How Fightful Excelled in Virtual Interviews (and Came to Prefer Them!)

How Fightful Excelled in Virtual Interviews – and Came to Prefer Them!

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Tell me about your organization and what it is that you do? How you use video?

Sean Sapp:
I’m the managing editor for fightful.com. We cover Pro Wrestling, MMA and boxing. MMA and Pro Wrestling have been two of the only live entertainment or sports that have been going on during covid. Obviously, pro wrestling is more towards the theater aspect of things, while MMA is more of a legitimate sport, but we’ve still been able to maintain and even add our coverage. We’ve had a few of our most successful months since lockdown unfolded, which is an unfortunate reality is that there are more people to ingest content in that regard. We had to pivot how we do things. Last year, I did mostly of in-person interviews filmed on video. We spent quite a bit of money getting production where we would like it. Now, we’ve switched to all Zoom and Skype interviews, and I’ve learned I get a lot more time with subjects when I get to interview them at their convenience as opposed to a convention setting ahead of a wrestling or an MMA event.

Sean Sapp:
Besides giving me more of their time, I find they open up more. It feels like more of a natural conversation with segues and transitions. The way that we pivoted has definitely changed things for the better for interviews to the point to where I’ll focus more on virtual interviews even after everything goes back to normal. We’ll still do in-person interviews but the methods in which we have discovered are more effective as far as gaining content, creating content and getting people interested.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
What have you been interviewing them on? So of course you’re not interviewing them right now after a fight. How are you coming up with ideas to create content?

Sean Sapp:
I always aim for evergreen content. Content that if I release it in six months for some reason, that it will be just as effective now. I have content from interviews that happened last November, and will be releasing those next week, but it won’t be dated, nothing that I asked was dated in that regard.

Sean Sapp:
There are some things in which we don’t necessarily have the benefit of doing that with like, if WWE contacts me and says, “We want you to interview our tag team champion, Kofi Kingston. It’s about WrestleMania.” WrestleMania is tomorrow, well, I’m going to ask him things that are interesting, but I have to get that interview out by the time they want me to, because that’s the conditions of which the interview is being conducted. So a lot of times it will be, “Hey, what are you doing during all this? How are you managing? How has it affected your schedule or routine?” Because MMA fighters and wrestlers specifically, they have routines.

Sean Sapp:
MMA fighters have routines. Pro wrestlers have insane schedules. They’re always traveling. They’re flying across the world, if not the country. Now they’re centrally located in Orlando, Florida, or Jacksonville, Florida. And they’re not traveling a lot. They’re taping a couple of days, then they’re not going back to work for a couple of weeks. And it’s a culture shock for a lot of these people that spend two days a week at their homes and now they’re spending two weeks at a time at home. It’s quite the transition for a lot of these athletes and performers.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
That definitely sounds right. So it sounds like you have a lot of stuff in your archive to dig through, is that difficult? Do you find yourself editing much of your archive? Do you have a team that helps you?

Sean Sapp:
I do have a team, but I handle most of the editing. I do a lot of the video editing. I have a producer for some video projects, but usually it’s me that does that because I know the direction and what I want the content to go for my site. So if I sense that someone is going to have something that pops up in the news and I have an interview with them in the can, I’ll schedule that accordingly.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Were there any technical challenges during this time?

Sean Sapp:
Not really. I’ve noticed the transition from Skype to Zoom. I have noticed that and I think that most people who were familiar with Zoom knew that it was going to take off during this period. And the thing that I like about it is, there’s been nobody that I’ve interviewed that has had trouble using that software. And this isn’t a plug for Zoom or anything. If they want to pay me, they’re more than happy. I’m more than happy to accept their money but everybody from active wrestlers to like 60, 65 year olds who I’m interviewing more about the business side of Pro Wrestling, it’s simple. Link, there you go.

Sean Sapp:
So that’s been the biggest transition, but it’s been a blessing in disguise because now I can record within Zoom while I’m recording on my own software and stream it to a private link. I can do that a lot of different ways. If I want to go in afterwards and edit in alternate angles because of that, I’m able to do that. And that makes it a lot easier. It’s one of those situations where I was forced to learn something new, but I’m really glad that I did because the benefits have been so positive.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Were you and your team working remotely? Do you usually work remotely? How’s that going? Is there an office you go into or…

Sean Sapp:
Well, this is my home office. I work 15 feet away from my bed, which is super nice, but we don’t always work remotely. Wrestling and MMA are traveling brands, as is boxing. So I got used to traveling to do certain interviews.

Sean Sapp:
A lot of companies went on to do virtual scrums. Now I miss traveling a little bit, but I think it’s more one of those things where I can’t have it so I want it type of thing. Like I want to travel because I haven’t been able to lately.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you keep all your video up in the cloud or do you have it on hardware in your home office? Or how are you going about that? How are you getting it to your team to help you edit and archive and all that?

Sean Sapp:
Most of it, I have effectively three copies of. I have one on an external hard drive. The files are also uploaded to YouTube. Our parent company has a Dropbox set up to where I can just take raw files, edited files, a little bit of everything, even behind the scenes content such as wild lines or outtakes are put up there too because we never know when we might need that. We might have interviewed a wrestler and nobody knows them right now. And then they blow up in a few years and we’ve got some outtake footage with them, people might want to see that. So we keep that on Dropbox as well. Not everything is on all three. Certain things are, but effectively, usually I have hard drive, YouTube and Dropbox.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Okay. Does that get a little difficult with all those different moving pieces?

