How creators are reshaping sports media

23:59Chris Stone:On the flip side, the traditional audience data is just much weaker than what you could get from a creator. So there is a bit of that, but we're still a long way from being a well-oiled machine, that creator economy around them.

24:12Nick Meacham:Now, before we move into talking about athletes, let's refer back to DAZN's DAZN 48 program that we mentioned at the top of the show. And you mentioned in the last Summer Olympics that the IOC had a similar content creator approach. And we've seen other people doing this. At this stage, things like the DAZN 48, is this innovation or is it more an admission that creators are now essential to the distribution strategy for these organizations?

24:39Chris Stone:So I don't know much about the DAZN 48. uh is it it's it's around the world cup right correct it's all 48 creators one from each country yeah so i think that is a great idea if you have the rights to the world cup i'm less sold on the idea until maybe a way for them to keep relevant yeah when they don't have the rights to the world cup but i just don't see how it can be a needle mover for the zone it sounds cool you know the zone 48 is a brand and stuff but i just don't see how it really makes it's going to make much impact i would wait i get away more if they did around the club world cup when they had the rights to that and trying to drive awareness that they've got the platform because most zone still has a bit of an awareness issue in many many markets and this will be a great great way to bring that all to life uh nbc celebrated a lot of the work they did with creators at the olympics um but yeah does not having the rights i can see this trying to be relevant but i just don't know how it really moves the needle there certainly is an admission that creators are essential from not necessarily distribution perspective, but from an awareness perspective and widening the net, I don't think they're going to be able to use any live rights.

25:50Chris Stone:So yeah, I don't think it's necessarily distribution needle mover, but I like the concept of people leaning into that. They can funnel audiences to their own platforms, a bit like the preferred platform concept, I suppose, in a different way.

26:01Nick Meacham:Yeah. And I guess we're doing this because creators are now becoming the storytellers, but I guess the question is if they are the storytellers what's the role for the actual broadcaster to

26:11Chris Stone:play these days hmm i would say that they at the very least they're filling the void between the main events they're taking away that responsibility of you know the magazine shows and all that other stuff that goes on where people would historically tune in to hear hear what gary lineker on bbc match of the day might have to say about the football that happened earlier in the day they They now have that being served to them by creators everywhere who have got opinions and publishing stuff on these different channels. So they fill the void in between those moments. And providing that dichotomy sort of continues to exist, it still gives the broadcasters a really valuable piece of the ecosystem.

26:54Chris Stone:It's when they start to lose that main event status and it gets threaded to the creators that they sort of lose a bit of their clout and impact. But maybe it's basically simple. They don't have to tell as many stories as they used to and let the others do the storytelling. Just enable them to do it. But I haven't spoken to any broadcasters that are actively thinking like that. I think they just think in this day and age, we keep hearing it. You've just got to do more of everything. And maybe more of everything means just enabling others to do it rather than doing it themselves, which would be enabling creators to make the most of the opportunity.

27:30Nick Meacham:And I think, you know, anecdotally, I'm one person. I think what you said there makes a ton of sense because I still go to the broadcaster to watch the main event, the live sport. It's the what do I do between? You know, I've got local Bengals podcast and YouTube channels that I listen to. I'm not necessarily going to ESPN or the traditional broadcasters for that in-between content. I'm really going there for the live event. I don't think, to your point, that's an excuse for those traditional businesses to not do those types of shows or not do that type of content. But in terms of the role they play, it definitely feels like at least just for me.

28:05Nick Meacham:And I would say that's consistent amongst my group of friends. Like they are going to Pat McAfee. They are going to other places. If we use the example of the NFL for Monday through Saturday content.

