The Question:
What's the Future of Sports Media like?
The Responses:
BiSB: Very Professional Podcasts.
David: Visual podcasts.
Ace: A vast web of two-minute autoplay videos with 30-second ad lead-ins.
Brian: Why is autoplay even an option? Why have you forsaken us, computer scientists?
Seth: Ask the legions of ad network peddlers who got my email when I joined the IAB newsletter. Someone saw on a spreadsheet that videos get incrementally higher ad rates and took this to all the board rooms in America.
Brian: It can't be incremental, can it? It has to be vastly different for the level of effort everyone is putting into video nobody watches
Seth: Rates are so dependent on so many factors that any generalization is necessarily incremental.
Brian: Anyway, it seems to me like there are a few different models for sports content that are viable. I would like you guys to guess at the models.
Ace: Grantland. RIP.
Seth: /giphy pours one out
Brian: Boutique prestige content is indeed one.
- PROS: good content written by people who don't feel like monkeys in the click factory.
- CONS: apparently doesn't make money? I kind of dispute that Grantland didn't make money because it couldn't, especially given the immediate and huge success of Simmons's podcast.
Seth: Obviously we’re rooting for this one. It depends on the media environment. The market of people who want to think long and hard about anything is so small I spent most of my life not knowing we were even a demographic. In a consolidated market like cable TV, the easy numbers favor the lowest intellectual demographic, so that becomes the ONLY market served (Hi TV news!). The internet is an open environment, so boutiques can find their market.
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| Not forgotten |
But they have to grow from the bottom-up. Grantland could be making money, but ESPN was structurally incapable of understanding how or why it did. Nobody who thinks putting Skip Bayless or Steven A. Smith on TV is a good idea knows the first thing about marketing to people who fire off braincells for fun. The best thing for everybody would have been to spin it off.
Ace: The other issue with those prestige sites is writers tend to get snatched up. Grantland was a pretty unbelievable collection of talent that The Ringer has had a hard time replicating.
Brian: Yeah, a lot of them want to move on to doing other things because they can. This is not so much an issue with Graham Couch.
The ringer is also stuck on Medium, which is a terrible decision because it feels like a part of something instead of its own thing. That's fine if you're yet another Gannett site but bad if you're trying to be bougie.
Other boutique prestige shops include VICE Sports, The New York Times, Sports on Earth, and The Classical. The former two are parts of much larger organizations, the latter two basically died and live on as husks that don't pay many people.
So this is a dodgy and ephemeral way to live.
[Hit the JUMP for other ideas, like not paying for trash, more diagrams, or embracing “Embrace Debate.”]
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BiSB: You guys aren't gonna like my prediction, which is full and final victory by Embrace Debate. It generates clicks, which is the safest thing an executive can pitch.
Brian: Is Embrace debate even content? It feels like filler because by god 10 AM to 5 PM exists every damn day.
Ace: I feel that that ends up falling under a larger General Clickbait umbrella.
Brian: Deadspin had a good piece on this: this TAKEWAR between FS1 and ESPN is fighting over audiences so small that Nielsen doesn't even measure them.
What all of this investment has bought FS1 is an audience nearly large enough to be semi-reliably measured, and the best proof they can offer that the strategy is working for the network overall is that the audience doesn’t turn the channel when a simulcast of a braying donkey’s radio show comes on. For all the money and attention that has been lavished upon Second Take, slightly more people are watching a damn simulcast of a radio show.
Seth: Yeah that whole genre seems like it was built to win in an environment of 100 cable channels, and viewers who press the up button through them until two people yelling at each other over LeBron stops them. That world is coming to an end.
Brian: I would like to restore our faith in humanity by reminding you once again that nobody watches these shows. They seem designed to be on at the gym.
Adam:That's what I don't understand about ESPN's stated strategy. They say they want people that can do things across different platforms but how do you write EMBRACE DEBATE content without it basically being a transcript of a conversation between Statler and Waldorf?
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| Rebuilding Rutgers: one triggered Michigan fan at a time |
BiSB: Clay Travis.
Brian: First, fuck Clay Travis.
BiSB: Say something outrageous, and the debate is between Stupid Author and Outraged Readers
Seth: Ah, the Drew Sharp method: find the largest possible fanbase and say something that will extremely offend them. I think Danny Kanell tried this yesterday.
Brian: Clay Travis is the sports equivalent of Ann Coulter where I'm pretty sure he's not dumb enough to actually believe the stuff he's peddling but I'm increasingly unsure about this as time moves along.
Ace is right though, this stuff falls under General Clickbait, which is a clearly viable model. The sheer number of outfits competing in the realm is evidence enough. PROS: the content sucks so you can get anyone to do it for cheap and when they decide to stop being clickmonkeys there's always another starry-eyed youth to put in the machine. CONS: nobody cares if you live or die.
