In June, Major League Baseball acquired a minority stake in Jomboy Media - the digital sports company built around Jimmy O'Brien's viral lip-reading breakdown videos and a scrappy backyard sports league called The Warehouse Games.

The financial terms weren't disclosed. What was disclosed: MLB invested through its Baseball Endowment L.P. fund, the same vehicle it uses for league-level strategic bets. Jomboy had already cleared $10 million in revenue in 2024, up 44% year-over-year. This wasn't a charity move. It was an acquisition of distribution they couldn't build themselves.

The deal structure is worth understanding. Jomboy keeps editorial independence - MLB said explicitly it won't control content or amplify everything the company makes. What it gets instead: access to a creator-built audience that professional baseball can no longer reach through traditional channels. What Jomboy gets: IP access, event integration, co-branded merchandise, and the institutional credibility that unlocks bigger brand deals.

That's the template. Not a sponsorship. Not a licensing deal. An equity stake with a content moat on one side and a distribution problem on the other. Every major league is now watching this. Every YouTube creator with real audience leverage is now in a negotiating position they didn't have three years ago.

The question isn't whether golf follows. It's who goes first.

Views on the PGA Tour's inaugural Creator Classic - August 2024, broadcast live on ESPN+, Peacock, and YouTube

For context: that's a golf event that didn't exist two years ago, featuring no professionals, broadcast at a time slot the Tour would normally reserve for a weekly recap package nobody watches.

The Creator Classic - 16 YouTube golf creators playing the back nine at East Lake the day before the Tour Championship - was the No. 2 trending video on YouTube the week it aired. The median viewer was 32. The PGA Tour's overall YouTube audience averages 37. The event doubled the Tour's record for new YouTube subscribers in a single day.

Numbers like that don't just justify one event. They justify a strategy. In 2025, the Tour expanded to three Creator Classics across TPC Sawgrass, Philadelphia Cricket Club, and East Lake, with YouTube as the presenting sponsor and a $100,000 winner-take-all purse at the finale. Good Good Golf is now headlining a PGA Tour event in Austin in 2026.

The Tour spent decades fighting for broadcast minutes on network TV. Turns out the audience was on YouTube the whole time.

A few years ago, Robby Berger was working the overnight shift at a Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Not managing the place.. working it. While guests slept, he edited videos on his laptop and posted them under a handle called @BrilliantlyDumb.

The name was honest.

He was covering sporting events - the Ryder Cup, the World Series - and few cared. Then he posted one golf video with a coworker named Joey Demare. It blew up. He posted another one. Same thing. Eventually he stopped asking why and just kept going.

That was 2021. Doing Things Media - the digital company behind meme accounts with 75 million combined followers - formalized a partnership with Berger to build out Bob Does Sports as a standalone property. Joey Demare came on full-time. A year later, Nick Stubbe, known to the world as Fat Perez, rounded out the cast.

"We never want to lose that feeling of how crazy it is." - Robby Berger

Here's what the channel actually built: a universe. Bobby Fairways is the ringmaster. Joey Cold Cuts is the straight man. Fat Perez (Soon enough Slim Perez) runs hot, reliably, in ways that make everyone else look reasonable by comparison. Though Between them, they've created something rarer than a loyal audience — they've created people who feel like they know these guys.

That feeling is the product. And it turns out brands will pay a lot for it.

The current stack: a Callaway equipment deal, Breezy Golf (their owned apparel brand), Have A Day (their owned beverage brand), The Brilliantly Dumb Show podcast, and a seat on the PGA Tour's Creator Council. Fat Perez competed at TPC Sawgrass in March in a YouTube-sponsored event broadcast on ESPN+. The Four Seasons wasn't that long ago.

What's interesting about BDS isn't the subscriber count or the sponsorship logos. It's the structure underneath. They didn't build an audience and then figure out what to sell them. They built audience trust and then built real businesses on top of it - two consumer brands they own, not licensing deals they rent. Callaway isn't paying for impressions. They're paying for credibility with a demographic that tunes out traditional golf advertising before the voiceover finishes.

The Jomboy playbook, intimacy-driven content that eventually earns institutional attention, is playing out in golf in real time. Bob Does Sports is somewhere in the middle of that arc. The audience is there. The brand infrastructure is there. What comes next is the kind of deal that changes the business entirely.

This trend was not unique to MLB. Nor to golf here. It’s a shift happening to all large scale brands looking for an intimate connection to their audiences.

The Jomboy/MLB deal and the PGA Tour's Creator strategy share the same underlying logic: institutions don't buy content. They buy credibility with audiences they can no longer reach themselves.

That means the most valuable thing you can build isn't a subscriber count. It's the gap between how much your audience trusts you versus how much they trust the brands advertising to them. That gap is your leverage. The wider it is, the better your next deal.

Berger built it through cast chemistry and a willingness to look bad on camera. Jomboy built it through a decade of baseball takes that never sounded like a press release. The delivery is different. The asset is the same.

The test: Remove every brand deal from your content tomorrow. Does your audience still show up? If yes, you have leverage. If no, you've built a media buy - not a media brand. One gets acquired. The other gets replaced.

That’s it for Issue 001. Staying consistent with it. See you next week.

- Slush