28:16Chris Stone:Yeah, I do think though, one thing that has caught my attention is the Pat McAfee example is, well, now he basically is ESPN. Yeah. you know, Monday to Friday and Saturday with college game day. He's basically on TV all year round. And so they are leaning into a sort of a personality driving the brand of that and that whole opinion-led content being such a core part of their show. You know, they spend so much money on talent, you know, McAfee and Steve Smith. Stephen A. Smith is there. They're spending collectively$50,$60 million just on those two guys. that's not nothing because they needed to fill the the airwaves they needed to fill the void of um of airtime frankly they've got to share but it seems to drive real engagement for them so i don't know i i think it's they don't need to lean into it but people like espn are still leaning into it they really value that whole connection with opinions and and um and personalities

29:17Nick Meacham:so moving on to athletes nick for years we've seen athletes lean into being celebrities some more than others, but it does seem slowly more and more athletes, they're becoming more media savvy and attentional with their choices. You look at Cristiano Ronaldo, he's got over a billion followers across all of his channels. I think he's just shy of 80 million subscribers on YouTube. And we've seen him not only producing his own high-end content, but we've also seen with Premier Paddle, he was live streaming and distributing from his channels. I think we covered that on a story in the past, but basically Premier Paddle tapping into his 80 million platform channel.

29:52Nick Meacham:We've got the likes of Erling Holland, you know, producing content. It's not all necessarily football soccer, but some of it's adjacent where he might be playing video games or some of it's completely non-football related. You know, it's what he's dressing up as the Joker for Halloween. It's also worth mentioning Bryson DeChambeau, sort of some of the independence and freedom that Liv offered him to be able to create his own YouTube channel, which honestly for Bryson and probably the case for most athletes can be a great PR tool because I know Bryson's always had a bit of a reputation but his youtube channel everyone talks about i kind of hate his youtube channel because it makes them look like a normal guy because they don't like his golf antics but again it's this idea of being able to do that and then i guess lastly they could potentially be creators but we'll call them athletes even if they're retired we've talked about pat mcafee we've talked about gary neville um with the overlap but these athletes essentially using their their platforms um to have some of that credibility to move in that space so i guess Nick, just the opening question when it comes to athletes.

30:48Nick Meacham:We've seen athletes with social media presence in the past, but what do you think is driving this shift towards what seems like an intentional choice to produce long-form content? It's a good question.

30:59Chris Stone:I feel like the growth of building your own media brand, media business, and audiences, you kind of think of it as like an investment. It's an investment in the longer term by having an established follower base on these channels particularly if your priority is your career and your performance on the pitch and you might not have the time to commit to doing a lot of off stage or off field stuff if you can just do enough to build a good base of visibility and awareness it not only leads to immediate commercial opportunities but it sets you up if you can walk away from competition you're not Ronaldo but like let's say the tears beneath him and have multiple million millions of fans who follow you across these different channels that's kind of like setting you setting you up for success longer term you just got to find a way to turn that audience into value and you're with the right people behind you that it should be almost not a guarantee but close enough to it and you are seeing a lot of athletes lean into not only sponsorship and investment deals but definitely sorry sponsorship and endorsement deals but also investment related concepts and having again a platform an audience base to be able to market those investments as well as investing in yourself to be able to get sponsor-led deals makes a truckload of sense.

32:14Chris Stone:So, look, I think it's a no-brainer for any athlete not to be investing in building a team around them to maximize that opportunity. Because if you don't, and then you get to your end of a career and you've been flying under the radar your whole time, there'll be some athletes that will just pass you in the street and no one will know you. And there'll be the same quality and standard of athlete who's invested into that, who will be a household name across the world, across the country that everyone will recognize just because they've invested into that. And that sets them up for lots of commercial success.

32:46Nick Meacham:Yeah, and I think to your point, Nick, like Ronaldo and Holland don't belong in that category. Like they are superstars, but Pat McAfee was a punter. And that's not to be disrespectful to punters, but like not exactly a glory position in football. And you might recognize him in the streets because he's really tall, but Peter Crouch isn't exactly a superstar. Peter Crouch has gone on to have a really good career doing some of the content that he does with Paddy Power. And like, I think there's a lot of example of those sort of lower level athletes that have been able to do that. And I think to your point, Nick, as glamorous as sports is for some people, it's not retirement money.

33:17Nick Meacham:There's still things that need to go on after that. But I guess, Nick, one question with those athletes, what's interesting is we often see, and this has been backed up with conversations that I had with Martin Raffel from Babe Bison and other people I've spoken to by YouTube, often we see non-sports content can actually perform their sports-related content when they're doing Get Ready With Me or stuff like that. Why do you think that is the case that athletes who are known for their sports, actually the content that has nothing to do with sports actually outperforms?

