Now that headline is purposefully a little clickbaity, which I’ll explain shortly.
From September 21st – September 28th 2022, Barstool sports ran their Merchapalooza campaign. Barstool was offering 10% off sitewide (not that great of an offer), but all content creators would be pushing this campaign and competing in a contest to see who could sell the most merchandise in 1 week. The person who sold the most would get a $15,000 bonus, 2nd place $8,000 bonus, and 3rd place $2,000 bonus ($25K total).
Naturally, this caught my eye, and I was curious how much total merchandise Barstool could sell when they have all their content creators promoting it simultaneously.
The Barstool Reach
On average, Barstool receives 9 million people to their website monthly. They have over 10M unique monthly listeners across their podcast network.
On their social media accounts, they have over 40M followers combined:
Twitter – 4.2M followers
Instagram – 13.8M followers
TikTok – 19.6M followers
Facebook – 5.7M followers
Youtube – 1.29M followers
Their content creators combine for over 20M followers across their social media accounts.
Now, no doubt there is absolutely double counting in these numbers. Someone that goes to their website most likely listens to one or more of their podcasts and followers the Barstool Twitter account along with following multiple Barstool content creators. But this gives Barstool multiple touch points to the consumer when running this campaign.
Campaign Results
Barstool held this contest from September 21st to September 28th (7 days). During that period of time, Barstool received approximately 18,000 orders. Their average order value is around $60. Giving them $1.08M in sales for this one week.
So Barstool spent $25K in bonuses for their content creators and generated just over $1M in sales.
However, that statement is a little disingenuous. That implies that Barstool would have generated $0 in sales that week if they did not run that campaign. And from tracking them for nearly 2 years, there has never been a time when they sold less than 1,000 orders a day.
Last year during that same week, Barstool received approximately 12,600 orders. At an average order value of $60, that was $756,000 in sales that week in 2021.
In the end, the merchapalooza campaign gave Barstool about a $300K lift in sales for the week. Not bad for only spending $25K. A 12X return on spend.
Just as a reference point, in 2020 and 2021 Barstool received approximately 90,000 orders for their Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns. While merchapalooza gave them a nice boost, it is nothing compared to what they generated for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
