Richard Gillis

How to solve the problem of America

Unofficial Partner is growing rapidly in the US. Substack’s data gives a breakdown of newsletter subscribers, by location:

The podcast audience has always been bigger and more widespread than the newsletter, but each week the data shows the same growth trend across North America - see below.

Questions arising

It’s great news that people are finding and sharing the podcast and the newsletter in the biggest and most influential sports marketplace in the world.

The lure of America brings a question, one I’ve been asked in a previous life.

Twenty years ago, I was editor

Global fan as hallucination

The Bundle

The global fan is one of those stories I’m beginning to lose faith in, like the conversion funnel and the pursuit of happiness.

The global fan exists because Netflix, Amazon and Apple want it to exist. And for as along as they want it to exist, the rights holders will play along.

At Sportel last year, Marissa Banu-Lawrence of Fox Sports put it well (on a very good APAC panel hosted by Imran Yusuf of SportBusiness): Australia is hyper localised. Even within Oz you have to go state by state. Australian sports fans are nuts for NRL,

The most addictive algorithm ever built

The Scroll

I found an answer to a question I ask every day, usually when I'm about half an hour in to doom scrolling Spurs clips and dogs welcoming their owners back from war: What makes TikTok so addictive?

@asianbossmedia
TikTok isn’t just addictive by accident. Its algorithm is constantly learning, testing, and adapting to keep you scrolling — often without you realizing it. #bytedance #tiktok #socialmedia #addictive #algorithm
♬ original sound - Asian Boss - Asian Boss

TikTok isn't playing the same game as everyone else.

The platform's recommendation engine, known internally as Monolith, doesn't care who your friends are. It doesn't

The Taylor Swift Data Fallacy - the ceiling not the floor

The Bundle

Source: The YouTube Arguments

Why has Mr. Beast’s Beast Games underperformed on Amazon despite $100 million budget, why did The Sidemen drop from 73 million YouTube views to 2.4 million on Netflix, why did Pop the Balloon see similar declines?

The mistake: assuming top-tier creator success represents the average outcome when creators migrate platforms. It’s the ceiling, not the floor. Most creators moving to streaming miss the charts entirely. The best performers are acquisitions like The Amazing Digital Circus—where Netflix paid bargain prices after creators shouldered all risk.

What happened to 'broadcast quality'?

Traditional notions of

The four problems to solve

ChatUP

The race to build SportsbizGPT is happening downstream of the bigger fight being waged by the foundational models.

There are four problems to be solved, and the company which solves each of them will be ‘generational’. That's how Jonathon Ross, CEO of Groq sees it.

@20vc_tok
The 4 future opportunities in AI 🤖 20VC with Groq Founder & CEO Jonathan Ross. Link in bio.⁠ —⁠ HarryStebbings Business businesstips businessadvice entrepreneur ceo startup founder entrepreneurship ai artificialintelligence grok nvidia futuretech techtok #careertips
♬ original sound - 20VC - 20VC

The four problems represent the evolutionary stages that AI companies must solve to

Infinite Athlete is in a long queue to be the Bloomberg terminal for Sport

ChatUP

This builds on a previous thread: The Unofficial Second Brain

The race is on to productise LLMs and make them specific for the sports business (Clickbait title)

In January 2025 we had Charlie Ebersol, founder of Infinite Athlete on the podcast. I didn’t come out of the chat with any real sense of what Infinite Athlete is beyond an aspiration to be ‘the Bloomberg terminal for sport’, which takes in multiple data sources and turns them in to something useful. That podcast is here:

Posts by Richard Gillis

What happened to 'broadcast quality'?