In a crowded, fast-moving digital landscape, The Volume constantly innovates to find new ways to engage with fans and provide instant authentic reactions to the hottest breaking sports news. With The Draymond Green Show, The Volume has broken the fourth wall between athlete and audience. The Draymond Green Show empowers one of the NBA’s most outspoken star athletes to share his personal thoughts, provide commentary on his own games, and deliver a candid, first-hand perspective directly to his fanbase.
The long-form podcast format gives Draymond the opportunity to share his basketball expertise through monologues and intimate interviews with fellow players. The Draymond Green Show’s first season, launched in May of 2022, saw Draymond delivering uniquely authentic content every week, providing fans with his unfiltered opinions and unprecedented real-time insights as the Warriors progressed through the Championship series.
Since our inception, The Volume set out to become more than just a podcast network. Since then, we’ve become a robust video offering that captures the “always on” social media ethos by delivering content in real time, presenting a highly valuable revenue opportunity.
Another key ingredient of The Volume’s secret sauce is leveraging outspoken star athletes with news-making potential. In our minds, who better to lead this new initiative than the most provocative voice in the NBA, Draymond Green? The Volume sold Draymond on hosting the show himself, pivoting his previous co-hosted podcast format. With Draymond on board, The Volume pitched him on recording realtime testimonials directly after playoff games. .
Executing a comprehensive distribution strategy was key to The Draymond Green Show’s national success. With two episodes airing per week, the program enjoys 1,883,812 average monthly downloads. Total social reach stands at 7.3M, while average monthly video views clock in at 39,236,539. This season, the show included the first podcast recorded on-site directly after a championship-winning performance, which garnered over 1M views on YouTube and 7.5M views across social channels. The Show’s Instagram account, launched in May 2022, also gained over 110k followers in under a year.
In June 2022, Draymond Green made headlines daily when he gave his own personal account of the NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics, giving fans a perspective they truly could not get anywhere else. Just hours after Game 3 of the Warriors-Nuggets playoff series, Draymond Green gave fans a moment-by-moment breakdown of how he pulled off the game-winning, and eventually series-winning steal. It is extremely rare to hear an athlete give such an in-depth analysis of a specific play mere hours after the game ended, so this perspective from Draymond went unmatched.
The success of The Draymond Green Show comes from Draymond himself. His electric personality captures fans’ attention instantly, and his bold, unfiltered commentary is perfectly suited for instant reactions. A smaller personality might not find the same success engaging fans, but Draymond’s larger-than-life persona and the show’s aggressive, bombastic approach to distribution and production make for a unique podcast that is truly lightning in a bottle.
The Draymond Green Show’s success can be traced directly to The Volume’s willingness to detach itself from the strict timeline of traditional sports storytelling. By offering content from iconic sources with breakneck turnaround speed, we’re engaging with audiences in a different way, practically in real-time. Minutes after the final whistle, viewers can go immediately to The Volume's social channels to watch instant reactions to the games they just watched. No more waiting until the next day to hear from top talkers in the country like Draymond Green; now viewers can get those reactions in primetime.
For example, Draymond recorded an episode inside TD Garden moments after the Warriors’ NBA Championship win, truly capturing the basketball zeitgeist. The morning after the Warriors title-winning performance, Chartable reported that The Draymond Green Show had reached its highest ranking yet as the 11th-most popular podcast on Apple Podcasts. During the playoffs, the show frequently made the list of the 100 most popular podcasts in the world. Bloomberg summed up the astronomical impact of The Draymond Green Show, calling it the “single biggest media story of the NBA Finals.” Draymond’s show already leads the pack in viewership and engagement as new athlete-storytelling podcasts arrive on the scene daily. He’s shown firsthand how a provocative, rapid reflection on a game can captivate an audience, and podcasters will attempt to copy his recipe for success for years to come.