33:51Chris Stone:I don't. I mean, I don't really, really know. Other than I think it is a bit of that you want to really, it's been consistent for a while now that behind the scenes, off-field stuff where you get to know the people. People love people. People are interested in people way more than I think we as sports fans kind of really accept or understand. At least it's taken me 40-odd years to work it out and understand that actually the people behind all the sports stuff matters way more than I really took for granted. So I think it's the ability to access and learn about the personalities and the field. As you think about fandom, sometimes we like a sports athlete because they're cool.

34:31Chris Stone:Sometimes we hate someone because they come across as arrogant and so forth. And the Bryson DeChambeau is a great example of how you can change your audience's perception. Within 12 months, he's completely transformed the perception of him in the golfing world. So, you know, fair play to him. I want to come back quickly, though, to your question before about sort of like the athlete side of things and why they're building media businesses. One thing I've been thinking about is that really the economy around the athletes and the media that they do is actually it's super tight. So it goes, the money that they generate goes to them, the families that they have, the staff that they have supporting.

35:14Chris Stone:And that's about it. Most of the money just sort of goes to that sort of very small group of people. And I think that's the interesting part of all this is if you go through the traditional channels, normally that revenue, not necessarily, I'm not saying fairly, does get spread through the entire ecosystem. And that could be to the leagues and the governing bodies, but also to the athletes, coaches, and also to families and the grassroots level. There's a whole ecosystem built around filtering that stuff through. Now, when you look at this athlete economy, whether it's NIL, it's happening in the US, or just building around a media business around you, that ecosystem and that economy gets really, really small.

35:54Chris Stone:There's only going to be a handful of people that are getting value out of that unless you are engaging with a major agency that's leading that for you. So I just think it's something that's a little layer to all this, that if we do continue to rely upon athletes and creators and and going down that that that line the risk is that the rest of the sports ecosystem starts to struggle to get their piece of the pie that drives the economy around whatever they whatever they do whether it's the again the coaches and the athletes and the support staff or people like us and who work around the industry like it does get just a lot narrower which i think is something to for us to be a little bit of aware of and see how we can i guess navigate all that in the future.

36:37Nick Meacham:Well, I think that was part of the point, not to put words in your mouth in your presentation about the eight realities. One of them was, we talked about our content creators and athletes of the future. And part of that argument was they're not the future, they're the now, they're already doing it. But I think the other part that you mentioned, we talked about the top of the show is athletes having bigger followers than the leagues. And I guess the issue is currently there's a disconnect between the attention that the athletes are getting that isn't necessarily directly driving revenue for the league.

37:04Nick Meacham:So we can celebrate that, hey, more athletes are getting involved and being more media savvy, and this is a positive. But at the moment, there isn't, at least what I can tell, like you can say if you're a fan of Erling Haaland, he moves to another country that might benefit the league because they're a fan of Erling Haaland. But that content that you're talking about, it's still not directly going to whichever necessarily league or team that he's in. There's still that missing gap between the two ecosystems, connecting those together to generate real value.

37:31Chris Stone:100 and i do think i don't really know how we necessarily solve that only way i can think about it as a possible solution is that the teams what they could what the teams could do in that situation around an athlete is they can be the ones enabling more of that all the commercial side for an athlete and and and please they they've got the the the ecosystem the framework the commercial expertise in-house and really enable that but there needs to be some sort of filtering of how the commercial stuff flows through the club and into the players. But I think that's really tricky to navigate and most athletes will want to control their destiny far more than give the rights over to the club at hand.

38:14Chris Stone:But an interesting look back in time is, I remember it was quite a groundbreaking deal at the time, but it was when Wayne Rooney was playing in Man United and he was renewing his deal for Manchester United and it was a record salary and part of the interesting aspect of that he sold his ip in a way which i'm struggling to remember the specifics of yeah that basically gave the club way more commercial control to his right so they paid a premium to the much higher salary than everyone else was getting but they had control of his commercial destiny a little bit more now there's pros and cons about that model but a guarantee that he didn't have to think about his commercial stuff too much the club did all the work he had to do what they told him to do from a representation perspective, which was more than what the other athletes would do.

