Josh Pate was evicted while earning $27K. Now, he runs a college football media empire
Josh Pate owns the IP of his industry-leading college football podcast and signed a new deal with ESPN to co-host a Friday afternoon television program with Will Compton and Taylor Lewan of "Bussin' With The Boys" this fall.
Pate now turns down sponsorship deals and other financial offers at the risk of overexposure.
"The truth of it is I leave a lot on the table because I don't want to overextend myself," he told OutKick. "A lot of these, you know, influencer marketing deals and stuff like that, I appreciate the offers. But I think there's a limit to how much of me the public should have to consume."
But it wasn't always this way.
Less than a decade ago, Josh Pate was working in Columbus, Georgia, making far less than the average American. His financial struggles eventually led to his eviction.
"I was making a little over, slightly over $27,000 a year. I was counting on YouTube revenue, Google AdSense revenue at that point. So I'm barely, I'm barely getting by. In fact, I got evicted. I didn't get by. So we fell below the get-by line for a little while," he explained.
In 2020, he started to make more, but not much more.
"I think I signed for $75,000 when I came to CBS in 2020. My goal when I was working down in Columbus was to one day make $50,000 a year. So please understand, I thought I had hit the lottery even then."
It was that year, during COVID-19, that Pate began building the show that would eventually put him in a position to own his content.
"So when I came to 247Sports in 2020, I came with a complete fresh slate. We started from scratch. That's right there pre-COVID. We started a YouTube channel before the show I was going to do, and so we started doing the show. Boom, COVID sets in, and I'm working for CBS. I'm working out of the 247Sports office down in Brentwood, Tennessee, just south of Nashville at the time."
"The key was I was smart enough, I guess strategic logic enough, whatever you want to call it, to just talk college football. Because I saw some other sports shows out there, including ones that I consumed regularly, starting to merge and segue into areas that I just didn't think they had any business segueing into. By that, I don't mean they shouldn't have the right to talk about it."
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Pate elaborated on why he stuck to sports during this time.
"What we found is because we did that simultaneous to so many other shows alienating their audiences, people flocked to the show and our numbers scaled really hard and really quick to the point where by the time we got games that fall, we had a condensed season. By the time some of the executives come back into the office, we're already a successful show. We're already a profitable show, and they never really touched the show because it was already a proven product by that point."
By 2022, CBS was offering Pate the first major contract of his career. But it wasn't what he wanted.
"They rip your old contract up. They want to extend you a couple of years, and then another year into that, it is just continuing to scale. So they rip that contract up. They want to offer you a new one, and I got about two new contracts in.
"In 2022, I had to make some decisions with CBS because they wanted to put a long-term, really, really lucrative deal in front of me. But it would not have included IP ownership, asset ownership. I remember talking to some people who I confided in, people in the business well beyond me whose opinions I valued. They said, look, the future of this business is IP ownership, asset ownership. If you're ever going to get it, you've got to get it now because you get one more step down the road and that franchise is going to be way too profitable for them to ever hand over the keys to."
Pate and CBS eventually came to terms.
"So it was that, or it was counter with an offer that was much less, still good, but much less. But it included IP ownership. We went back and forth on that, back and forth on that. There was one night, it was about 10:30 Friday night, for whatever reason, I was in the office all by myself, and I got a call from CBS and they said, all right, we're going to do it.
"I negotiated with CBS. They put a really, really big, to me, an astronomical salary number in front of me, because I'd been making 27 grand a year a few years before that down at my old job in Columbus, Georgia.
"So we've got the YouTube channel, we've got the podcast feeds, we've got the IP ownership, and I own the company. We produce the show now."
From eviction to media stardom.
Watch Josh Pate's full interview with OutKick here.