Sean Sapp:
Yes, very. Especially considering, a lot of times with YouTube, there aren’t really good download options once you’ve uploaded something. So if I wanted to go on the back end of our YouTube channel, for example, it doesn’t really download in the best quality. You get it in an MP4 file. That makes it difficult because a lot of our video is 4K. We invested in some 4K cameras and some really good audio, and sadly, YouTube just hasn’t quite caught up there. But yeah, it is a little frustrating and there’s plenty of stuff that I have to remember. Have I uploaded it here? Have I uploaded it here? Do I have a copy of this? It can be a little overwhelming.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you mind me asking, who is your parent company?

Sean Sapp:
Shazzu, incorporated in Toronto.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Any video highlights or success stories during this time where something really great happened that you want to brag about?

Sean Sapp:
Of all things that took off, we posted a video of this Japanese pro wrestler eating a Reese’s cup for the first time and it blew up. It did like a 100,000 views and we’re like, “Oh, okay. Well, you just never know what’s going to hit.” Like there was one of a male wrestler and a female wrestler pretending to fight over toilet paper, that blew up. And those are just social media clips and the like, and sometimes you just never know what’s going to catch fire. I mean, that’s the benefit of viral media, is sometimes it picks up like that. But there have been some unusual things. We had a pro wrestler that was showing up at a Shania Twain concert that exploded in popularity because they had a little bit of interaction there. You just never know.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Those are great stories.

Sean Sapp:
Yeah. I’ve had a compilation of advertising segues that I did just blow up and do 40 – 50,000 that we do for funds because we think the segues are really funny and we compile that and it becomes one of the top SEO terms for that advertising product. And of course they’re thrilled with it because they get a compilation of their commercials on YouTube and it’s doing really well. So there is an element of luck, which, I mean, I’m still very new at learning a lot of those SEO strategies and implementing those.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Gotcha. That makes sense. So is advertising a main form of bringing in revenue or was it during this time or does it mainly come from when you interview the wrestlers and such?

Sean Sapp:
It really depends. So we have several different forms of revenue. We have the onsite revenue, which curiously in the past couple of days, we’ve had some issues with. There is an issue with ad sense, I don’t know if that’s across the board or just us. We have YouTube revenue, which is from the actual onsite. We have, I don’t want to say substantial, but a nice help from advertisers and that does help because all of our advertisers stuck with us

Sean Sapp:
Then we have, effectively, our premium revenue, which is a Patreon, which we are going to move onsite. That’s a significant percentage. I thought that that was going to decline because I assumed that people would have less disposable income. As it turns out, people actually weighed that, it would appear, and said, “Well, I’ve got more free time. I can handle $5 a month or so. And our subscriptions exploded over the last few months. I mean, I was shocked at how well that did. Advertising is about, gosh, I would say one third or one quarter of what we do on that. So I would say probably based on the amount that we bring in, advertising is maybe 10% if we’re talking podcast reads. If we’re talking onsite with Google and all that closer to 35, 40%.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
How do you think the industry is going to change as a whole? And how do you think, more importantly, video, creating all this stuff, do you think it’s going to keep booming? What are your thoughts? How do you think it’s going to change?

Sean Sapp:
I do think it’s going to keep booming. I do think that there are going to be people that will want to stay working remotely, whether it be convenience or concerns about their own health or their loved one’s health, whatever that may be. There are a lot of people who go and do those in-person interviews. And last November I was doing them and people didn’t want to shake hands. They wanted to do the fist bump instead, just for their own personal safety. They get a lot of people coming in contact with them every single day. So I do expect some people to say, “No, I prefer to do the remote method.” And I’m fine with that.

Sean Sapp:
Of course, you also have to wonder how the aesthetics of not having a crowd for some of these places is going to affect video content because, in our line of work, a crowd reaction is very important to how well something takes off. You can search online for Pro Wrestling and find tons of videos about the biggest pops, which means when a crowd makes an uproarious reaction to somebody coming out, or doing a move, or saying something. That is integral to that line of work, and they’ve been surviving barely based off of not having that for a few months. So I’m very interested to see how that affects things because you might not have those to the level that you did before.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you think they’ll be pumping crowd sounds into the stadium?

Sean Sapp:
I don’t think so. Wrestling used to do that a lot and now they’re having their own wrestlers sit ringside and react accordingly. That way, they aren’t absent of sound. Some of them use younger recruits and, that’s how they’ve avoided piping in sounds now. I think that if there was an actual crowd, it would have been more likely, but I think everybody would pick up on it now. If you transparently insult the intelligence of the audience, you run the risk of alienating them.

Gabrielle Skidmore:
My final question is any kind of tips, tricks, hints for how you got through keeping up recording video? Anything? Definitely do this, don’t do that. This works for us, this didn’t work for us, like that.

Sean Sapp:
Always reach out. I don’t know how much free time people will have moving forward, but over the last few months, people have had a lot of free time

Sean Sapp:
It’s been very, very positive in that regard. A lot of people that have opened up to me that I wouldn’t have thought would have originally. The answer will never be yes if you don’t ask the question, if you don’t ask people, if they’re willing to talk to you and all that for interviews. As far as video, be versatile, step out and do different things. We’re still learning a lot as well. We’re not where we want to be, but we’re open to trying a little bit of everything and I think that’s the important thing. Be confident with everything.