39:00Chris Stone:But they did all the commercial work as a result of that, and he was able to cash in. I have no idea whether that was a worthwhile deal for them in the long run, but it was an interesting way that they were to sort of like, what do you call it? Integrate, I guess is the word I'm trying to look for. Integrate the athlete and the club together so the commercial goals were the same. I just wonder if that's going to be something that might play out again in the future? Because I don't see that happening at the moment. I feel like they're going further and further away from each other right now.

39:31Nick Meacham:Yeah, interestingly, that was a, I can't remember the specifics of it either, but it was something that we spoke about when I was doing my master's in sports law when we were talking about intellectual property. Fun story for you, Nick. Even when I was a D3 college football player, we're talking, Jesus, I'm old now, almost, you know, 18 years ago. Every start of the season, we had to sign a contract. And this is part of why NILs came about is that the NCAA had intellectual property rights to you for the entirety of your life. Didn't matter if you graduated. So, you know, famous example, Barry Sanders, one of the greatest running backs of all time.

40:03Nick Meacham:The NCAA had exclusive access to his IP rights, even though he's graduated 30, 40 years ago. So yeah, like some of that stuff does come up. I think that's why some of the NIL stuff has come up is because you basically had to sign away all of your rights. And that's why, you know, even though, you know, they've banned or taken away Reggie Bush's Heisman. They can still keep using his IP because you had to sell, I don't want to say sell, you had to sign away your IP rights even after you graduated. So yeah, how that stuff's all evolved over the years is definitely going to have changed.

40:35Chris Stone:Yeah, and I'm not sure NIL is the solution, but it's probably broken the dam or the barriers that were in place of the result of that legacy model to try and hopefully come to a different place. But I'm definitely not a college expert, but that doesn't sound like a healthy environment longer term for people. That's for sure. No.

40:51Nick Meacham:And one of the questions we talk about, Nick, and I bring this up when I'm onboarding the new employees and I'm giving them my speech, kind of giving about the sports industry, is there is quite a gap, Nick. And the thing I try to explain to him is using my football, for example, and I touched on this a little bit, is at the moment, in terms of attention, I'll watch the Bengals for three hours on a Sunday. I'll probably consume 20 hours of content on YouTube and Spotify from third-party content creators. And actually, despite the value of media rights, none of that is directly monetizing by the league or those teams.

41:28Nick Meacham:It is those third-party content creators. And there's, I would argue, an even significantly larger amount of value being left on the table because that... And I don't know how you close it, right? How are you going to monetize third-party content creators? I don't know. But I think it's more to just demonstrate if attention is the true metric, there's just massive amounts being untapped for the sports world? Yeah.

41:54Chris Stone:Yeah, I don't really know how to solve all that, but that is the number one conundrum I've got. I've used this example a few times, but yeah, me as an NFL fan, or let's say even me as an NBA fan, I wouldn't say I'm a fan of the NBA. I like checking it out every now and again. I've watched some of the highlights from the final series we just talked about. I've listened to more of Bill Simmons' podcasts at the gym the day after those few games that I have watched of any live NBA for this entire season. Now, there are at least more mature ecosystems around podcasting, around Spotify and video that allows them to generate their own ROI from the fact that they're able to talk about those things.

42:39Chris Stone:and they're obviously there they are helping build that level of fandom around the sport around the sports property so that so there's sort of just like an acceptance of a bit of quid pro quo there you're helping build our audience you're allowed to talk about us off you go and that's that's all fine but it doesn't feel like it's really optimized in the right way does it at some stage I just feel like we're going to end up with some sort of really empirical way of measuring attention that turns into direct revenue but we are very much not there and i don't expect to get there any anytime soon because everyone wants to like maximize their opportunity right so you know on social media and so forth yeah they've run they run created chat what do you call them like um creator initiatives i'm trying to think about another word the pga coordinated one a couple years back i think yep yeah that sort of thing and that you know the tiktok's tiktok will do rev share and YouTube do rev share and those types of things to help facilitate the economy.

43:36Chris Stone:But that reach is just the 1%. That doesn't really reach 99 % of the rest of people producing that stuff. So it's definitely not an environment that is built for everyone to prosper. You do have to get through or pass a certain threshold before you're able to make ends meet, basically, which in some ways you could think is a good thing, but it would be kind of cool if everyone was able to get proportionally the amount of revenue they generated from the amount of attention they got. I'd love that to be the case.

