I see one. And you do as well. Josh, set the table for everyone and kind of give them your background and building up to today. I grew up down in a rural Georgia. I had no family in the business. When I graduated high school, I was very directionless. If you asked me, if you asked me, who are you when I graduated high school? I could never give you the

answer. I'd be able to tell you my height, my weight, my eye color, the birth certificate stuff, basically. But I would not be able to tell you what my talents were, what my passions were, where do they overlap, what your direction, what your purpose, what your why. And it took a long time because I didn't grow up dirt poor, but I didn't grow up rich. I was just kind of a or kid, closer to the poor than the rich, but I just wasn't shot out of a canon the way some of my peers seemed to come out of high school. And I wasted a couple of years in college and ended up dropping out and going and doing, like I said, construction work. I did all kinds of different manual labor jobs. And slowly but surely got my act together a little bit. Slowly but surely,

the right people just continued to beat on me and beat on me and beat on me until I got back in school, but that kind of coincided with the rise of digital media. What I did was I just badgered a radio program director that I listen to every day. And I said, can I come in and observe? I think I want to do that stuff. I immerse myself in it. I think I have the God-given ability to do it, but I don't know because no one's ever giving me a shot. Can I come in and watch you produce radio? So he let me go in there. And a couple of a few weeks in, his co-host calls out sick one day. So I just got put on the air one day. And it's afternoon drive sports talk radio in the deep south in the middle of college football season. I mean, live bullets flying. And I love it. I've never had more fun in

my life and we got off air at like 7.01 p.m. that afternoon. And he said, where have you worked before? And I said, I've never done this before. I've just pretended to do it driving around in my truck for years, but I've never actually done it. He said, well, man, I'd love for you to just stay on the air. So I stayed on the air. And that turned into a television general manager calling me up a couple of years later. Hey, do you want to do what you do, but do it on TV? Said, sure, I've never been on TV. Is that a problem? Oh, no, man, it's easy. TV ended up being the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And then I elevated to being a sports anchor and then a news anchor and I'm doing the college football stuff on the side. But that brings me to what I was just saying. This is mid-20

teens. This is not that long ago. This is less than a decade ago. I will so vividly remember for the rest of my life sitting next to our chief meteorologist one day after a newscast and his computer screens like in the background. He's sitting here, computer screens in the background. He's got his Facebook feed pulled up. And I saw a live video playing on his Facebook feed. And I said, what's happening there? He said, oh, it's just a Facebook live feed. I didn't know that they had just launched that software. That was a Berlin Wall moment. And then YouTube, shortly thereafter, introduces live capability on their platform. So to me, I've been sitting here thinking the whole time, the whole key to this game, as you know, is overhead and distribution back then.

You've got to have the big fancy studios to make your product look the way it's supposed to be. And then you've also got to have the distribution so that someone can see you in L.A. and Seattle and Miami and New York all at the same time. And if you don't have those or you don't have syndication deals, you don't have a nationwide audience. Then the internet gets weaponized and leverage the right way. And overhead and distribution are literally, if you're holding your phone, it's at your fingertips. And I realized at that point, man, I got a shot. If I really am what I think I am, if I've really got the ability, if I can really appeal and mass communicate this stuff in an entertaining way, I've got a shot. And so we started to immediately, I started to conceptually put that

together. And it was a fight. It was a multi-year fight. But finally got to where I was willing to work as an independent contractor instead of an employee at that news station in exchange for getting access to that studio a few nights a week. We started producing a college football show on YouTube, started it from scratch. And we started doing it in a couple of years in. I was already making more money on the YouTube channel than I had ever made in local news. And it was at that point that CBS hit me up. And they said, we're not doing anything like you're doing. And we know we should. We know that's the direction that's going, would you like to come here? And so I came to CBS in 2020. And when COVID said in and everyone else started talking about everything other than sports.

I just stuck to sports because that's what I know. And our numbers, man, they just shot through the roof cause a bunch of those networks alienated their audience because of what they were trying to present that the audience wanted nothing to do with. And so then when football came back in 2020 and beyond, we've never slowed down. And we got the number one college football show

in all of digital media now. And you're excited by that and you love it. Now I get all kinds of opportunity. It's amazing. It's a dream job. But I know 2024 still looks like, the infancy of this whole thing relative to what 2034 will look like. And so you call it new media. I remember not too long ago, they called it alternative media. It's not the alternative.

It is the way, I think a lot of folks, if you watch the way that the election was covered from either side, left or right, the way it was covered this past cycle, it wasn't covered in a legacy manner. Far more people went to those alternative new watering holes than they did the traditional and that's not going back and that we are downstream, sports media and any kind of little niche industry that you could be in in the media world, it's all downstream of that. If that's the way an election's going to work, I promise you it's the way any other form of content is going to work moving forward. Bingo, Josh, literally that is the way it's moving.

And I don't think people realize, I think you're right, we're still in the precipice of all of this, the democratization of distribution that this thing has allowed. The way that distribution and awareness has been democratized through the smartphone, through YouTube, through now the apps all being on the television, the only thing keeping cable companies alive is live sports. And those deals are getting undone. We're moments away from probably every station being an app just about. You're packaging those things.

