Listen to enough sports podcasts, and eventually you will hear someone spit the name of every podcaster's greatest enemy: the aggregators. Oh, how the fellas who talk about sports into a mic for a living love to complain about the aggregators. Don't aggregate this! yelps Zach Lowe, before sharing a mild opinion about the Toronto Raptors. Listen up, aggregators, I am not reporting this, groans Bill Simmons, before guessing where LeBron James might sign. I need to be careful here, because of the aggregators, murmurs Brian Windhorst, before doling out a trade rumor. These men are beset on all sides by the dreaded aggregators!
But who are the aggregators, and what exactly are they doing to these podcasters? More often than not, "the aggregators" is a phrase used to describe various social media accounts that circulate quotes from podcast episodes for the sake of baiting engagement. A recent tweet from Yahoo Sports acts as an exemplar of the form: a graphic with Bill Simmons's face above something he said on a recent podcast episode about how the 2026 Philadelphia 76ers might end up being just as bad as the 2012 Lakers.
"This is bullshit," Simmons angrily tweeted in response. "We went thru all the scenarios for how the Philly signing could play out on Friday’s pod good and bad. I thought Yahoo was trying to be a real place? Don’t you guys pay respectable writers and podcasters to do content? But you also do fake clickbait crap?"
Setting aside the question of whether it is "fake clickbait crap" to directly quote someone, there is an interesting structural issue at hand. What Simmons and the other podcasters in his cohort are doing when they complain about aggregators is making an argument against cheap incentives. They see their own words being cherry-picked in a way that is meant to raise the ire or intrigue of social media users, and they feel they have been taken advantage of. They believe they have been dragged into a more cynical corner of the internet, where "fake clickbait crap" reigns supreme and nobody cares about nuance or context.
I don't do much sports podcasting, but I can understand why it might be frustrating to have one thing you said during a 90-minute episode picked out for aggregation. And yet, something that has always irked me whenever "the aggregators" get brought up and complained about is the implied dichotomy. On one side you have the virtuous podcaster, working diligently to bring only the highest-quality sports opinions to his listeners, and on the other you have the nefarious aggregator, plotting and scheming against the very concepts of analysis and nuance in pursuit of cheap engagement.
But are the podcaster's methods and incentives really all that different from the aggregator's? If the podcaster doesn't want every tossed-off thought they express during a long and free-flowing conversation to be fair game for criticism, or even just simple recirculation, then perhaps they should find another medium. If the podcaster desires to be precisely understood, and to ensure that any single idea they express is properly situated within the broader context of their argument, then they should write it. The writer is at far less risk of being misunderstood or badly interpreted because of their ability to refine and edit their thoughts before sharing them with the world. The writer can, for example, spend more time thinking about the construction of the Sixers' roster, and ultimately decide that a fleeting thought about its similarity to the 2012 Lakers' roster is not worth publishing, or if it is, to support the thesis with evidence. This extremely simple solution is available to all podcasters, most of whom were originally writers.
The podcaster no longer writes because of the same incentives that motivate the aggregator. Over the years it has become lucrative, especially at a place like The Ringer, to trade one's keyboard for a mic. This is because audio ads cost significantly more than digital ads, thus audio becomes more profitable than print. The writer becomes a podcaster because they are responding to market incentives, and those incentives push the podcaster in the same direction as the aggregator. More and more often a sports podcast's set recording schedule is sped up for the sake of responding to breaking news—there used to be a time when the phrase "emergency podcast" would not have been immediately understood—and more and more podcasts are either rushed to publication or broadcast live, removing opportunities for refinement and editing. If Simmons didn't want to be ungenerously quoted so often, he could start by resisting these market incentives that push him toward increasingly extemporaneous expressions of his thoughts and opinions. The reason he doesn't resist is the exact same reason the aggregator plies their trade: He wants to maximize the level of engagement he receives.
The podcaster and the aggregator are not enemies, but inadvertent allies working toward a common goal. If Simmons's suggestion that the 2026 Sixers might end up being as bad as the 2012 Lakers reads as undercooked and needlessly provocative when splashed across a Yahoo Sports graphic, that's because it was undercooked and needlessly provocative when it was made, as are many things that get said during a podcast episode. This is no criticism of Simmons or any other podcaster, but rather a statement of fact about the effect that increasingly urgent and unstructured forms of podcasting have on the quality of conversations such shows produce. This is no great sin, and as a listener I often appreciate a podcaster's willingness to respond quickly to big news, but I would prefer if everyone could be a little bit more honest about the role of their product in the take economy. When I click play on an episode of Bill Simmons's podcast in order to discover his near-instant reaction to LeBron James signing with the 76ers, and within 15 minutes I hear him suggest that Jaylen Brown may be traded by October, I'm under no illusions. I am not listening to some elevated, deeply nuanced discussion about basketball that must be protected from the cheapening effects of aggregation. I'm just listening to some guys yapping.
