Duke4life831 wrote:KqWIN wrote:Duke4life831 wrote:
I understand Youtube didnt buy Esports. Like I said the League of Legends tournament by itself gained more viewers than the NBA finals. Overwatch or Call of Duty both garners more clicks on Youtube than the NBA does.
Im also not denying that streaming and digital is where all things will end up. What I am saying as of right now, there is no way YouTube, Hulu or whoever is going to drop 2.5 billion dollars a year for exclusive rights for the NBA. Even if we say YouTube buys the rights for 1 billion dollars a year and NBA monetizes the videos and collects on the ad revenue. They arent coming close to 1.5 billion in ad revenue. Also to be clear the 2.6 billion a year isnt for every NBA game, thats just for the nationally televised games and playoffs. The individual teams TV deals bring in between 9 million a year to 150 million a year (depending on the team). So lets say the total local TV revenue from games is somewhere around 1 billion per year. If the plan is to have all games on Youtube, that is another billion dollars per year that the NBA is going to have to find.
Just to put this into context, NYTimes and Business Insider have Pewdiepie's annual income from Youtube ads at around 15.5 million dollars. The NBA would need to be about 200x more popular on Youtube than Pewdiepie to reach 3 billion. The NBA isnt going to get 200x the amount of viewing time than Pewdiepie.
So again yes I agree that the transition to digital streaming is going to happen sooner or later. All Im saying is, its not going to be as smooth as many think, especially if the NBA doesnt pick up its numbers in the next few years. These digital streaming services arent going to get into a massive bidding war for something that gets a 3-4 TV rating and cant beat out a Seattle vs Minnesota regular season game when you got a closeout NBA finals game with LeBron James on the Lakers.
I get everyone likes to boohoo the TV ratings. But guess what Hulu and Youtube are seeing how those games compete with other things airing with Hulu Live and YouTube TV and its not a pretty picture. Again there wont be a huge bidding war for a league that is struggling to get viewers.
Let's be honest here. We don't know how much the NBA could make from ad revenue. We're basically making up fake numbers saying what portion of the $2.6 B value comes from ads and what comes from other value added. How do you know that the NBA won't pull $1.5B in selling their own ads on YouTube. They could easily get more viewers online than on TV if they put then NBA games on home pages. Livestreams of scoreboards of NBA finals games have millions of views. I think the actual games would do very, very well.
TV is a different realm than digital. You can't just use cable statistics to determine how effective a product will be on digital. The revenue streams, content delivery, and audiences are very different. That would be the same thing as using the digital numbers to show what's the most popular on TV. We know that's not true, there's a huge disparity there. While the cable numbers would be very concerning if digital wasn't an option, digital is an option and the online presence that the NBA has does matter in the digital space. Being appealing to a network is not the same as being appealing to a digital platform. The NBA should focus on the latter.
Im not making up numbers. Im giving you examples of what kind of ad revenue the biggest channels on Youtube make. PewDiePie is one of the biggest channels on Youtube, he gets 230 million views a month. These arent made up numbers, these are public numbers. And that is 12 months a year, not just the 8 months that the NBA season and playoffs are.
Also lets not overrate social media and overall popularity. For example, the UFC has more Instagram and Youtube followers than the NFL. The UFC is nowhere near the NFL when it comes to popularity.
Would the NBA get better numbers on Youtube compared to on ABC? Yes, Im not denying that. Im looking at Youtube having an overall revenue last year of 15 billion dollars, Im looking at the biggest youtube stars that get hundreds of million views a month that end up getting around 15 million dollars in ad revenue per year. Im looking at if the NBA just wants to break even with the TV deal they currently have right now, plus matching the revenue they bring in from local TV deals (because again the idea is to have all games on Youtube behind no paywall) which would come out to be at minimum 3.5 billion dollars annually.
Looking at all of that, no I dont see Youtube wanting to put up the annual money for broadcasting rights for a sport that has been hemorrhaging viewers for years. Whether that be because of losing popularity, illegal streaming (even though I would argue that if that was the main issue a sport like the NFL would be seeing bigger loss of viewers than theyre currently seeing since they have more young fans in total than the NBA).
It seems like many people on here arent willing to accept that maybe just maybe, the NBA isnt gaining viewers who watch games, theyre losing them. The NBA didnt lose 50-60% of its audience in 1 year all to illegal streaming. Its losing fans.
PewDiePie or any other YouTuber to NBA isn't a one to one comparison, you know that. If you think that views calculation is correct, then explain how overwatch league gets $60M with the viewers they get. And again, that $60 is not for ads. That is for exclusivity only. OWL grand finals did 1/3 of the NBA scoreboard livestream by the way. Views is not the only thing that factors into the money, and even it it was CPM is highly variable across different content.
Also I don't think that everything has to be on YouTube. I think YouTube homepage is the equivalent to an ABC broadcast. A paid subscription would be similar to paid cable, except significantly cheaper. An equivalent to a local broadcast would probably be the NBA allowing fans to pay to watch their local teams, which is only possible with cable currently. I think there's a million different ways they could configure this with one or multiple digital platforms. These are just possibilities. For the NBA in particular, I think all the digital solutions are better.
I don't disagree with you about the NBA losing fans. Personally I think the NBA has lost fans because the product sucks..which I've said a couple times now. The regular season is so incredibly boring and meaningless I'm wondering how the NBA can hold on to causals at at all. But no matter what the damage is or how it's caused, the NBA is still far better off on digital. A lot of people are calling for solutions that specifically address the cable audience, but I don't think that's smart because cable is a sinking ship for the NBA anyways. But yeah, the thing that's probably contributing most to the loss of fans/viewership is that the product sucks and that is a problem no matter where the NBA goes.
I guess our main disagreement is that you believe that the TV numbers are more important to digital than I believe they are. I just believe that there are drastic differences between TV and digital. TV indicators are not the same as digital indicators and vice versa. The NBA has some things going for them that probably don't mean much to the networks but actually hold a ton of value to digital platforms.
Going back to my very first post, I think the challenge the NBA facing is transitioning their digital presence into digital success and that's a totally different process than optimizing their product for TV. Digital is a completely different world and that's what they she be focusing on...how they can maintain and increase their presence and also how to monetize that most effectively. Every sports league will have to think about these things eventually.