Case Study / DEFY Sports Media Department
From Zero
The channel launched with no subscribers, no videos and no views. Every figure on this page was built, not inherited, and every asset that built it was made by the same person.
01 · Stats
One person,
twelve months.
A full sports media department: two platforms, two formats, daily output. Stood up from an empty channel and run solo.
Output · what one person made
Return · what it came back with
for every hour produced 7:22:26 of finished runtime → 16,193 watch hours
02 · YouTube
Views buy reach.
Minutes buy trust.
Shorts are how strangers find the brand. Episodes are how they keep coming back.
What drove watch time
Top 7 by hours watched · 2026 year to date
Six of the top seven are long form.
What drove subscribers
Top 7 by subscribers gained · trailing 365 days
One Short recruits; the rest is the long form library.
03 · The Channel
The second half
beat the first
on every measure.
Twelve months of YouTube Studio data. The volume isn’t the point. By the second half the data had made it obvious which formats earn their runtime.
Access beats results
78 episodes in eight formats, ranked by average views per episode
Closed practices and gear tests beat match coverage by 1.5× per episode, despite match coverage being 40 of the 78 episodes. Steering the mix toward what worked lifted average views per episode 90% in the second half.
The “Eight Minute” rule
Every episode plotted by runtime and views. Hover any point to identify it.
In this sport, the instinct to cut shorter is wrong. Longer episodes averaged 3.6× the views of shorter ones.
Who watches
Share of viewers by age · trailing 365 days
81.4% aged 18–44. Of the monthly audience 85.5% were new viewers and only 2.3% returned across six months or more. This is a channel still in acquisition, nowhere near saturation.
The vertical library
Top shorts by lifetime views · 351 published
The engine is not one fluke. A long tail of 30K to 50K clips sits behind the breakout.
Where the audience lives
Channels this audience also watches · by subscriber count
The audience overlap maps the whole competitive set. Useful for knowing exactly who you are up against for the same attention.
04 · The Library
78 episodes.
Watch any of them.
Every one shot, cut, graded, scored, titled and published solo. Newest first. Filter by format, sort by what you care about, and press play. They run right here.
No episodes match that filter.
Prefer YouTube? Open the full playlist →
05 · Instagram
0
views in 12 Months.
Not a community feed, but a top of funnel acquisition channel, and it should be resourced and measured like one.
Most recent quarter, in detail · Apr 2 – Jun 30, 2026
What carried the quarter
Share of views by format
72.4% of views came from people who do not follow the account, and 77% of them arrived through Reels.
Intent, not just eyeballs
Change vs. Jan 2 – Apr 1
Reach softened against a heavier Q1 event calendar while intent signals rose. Fewer accounts saw the feed; more of them acted on it.
The account was run, not just fed
Posting was one part of the job. The same person answered comments and direct messages, fielded customer questions and pointed them to the right department, published stories daily, and shared customer content back to the audience. A brand account that replies is a different asset than one that broadcasts, and the profile visits and link taps above are partly a product of that.
06 · What I’d Do Here
The next year.
The pages before this are a record, not a pitch. That department was built alone, from an empty channel, and the numbers are what they are.
You’re starting from zero. That was the starting line twelve months ago too. The difference this time is walking in already knowing what the first year teaches.
What the year proved
First ninety days
Six moves, in order.
I’d rather be judged on the next year
than the last one.
Thank you for the opportunity. Ready to get to work.
theplaceforthings@gmail.comDylan Fout / The Place For Things