Ace: The format is depressingly compatible with people getting their news through occasional glances at their smartphone.
Brian: Yes, and by this point it includes major newspapers. Except they're bad at clickbait. But they're clickbaiters nontheless. This is why the attempts at Gannett paywalls were such miserable failures. Rule of thumb: if the reaction to you putting up a paywall is a derisive snort, you are clickbait.
Ace: I’ve found it interesting, especially in light of today’s layoffs, that ESPN.com’s front page is increasingly moving towards short videos and the ESPN Now updates that are essentially longer tweets.
Brian: Yeah, it's all mobile all the time.
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Seth: I'm very intrigued by the interplay between sports broadcasts and the dying cable industry. I'm waiting for the day that a major league of something--MLS, maybe even the NHL, gets angry in the middle of a cable negotiation and takes a meeting with Netflix to stream everything. Live sports are just about the last thing other than political theater that will guarantee a ton of people will turn to your station and watch your ads. When Comcast balked at making every general cable subscriber pay more for BTN, it gave Ann Arbor Torch & Pitchfork their best quarter in a century. The leagues have a sweet deal now where they can charge everyone's grandma to carry their games, but when that collapses the first thing to go will be the niche sports.
Brian: Please read the following in your best David Attenborough internal monologue.
Ah, broadcasts, the lions that roam the money savannahs and create the carcasses we extract a few morsels from. In a sense we are all scavengers, we of the sports media.
Or possibly Werner Herzog.
Ace: The NFL had a couple games live-streamed on Twitter last season.
Brian: The broadcasts will continue and be largely unchanged. The format and the amount of money they throw off will change. I don't think it's going to have much impact on any of the peripherals.
Seth: They've all got livestream options for their cable customers now. There's no numbers on this but how many people don't have cable and log on with their parent's accounts to stream their games? Long term this isn't sustainable. In 30 years, 20 years who's going to pay for the cable accounts that everybody else is stealing?
Brian: ESPN will continue to be the heart of the thing in some format or another because they're the gorilla at the heart of the jungle. The Big Ten probably could have gotten even more money in its recent negotiations but didn't want to leave ESPN entirely.
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| United States of Cable |
Ace: To Seth’s point, once cable companies can no longer force you to take dozens, if not hundreds, of unnecessary channels in order to get the few you actually watch, people will pay a reasonable amount of money to watch live sports. The problem isn’t paying for cable at all, it’s paying $200/month for a bunch of stuff you don’t need.
Streaming music sites show that millennials like me are quite willing to pay little bit every month to get access to content I actually want.
Also: Netflix, which almost literally everyone I know subscribes to.
Seth: Yes, yes. But you're not really paying that much for NatGeo. Those cable contracts are bloated to cover the massive payouts to live sports because they will die without live sports. I don't think the market, if allowed to function, would support half of what sports makes right now from TV contracts.
They’re also bloated because they need 10 stations to air live sports when they’re on, and then they need to pay people to fill those stations with something for the 90% of the week when live sports aren’t on. That all goes into our cable bills too. We’re paying Steven A. Smith’s contract, and we’re paying for every Arkansas to build a palace a year on their athletic campus.
Absolutely our generations will be happy to pay something for our live sports. But if ESPN is $35/month would you pay that? Because that's about the cheapest any bundle was paying to ESPN last time I looked.
Ace: I think that number comes down if/when ESPN realizes it’s a really damn bad idea to pay Stephen A. Smith $3.5 million a year. ESPN’s a tough one to figure out because they’ve basically tried to be all of these different media types in one. But, no, I wouldn’t pay $35/month for one channel if anything resembling piracy still exists.
Brian: It will be priced at a point where a lot of people will subscribe. It's going to be super tough to sell people on 35 dollar ESPN when HBO and Netflix are 10.
Ace: And $10 for the ESPN networks is a no-brainer buy for me.
Adam: Me too. If I'm paying $35/month it'll be through Playstation Vue, where I can get a few other channels I'll actually watch.
Seth: Exactly my point. They're on a major bubble versus what the market will bear right now. Eventually this system will crash under its own weight or some helpful politicians of the future will jump in. I'm betting by that point the MAC has its own streaming service, and when the Big Ten goes back to the table, maybe they don't need a middle man.
Brian: That degradation will be slow for the same reason the NYT is still a big deal. The top thing in any market benefits from network effects.
Seth: I think it's hard to guess how slow, because a good chunk of that iceberg is already under the boat, if you take the metaphor.
Ace: I mean, we’re seeing a big part of the “collapse” of ESPN right now and it’s had zero effect on them broadcasting games.
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BiSB: There is another model out there: the MGoBlog Model of a hyper-focus on a niche market with the cultivation of a distinct readership/viewership/listenership. But who the hell would try that.