It's crazy what's happening in that field. The only thing holding that whole bundle together, if you will, is live sports. And then in my business, what that does from a talent perspective, perspective, what it does from a representation and agency perspective is it makes you realize I've got to have dual roles or I've got to contractually define myself in two different lanes. If you've got networks that are spending the billions that they're spending, that the Big Ten makes $8 billion over the next seven years for their TV deal, if you're going to invest that kind of money, whether you're CBS, whether your FOTS, whether you're NBC, do you not look at the ecosystem of

commentary that exist around something like college football and think we need to invest in that. We need to leverage that because we just have them on Saturdays for four hours right now. Those people have them the other six days and change. Why are we not investing more in that? Now, I expect those conversations have been happening. In fact, I know they've been happening. This is kind of a put yourself in the right place and then the right time we'll find you sort of ideology. When you first started on YouTube, you went live, started doing your live show on YouTube.

And you said you started making more money than you even made in broadcast to that date. Are we talking about direct from YouTube like ad plays or whatever or just you were immediately doing sponsor deals on your channel? That would have been just ad cents dollars in the immediacy. To say I was making more money, it's not a high bar to clear because I was making $27,500 a year multiple years into doing news. What happened was we monetized the channel. We made to me really good money at the time.

But also what happened one day. was there was a guy, he was the representative for Buffalo Rock, which is the Pepsi distributor, Mountain Dew, et cetera. And he's there to meet with clients at the TV station one day. Now, I just happened to see him. And he had happened to see the show on Facebook Live at the time in YouTube Live. And so he's walking through. Now, look, this is the end of probably his quarterly. He's still got ad dollars that he needs to allocate somewhere. He just happens to have 25 or 30,000 extra ad dollars that he probably just needs to put in the 25 to 48 male demographic somewhere. And let's lean into sports. And so I'm having a conversation with him. And we're talking about this sort of thing.

He says, how would you like Pepsi to be a sponsor on the show? I have no clue how this world works. But that was my first interaction with ad sales for the show. The lesson it taught me was I didn't have a third party go out and do that for me. And I didn't have an agency bring him to me. That was a direct face-to-face partnership. And I swear to you, that was one of the biggest blessings that ever happened. Because moving forward, I realized that right there, no matter how high in this industry I climb is exactly how I want my partnerships to be. So you fast forward to today. I've got a huge deal with Academy Sports. I've got Fandul Sports on board. We just signed a big deal with Quick Trip, which is a huge gas station chain for those unfamiliar earlier this year. And we just partnered with Zivia, which is

a zero sugar soda. I have personal relationships with all of those clients. I deal directly with all those clients. And what that does is it means they come with you wherever you go. And that along with owning your intellectual property and owning your branding. If you can ever pull it off, and it is much harder done than said, but if you could ever pull it off, that's the brash ring on this new frontier. And the reason I'm so proud about it, the reason I speak so boldly about it is because I've had a lot of whiffs in life. I've had a lot of predictions that don't come true. I could see this coming. I could see that I thought the model was build it the way we've built it, have it prove itself, and then simultaneously get your personal relationships with your

clients and you need to do that and you need to select them based on understanding your audience and the people you serve better than any ad agency or any corporate media entity ever will and if you really have that granular a relationship with your audience ad partners will take care of themselves the numbers will take care of themselves and you will be able to empower yourself above and beyond what you could have ever hoped to do in the old landscape i'm so thankful for you that you experienced that direct sell for yourself because you both made yourself a lot of money. And as much as you made money, you avoided like the pitfalls of just some of the signing with people that aren't really that motivated to work that hard for you, that are just looking for

percentage deals. And you got to learn exactly how it all works. And I can't stress enough for anybody hearing that, that the most lucrative deals are the most personal deals. I'm guilty of this at times with our show and things that we do. You have to be involved with this stuff. When you're building, especially, it's the Josh Page Show. Right about now with Ryan Alford, it's tied to your personal brand and tied to you. And you can hide. hire and build a team and do all those things. But you got to know this stuff and understand it at a really high level. You've got to be the brand. But then when you say that, you got to understand what you mean when you say that. A lot of people say that and it's just the most douchebag like

conceited thing imaginable. Like bragging about yourself as you're the brand. That is not the case at all, at least the way that I look at myself. The way I look at myself is I am a total product of our audience. And I am a total product of what they've allowed me to do. And the reason they've allowed me to do it is because of the same reason somebody keeps coming back to the same restaurants, because you're serving them what they're asking for. I think two of the biggest pitfalls is, number one, people getting ignorant or self-absorbed enough to where they believe they're the big deal, and therefore they're going to stack their show or they're going to produce their content around what they care about, and the audience will just consume it because they're a bunch of

clapping seals. That's pitfall number one. Pitfall number two is you do what you do. The audience reciprocates with their viewership traffic or their listenership traffic. Therefore, it props you up. And then you get up on the mountain top and then you decide, all right, now I'm going to change everything. Now all of a sudden I need to add bells and whistles. Now I need to dress different. Now I need to cover more things than I got here covering. And it happens so often. I've been approached about covering other sports, covering the NFL. There's a reason for that because the powers that be look at this model and they say, why don't we apply that model to the NFL? Imagine the traffic. Well, they're right to think that.

It would do really good traffic. But it would be so inauthentic and disingenuous and it would be so pennywise pound foolish to try and merge what we're doing here into other lanes. My response to that is, I'm good in college football. If you think what I do is effective and would be effective, then go find the person to execute it in that lane. Josh, work here I keep up, learn more, watch the show, all the callouts. If you want it on YouTube, it's Josh Pate's College Football Show. It's the same thing on podcast. It's my name on

socials. It's pretty easy to find me. It's pretty consistent across the board. Hey, guys, you know to find us. Ryan isright.com. Look for the highlight clips. And it's going to be a master class in media from my friend Josh Pate. We're going to have highlight clip score from this show. And look, you know to find me. I'm at Ryan Alford. That blue check. Before you can buy it, we'll see you

next time. Right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Ryan isright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.