Jomboy Media Gets $1M In Funding, Eyes Full Baseball Schedule

Jomboy Media — a content company from founder and Yankees fan Jimmy O’Brien that became famous thanks to live-mic video of a rant by New York manager Aaron Boone and its detailed breakdowns of the Houston Astros cheating scandal — has raised $1 million from a group of investors that includes filmmaker Eli Roth, Chicago Cubs outfielder Ian Happ, retired MLB players Trevor Plouffe and Josh Satin, media executives Julie Young and Tal Shachar, and actors Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Lerner and Cam Fuller.

The New York Business Journal reports the budding digital media empire has annual revenue in the low- to mid-seven figures, the company now has 19 different podcasts, and its flagship show “Talkin’ Baseball” is Chartable’s top baseball podcast. “Talkin’ Yanks” ranks among the top 10. Jomboy has over 800,000 YouTube subscribers who routinely tune in to watch appearances from the likes of Trevor Bauer, Johnny Damon and Dwight Gooden.

O’Brien was just a bored baseball fan when he began live-tweeting and recapping New York Yankees games in 2017. He gained modest popularity from the team’s run to the ALCS that year, and the hobby turned into a job the next year when an angel investor kicked in $25,000 so O’Brien could focus on content creation full time. That paid off during the following season, especially after O’Brien used isolated audio from field microphones to pick up Boone berating home plate umpire Brennan Miller on July 19, saying that Yankees’ hitters were “savages in that box.” The video went viral and how has over 2 million views on YouTube and 111,000 likes on Twitter.

“Halfway through the 2019 season it all started to click, and everything started to grow, and every revenue stream started to grow,” said O’Brien. “Our charts looked fake.”

Much of the company’s success is due to its ability to immediately create content around baseball news. “Because we had built up the infrastructure to have merch ready, to be able to jump on a podcast whenever something big happened, to cover every single game without a day job, when big moments happen we’re able to hop on the mic and be first to market with a podcast,” said O’Brien.