Playground →
Barstool Sports sits at the top of Starting 9's neighbor set with a similarity of 0.96 — and the full top 10 reads like a map of the Barstool media universe. Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in composition; a score near 1.0 means the audiences are nearly identical in shape.
The shape is broad: no single neighbor dominates to the exclusion of others, and scores remain elevated across all ten positions, from Barstool Sports at 0.96 down to Pardon My Take at 0.90. The cluster is anchored by Barstool-affiliated properties — Barstool Sportsbook (0.95), Dave Portnoy (0.93), Dan Katz (0.92), and Riggs (0.91) — alongside the golf-and-sports podcast Fore Play (0.93) and the TV personality Kayce Smith (0.93). The subcategory breakdown across the ten neighbors spans Websites, Entertainment brands, Professionals, TV Personalities, Athletes, Lifestyle, and Podcasts and Radio — a genuinely mixed set, but one with a clear gravitational center in the Barstool ecosystem. Starting 9 itself is a Podcast, and only two other neighbors share that subcategory in the top 10: Fore Play and Pardon My Take. The remaining eight come from adjacent kinds, which means the audience overlap is driven less by podcast-listener behavior in general and more by the specific Barstool-adjacent sports media crowd.
Alexandra Cooper (0.91) is the one neighbor with no direct Barstool affiliation in the top 10, suggesting the audience shape extends slightly into broader sports-adjacent podcast fandom, but the dominant pull remains unmistakably one media network's orbit.
