If The Podcaster Desires To Defeat The Aggregator, He Must Look Inward

Listen to enough sports podcasts, and eventually you will hear someone spit the name of every podcaster’s greatest enemy: The aggregators. Oh, how the fellas who talk about sports into a mic for a living love to complain about the aggregators. Don’t aggregate this! yelps Zach Lowe, before sharing a mild opinion about the Toronto Raptors. Listen up, aggregators, I am not reporting this, groans Bill Simmons before guessing where LeBron James might sign. I need to be careful here, because of the aggregators, murmurs Brian Windhorst before doling out a trade rumor. These men are beset on all sides by the dreaded aggregators!

But who are the aggregators, and what exactly are they doing to these podcasters? More often than not, “the aggregators” is a phrase used to describe various social media accounts that circulate quotes from podcast episodes for the sake of baiting engagement. A recent Tweet from Yahoo Sports acts as an exemplar of the form: a graphic with Bill Simmons’s face above something he said on a recent podcast episode about how the 2026 Philadelphia 76ers might end up being just as bad as the 2012 Lakers.

“This is bullshit,” Simmons angrily tweeted in response. “We went thru all the scenarios for how the Philly signing could play out on Friday’s pod good and bad. I thought Yahoo was trying to be a real place? Don’t you guys pay respectable writers and podcasters to do content? But you also do fake clickbait crap?”