Ace: Ahem, Very Professional MGoBlog Model.
Brian: I thought there would be more of us by now. Like, there's no Notre Dame version of us.
Ace: My assumption is the lack of other us-es is in large part due to the sheer amount of work it takes up front. Making something out of nothing is a hell of a thing.
Seth: By now they'd have congregated on the SBNation site then. The best I can gather is that's a very segmented fanbase, with pockets of different types of fans all over the place who all want a different thing. NDNation, One Foot Down, readers of the Chicago Tribune, etc. are all large and extremely different communities who would not play well together. The Red Wings’ blogosphere is a lot like this too—the 19 people at A2Y are a different breed from WIIMT.
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| professionalism means having your own media badge |
BiSB: I thought SBNation would help to foster it, but I don't think that's happened to a great extent.
Ace: They almost have to be independent because SBNation-type networks inevitably gravitate towards General Clickbait.
BiSB: Look no further than the Iowa scene, where the personalities of Black Heart Gold Pants left.
Seth: They left because Eleven Warriors started sister sites for Iowa and Penn State fans on their platform. But 11W is already far down the clickbait road themselves—I stopped following their Twitter when it was taken over by 5-year-olds, and there’s so much content posted per day that I either have someone else tell me when their good stuff hits or I miss it altogether.
Brian: SBNation has some versions of MGoBlog in their fold. Their MMA site, for one, and I think their Celtics blog is big enough that the guys working on it think of it as their job.
Ace: NBA coverage in general is way out ahead of a lot of other sports in terms of depth and quality. Same with MLB. I’d bet it has a lot to do with the amount of advanced stats that are freely available and widely understood.
Seth: I think the point is the MGoBlog model only exists wherever there’s a personality on the top who’ll stick to his vision when it’s not economically viable and then stick to his vision when easy content for easy clicks is more economically viable. It’s a lifestyle business.
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Brian: And there's what I think the last model is: paywall-worthy information purveyor.
BiSB: The land of the 'crootin
Brian: That can be a recruiting site like The Michigan Insider or Michigan 247 or it can be a stats-plus organization like PFF, Krossover, or Synergy. But the key thing for them is "is there a population of people who will pay for your stuff." Kenpom is now in this category as well.
Ace: In the era of Patreon, there are also a select few writers who’ve generated enough of a following to making a living (or something like it) for stuff that would’ve been freelance work before. Joe Sheehan’s newsletter comes to mind.
Brian: Or that dude who did the Peppers video.
Seth: Yeah just as the free sites are gravitationally drawn to the lowest standards, paywall stuff has to hit a super high one. To use the cable analogy, there's HBO, then there's every other premium network.
BiSB: It's almost a subset of the prestige model in some cases.
Ace: Agreed.
Brian: I mean, we're kind of in that category as well except the great depth and breadth of the Michigan fanbase has allowed us to forgo the paywall. It is great to be a Michigan Wolverine blogger.
BiSB: How broad is the demand for X's and O's coverage? I know the people who have read this far (hi, both of you) are probably interested, but beyond them?
Brian: The X and Os numbers are not large but their interest is deep. We are consumers of X and Os and stats and lay out hard cash for it on a subscription basis.
Seth: The thing about Xs and Os is those articles take a lot of time to make sure you saw everything and got it right. And I think my last one got 1 comment.
Ace: It depends. Zach Lowe ended up being ESPN’s most prominent hoops writer through a lot of really in-depth play breakdown posts. It’s a tough topic to keep interesting, but if you can make the content accessible it can work.
Brian: UFRs do get a lot of comments, though fewer after Al Borges left.
BiSB: Does anyone want to talk about Barstool and the Ass&Tittification of sports media, or just let that sit?
Ace: That’s kinda always been a thing, right?
Seth: As long as the sports-consuming demographic looks like ours:
…the T&A will continue because that demographic largely shares a certain brain chemistry. But it also reinforces the demographic. I think female sports interaction numbers are soft; anecdotally I know so many women who’d engage more if the culture wasn’t such a turnoff.
Brian: General clickbait has a wing of its hall of fame dedicated to T&A.
Ace: My football preview magazines always had stuff like Cheerleaders Of The Big Ten.
Seth: With X's and O's it’s like consulting: Level of expertise is a big deal—there's a massive gap between what I can come up with and like, Chris Brown, and it’s going to take me hours of extra work and running stuff by people just to match what he can spot live.
Again, this goes back to the math of effort/reward. A diagram of a Michigan play that Harbaugh borrowed from Bo and a picture of a woman in a Michigan bikini probably get the same click-rate.
Ace: Clearly the market inefficiency here is diagramming the women in bikinis.
Brian: i... might read that
Ace: I’m a media visionary.
Seth: Alright guys, good talk. I'll let HUEL know that's the new direction we'd like to go.