44:08Nick Meacham:Yeah. Well, Nick, I actually saw there's a new, I actually know one of the founders. There's a new service where basically you pay influencers, but they get paid based on the amount of engagement they get. So usually they might have a standard, hey, if you want an Instagram story, it costs this much. If you want that, it costs this much. but basically you go to the service you say i have five thousand pounds in my budget split that up by views or whatever and then it pays them based on so basically you're not paying for product you're paying for performance um it almost sounds a little bit like that nick where it's kind of like um you know giving it for the actual performance as opposed to the product i think that's an interesting concept in terms of like trying to measure um actual engagement what the value is

44:50Chris Stone:behind that yeah like it's back to the point before about the ecosystem there's all these different ways of making money but it's not it's not people are trying stuff but no one's got the magic bullet here uh for to solve all this and make sure that it's all seamless through the whole way uh through the ecosystem uh so i think i'm not sure if we'll ever get there but uh it's

45:11Nick Meacham:cool to talk about yeah well last question nick just to wrap things up on this i think if you listen to this podcast it's clear that this is not a fad it's not a phase it's something that is very much a part of the ecosystem, how much one depends on the other or how much one supports the other, whatever. But Nick, in terms of the broadcast industry, how quickly do you anticipate this shift? Or is it something that the broadcast ecosystem is so ingrained that we might not ever hit a particular threshold or just might not really accelerate the rate we might think, given what we've said? Because you also said here, it's not all rose-tinted glasses for everybody.

45:51Nick Meacham:There are the examples of the people that have hit it big time, but there are certainly millions more who never hit that threshold to get to the Pat McAfee level, the Mark Goldbridge level. Like you have to do quite a bit of work before you really kind of break through. So how much change would you really expect? Or are we kind of at a rate of adoption that this is probably going to be the status quo?

46:14Chris Stone:That is the trillion dollar media question, Chris. I mean, I have no idea where we're going, but it feels like the effort, the attention that all these big tech platforms are creating and the fact they're able to use people at no cost to them to be able to drive this attention, drive engagement on their respective platforms. It's an arms race now. They're all investing into different ways to do it, whether it's supporting the creators themselves, buying live rides, creating new events, driving e-commerce. and I just don't know what that means for the traditional media landscape. I know that it's only going to continue to be a focus for all these big tech companies.

46:54Chris Stone:There are some studies that show that people are stepping away from focusing on engaging on those sorts of big tech platforms, but they aren't necessarily going back to the traditional ones and that's kind of the conundrum. So I don't know where we get to. I do think you're going to see more traditional media leaning into more creator-led content primarily because it's actually also often cheaper to create than some of the other stuff that's out there but also it does drive a lot of engagement and interest and it threads directly to social media channels so succinctly there's a there's the creator's ability to market themselves on those channels that allows that to be amplified and to drive audiences to the traditional but I think we're going to go through a lot more disruption before it gets more before it calms down and frankly long may it continue because it gives us a lot of lot to talk about.

47:43Nick Meacham:Absolutely. Well, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Stream Time Sports. As you're hearing this, the World Cup will be in full swing. Hope you're enjoying the football there. I'm going on a two-week holiday. I'll be back in the States next. I'll get to watch it live. I'll let you know how the coverage is over in the U.S. versus what we'll see back in England, but I'll be eating lots of smoked meats, got the briskets all ready to go. My parents have a kegerator in the barn, so basically it fits the size of a keg. You can pour your own pints in the barn it's going to probably be anywhere between the low 90s to you know high 30s low mid 30s for the people speaking celsius so yeah nick i'm looking forward to a sports filled vacation back

48:21Chris Stone:at home i'm really intrigued to hear just how you see the adoption and the engagement with the local community given particularly obviously you know whether irrespective of what the u.s does so yeah good lot to talk about when you get back but i'm very much i've already booked a few calendar invites into my schedule to make sure I get a chance to watch Australia, England, and Sweden play at different stages in the early phases. So I'm looking forward to it as well.

48:48Nick Meacham:Absolutely. Well, everyone, thank you again once for joining us, and we'll catch you on the next episode.