The secret ingredient to building a community? A great live strategy

What’s the easiest way to know if you’ve built a community?

Ask yourself this question. 

Are you the destination your audience reflexively seeks out when something big happens?

Or are they heading somewhere else?

It doesn’t matter whether your main business is a website, app, YouTube channel or newsletter. In 2026, you must build direct ramps into your content. Google Search traffic is collapsing, algorithms are as consistent as your favorite team and social media platforms can derail your audience from fully engaging. 

The creators and companies winning in this market are the ones people are seeking out independently time and time again. 

And the best way to build that community is to have a rock solid live strategy. 

While more people may be talking about their approach to “live,” having a live presence is far from a new development in the content game. 

We’re a few decades into “live blogs” and curated breaking news home pages like MLB Trade Rumors go back even farther than that.   

Saying the words “Facebook” and “live video” might give a lot of industry veterans PTSD given the fallout over fraudulent metrics. 

But what was a gimmick then is a real building block now.   

It’s also increasingly becoming a necessity in the era of AI.

LLMs can’t scrape a live blog or video stream as it happens. Real-time reaction and context provided by humans is one of the best moats a content company can currently dig.  

Doubt that? Check out the strategy currently being followed by outlets like The Athletic and Yahoo Sports during tentpole events like the NFL playoffs and Olympics. 

There’s also a strong chance your favorite outlets have cast a few more chips on the live watch party pile, whether it’s legacy outlets like ESPN with the Manning Brothers and Pat McAfee or YouTube-first outlets like Jomboy and ALLCITY. 

Here’s how the whole thing is supposed to work: 

Any outlet of any size can use this strategy to grow and I’ve seen it firsthand. 

ALLCITY Network rose out of Denver after being among the first to stream live podcasts on YouTube. Making that decision allowed the chat to become an additional voice on the show and an opportunity for viewers to form bonds with not only the hosts but other fans of their favorite teams.

By the time I joined ALLCITY in Chicago, other outlets had hopped onto the live podcasts train. The company responded by pushing the throttle forward on “emergency podcasts,” unscheduled shows whenever breaking news called for it. 

Though people sometimes smirked at the approach, it turned into a serious building block and one of the true differentiators for an upstart media outlet in a competitive market like Chicago.

I’ll never forget the Saturday in the spring of 2024 when the long-awaited Justin Fields trade came down.  One of our hosts was out on a date with his wife. Another was at the retirement home with his dad. I was in my front yard supervising a game for my daughter’s birthday party.

Still, the entire team immediately scrambled to be live on YouTube within a half-hour.  More than 7,000 people showed up as well, having long been trained that we’d be the place to gather.  

(I’ll also never forget a competitor tweeting that night that he’d weigh in on the trade come Monday, a moment that felt like a forfeit we were happy to accept.)

That afternoon cemented the belief that people don’t only come to you for content, they come to you for some place to go. And when newcomers see a crowd, they want to be part of it, too.   

Once we established that, we’d built another layer to the business. Emergency pods were sellable to sponsors, our memberships were injected with more trust and more people were introduced to everything that our company did.

So what does having a good live strategy actually mean? 

You obviously can’t wait around for big trades or injuries. 

Heck, your company might not even be in the sports space. 

What you want to look for are opportunities to eliminate the distance between you and your audience in real time and then use that opportunity to build trust.  

This is how the entire process should correctly play out. 

So where do you go from here? 

You don’t need to stream every game or reorganize your entire organization around a live strategy. We don’t need a repeat of the fallout from the Facebook Live era. 

But you do need to have something.

So ask yourself:

• What are the moments you want your audience to feel like they can’t miss? 

• What does your version of the emergency podcast look like? 

• What will your business get in return for all of these efforts?

If you can answer these questions and then build the infrastructure to deliver on them, you won’t have an audience any longer.

You’ll have a strong community you can use to build a sustainable business.

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•. I saw a humorous tweet this week that said X has gotten so bad they’re turning back to the real news to find out what’s going on. There’s actually a lot of truth in that joke. Did anyone see a video clip from the Middle East in the past week and not have their B.S. meter immediately activate? (If not, you should have.)

• My friends at Yahoo Sports are doubling down on sports newsletters with the promotion of Yahoo Sports AM’s Kendall Baker to “head of newsletters.”

According to the company’s press release:

Given the quality of the Yahoo Sports staff and Yahoo Mail’s deep advantage, this is a move that makes so much sense.

• Last week’s Dozin’ With The Dinos sleepover at the Field Museum was a lot of fun, but my body is officially calling it quits on sleeping on the floor underneath a case of stuff antelopes.

• My friend Tony Gill just started a newsletter he is uniquely suited for: Bleacher Theology, a bi-weekly look at the intersection of religion and sports. Check it out!

• I was a huge Notre Dame football fan growing up and Lou Holtz was a big reason why. There’s a lot of good Lou content out there in the wake of his passing, but I especially enjoyed these pieces from Mark Whicker and Herb Gould.

• I shouldn’t be looking forward to this new bowling documentary from HBO as I should be. Every sports league is looking for their “Drive To Survive” and this spinoff might turn out to be the most entertaining.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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