Following a year of sports that saw new partnerships, viewership milestones, and an influx of new technology and data, Nielsen released its State of the Media: 2015 Year in Sports Media Report as the newest chapter dissecting the evolution of the industry. The year saw over 127,000 hours of sports programming available on broadcast and cable TV with American audiences spending 31+ billion hours viewing sports.
The report offers up nuggets such as a comparison of programming versus conversation on Twitter, the top advertisers for each of the sports, the continued power of audio, and a breakdown for each of the leagues. Cynopsis Sports spoke with Stephen Master, Senior VP of Sports at Nielsen, about this year’s findings, what trends are changing the sports and where there is cause of concern. The report itself can be accessed here.
Master on 2015: If you think about all the fragmentation of the media over the last ten years, with Netflix, DVRs and social, sports has remained a tent pole for viewers. Looking at the stats, in 2005, the top 100 programs watched live plus same day, saw only 14% of them in the sports category. Ten years later in 2015, with all the media fragmentation, 93% of the programs in the top 100 were sports. Sports continues to grow in importance as a genre of content as there are 127,000 hours of sports available on broadcast and cable now, which is up 160% from what is was ten years ago. It’s a great vehicle for advertisers.
On the dangers of digital metrics: There’s a lot of news in the marketplace that sees people talking about digital metrics. After a football game or any other sporting event, they’ll say they had 6 million uniques on their sites, the problem is that they are putting out reach numbers and that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. Initially, when Yahoo came out with their report about their NFL streaming numbers, they said they had 15.2 million viewers. So you’d think that that was pretty good and aligns very well with other NFL games and their TV audience. But the NFL games are using an average minute audience, so over the course of a three-hour game, the average NFL telecast gets around 18 million viewers watching at any given minute. But in Yahoo’s numbers, if someone watched for only 10 seconds, they were counted. When we recalculate the numbers so it is an apples-to-apples comparison, it was really closer to 1.6 million that Yahoo got over the course of the three hours, which would make it the lowest-rated NFL game of all time. So while everyone is talking about how people are streaming and watching games on their phones in 2016, if they are going to throw out big numbers, they’ve got to be apples-to-apples. That’s something that has to become clear in the marketplace.
On out-of-home viewing: We’ve known that out-of-home viewing has been happening for a while now, but we’ve never really quantified it. People have been gathering at bars and restaurants, such as Buffalo Wild Wings, to get together and watch sports. We never really measured that up until 2015. So if you look at the World Series on FOX, it’s pretty astounding the lift that the audience sees when you add them on top of the traditional ratings that are reported in the media. Not surprisingly, it is really big for person 18-34, and there is a lot of discussion about how people don’t watch television, but when it comes to big sports events, they are still watching, they just aren’t watching at home.
On the Women’s World Cup: This was such a huge story. When you think about it, it was the same matchup as four years ago with US/Japan and US/Japan. So for that to increase 67% in four years is remarkable. That team captured the imagination of the American public, and drew 23.6 million viewers across the English and Spanish broadcasts, which is a huge number and makes it one of the top 100 programs watched in the US last year. It wasn’t like you could say it was just because the US was in it. It wasn’t even like the matchup was more intriguing because they were facing the same team. The really interesting piece was the young women and they huge increase they had. Women 12-17 and 18-34 were up 48% and 43% respectively. They really engaged with the Women’s World Cup and the reach really spiked.
On which league is on a hot streak: The NBA was really hot again last year and they are continuing that momentum again this year. The Finals was the highest-rated Finals they’ve had since the Michael Jordon era and you can’t just attribute it to LeBron, because he’s been in the Finals for the past five years. They’ve done a really good job using social media and getting fans engaged and they also had great storylines heading in. Everyone’s really engaged and they get a lot of casual viewers to tune in.
