Penn National Gaming (PNG) has made the right moves and are seeing the fruits of their investments in 2020. Jon Kaplowitz, Head of Penn Interactive, joined our Becky Liggero Fontana to explain why buying Barstool Sports was the right move.

PNG was first rumored to buy Barstool in January, 2020, and Kaplowitz explained why they were so interested in buying a media platform. “When we started the process of looking for a partner we realized that we needed two things,” he said. “One, we needed an established brand that people knew that resonated with sports and sports betting. And the second is we needed an audience, an audience that was young that had a propensity to watch sports and actually make a bet on sports. We didn’t have that at Penn National and when we looked at every single media company under the sun, and finally when we met Barstool, we knew that they were the company for us.”

That makes the $450 million purchase of Barstool a natural choice, considering their audience. “Barstool Sports have been around for 17 years, they have built a loyal core audience of Stoolies, they have a hundred million people every month across all their social media channels, and these are people who love sports, many of them bet on sports, and engage with the Barstool talent in a way that engenders a lot of loyalty.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOl1lAL4JBY]