Sports in 60: 90 Days, Zero Growth, and a Big Lesson
Friday Rate Report XI
For 90 straight days this summer, I tried something new. You may have seen it, but I've buried the lead already so let's be real folks; you most likely never saw it.
Here's how it went down. Every morning, wherever I was in the world, I filmed a daily sports show called Sports in 60. The format was simple: a one-minute countdown timer, me talking through the Top 3 Rated Games in RateGame from the last 24 hours, and a closing reminder of how many days remain until the 2026 World Cup.
The show was built on RateGame's DNA: unbiased, user-driven, rooted in the games you rated, and packaged in 60-second doses for the daily doom scroll diet we all indulge. I thought if I brought it to life on video, awareness and installs would follow. I think you know where this is going; neither did.
Ninety days. Hundreds of hours editing. Thousands of minutes of me talking to a tripod while standing in parks, near bodies of water (I'm a sucker for a BBW -beautiful body of water), and on NYC street corners. For sixty seconds and not much to show for it. No growth. No traction. Nothing.
For someone who lives off feedback - good or bad (I swear I can take It) - the silence of social media can be soul-crushing. Almost every episode earned exactly one comment: from my wife, the greatest human being alive. I'll be the first to admit, that's both heartwarming and insanely pathetic. It felt like being the little leaguer with no athletic gifts, cheered on by a loving parent as you strike out again and again, helmet crooked, half-toothless smile intact.
At first, I was frustrated. I'd scroll past sports creators tossing up low-effort clips with zero editing, watching them rack up the kind of engagement I could only dream about. Meanwhile, I was grinding through daily shoots and edits. In desperation, I even paid TikTok to 'boost' some posts, thinking it might help. What I got instead were a few hundred extra views and one commenter advising me to shave my 'aggressively receding hairline.' As SVP would say: it's almost time to come home - but not yet god damnit, not yet.
So I doubled down. Then tripled down. More editing. More angles. I even filmed a full week of episodes in Denmark while there for my sister's wedding. Still nothing.
Finally, after an episode filmed on location at a UNESCO site last Saturday - the breathtaking cliffs of Møns Klint - pulled in fewer than 500 views and, you guessed it, a single comment, I had to face the music. Sports in 60 officially goes down as the world's fastest… and shortest… sports show of all time.
As the founder of RateGame - doing my best Red Panda impression while balancing a full-time job - time is my most precious resource. If something isn't working, I can't afford to drag it out; I need to cut bait quickly and keep it movin'.
Since then I've found myself in every pose of the famous 'Lost Escobar' Narcos meme - pacing, sitting, even standing in the shower staring into the void - wondering what I wasn't getting. Was the algorithm suppressing me? Was I missing something fundamental? Should I, in fact, already be bald?!
Then two nights ago, on one of my favorite subreddits, r/longreads, I came across James Marriott's essay The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. That's when it clicked.
The silence around Sports in 60 wasn't random - it was telling me something deeper. Sports in 60 didn't fail because it was bad. It failed because Social Media and RateGame speak different languages; one rewards scrolls, the other rewards words. As Marriott writes, we're living in a time where attention is trained to chase motion, not meaning. Where streamers and their cadres of clippers flood our timelines without end. Where divisiveness dominates, and anything resembling positivity gets Pat McAfee'd straight into the abyss.
This chart says it all: the gap between teens who read and those who don't is now wider than at any point since Gutenberg cranked out his first Bible. Put another way; as reading goes the way of the dodo, our ability to write disappears like Costner in the cornfields.
And that's the real tragedy. Because beyond being one of the greatest achievements of human evolution, writing is beautiful. Writing is where thought slows down just enough to find its shape. It's how raw emotions turn into vivid stories, how memories become legend, how passion becomes something you can practically touch.
When I read something that's well written, it tickles my brain stem. Great writing has taken me places I've never been, and introduced me to people I've never met. Words give permanence to what would otherwise vanish into the scroll.
That I was naive enough to think a few slick shots and graphics could communicate a message as effectively as the one I'm typing out here, letter by letter, is laughable.
Which brings me to RateGame: the (free) sports app where the currency isn't clicks or views - it's your words. It's how you wrestle with the highs and lows of fandom - how you capture the fleeting magic of a game-winner, and the way it made you feel. Or maybe it's who you were with, or where you were. The point is, it's awesome because we get to read it, and even better because you wrote it.
This is why RateGame exists. To give sports fans a space where words matter. Here are just a few of my favorite examples:
So yeah, Sports in 60 failed. Not because it was bad, but because it was the wrong medium. Turns out the future of RateGame isn't me talking to a tripod - it's you, writing down the moments that matter.
The internet may be hurtling toward a post-literate apocalypse, but here in this little corner, words still win. And for that, I'm grateful.
There's 251 days left until the World Cup. My name is Nick Mark Goerg, And I'll see you tomorrow 🫡
Sincerely a Sports Fan,
Nick
nick@rategame.io
