This Week’s Obsession: The Future of Sports Media
[Comments temporarily turned off while we fix an issue]
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.
Couldn't read the whole thing. More uninterestin' shite in this article than a whole years worth of boring drivel that comes out of me wifes mouth. I miss the ye olde days when Lord Brian, Ace, and Seth, would write about our beloved football team. Could ya do that for some loyal wee lads?
on the cover of ESPN. Its like the artist said "I got khaki pants in there, good enough."
I disagree with your assesment of unbundling. its bad for consumers. Are people really better off paying $90 a month for 7 channels than $110 for 100 channels? Because that is where unbundling leads. Not to mention the death of a lot of networks or good tv. We are in a golden age of tv right now because networks can put a lot of money into putting together good tv. If the only way to remain viable is to charge $10 or less a month then you can't pay for the good tv anymore.
And the biggest mistake everyone makes when discussing it is believing things like Netflix will still only cost $10 a month. When every individual channel needs to protects its paying customers netflix will either be cut off from network shows (and this is part of why they are trying to create their own) or it will be much more expensive, sort of like a cable package if you want to get many things in one place.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/upshot/why-unbundling-cable-would-no…
If unbundling becomes a thing, I'd happily pay $20/month for HBO, $10/month for the ESPN family of networks, and $10/month for the BTN during football season. That plus the networks is about 99% of what I watch.
If you're going to watch a whole bunch of different networks, then yeah, you'd probably want a bundle. The idea behind unbundling is to give people who don't want that another option.
Didn't Netflix just set the record for the most expensive series in television history with The Crown? And they're set to do 5 more seasons of it.
I, for one, would gladly save $20 a month if it meant the only channels I received were also the only ones I watch. Although, I haven't been a cable subscriber for about 2 years now, so my opinion may not be the same as others.
However, more to your point: The market will only pay up to a certain amount for a channel (or more likely a package of channels in the case of ESPN). If ESPN charges $35 per month for access in an unbundled world but only gets 10 million subscribers, but dropping it to $15 a month would get them 30 million subscribers, which makes more sense for them?
What happens to the cost of Netflix (and Hulu, Prime Video, etc.) in this situation is probably true, but individual channels pulling content to keep their own coffers full would, in all likelihood, ultimately kill those channels, and they'd likely turn right back around and sell the rights to those already-aired shows.
There are an extraordinarily large number of channels that would cease to exist in an unbundled world, at least in their present form, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it would get people to go outside and be more active and social. At least 90% of television is junk anyway.
I've seen that 2014 NYTimes article cited before and it's bunk. It and you're making a supply-side argument that completely ignores demand. The cable company supplied all of those numbers, wherein they correctly state that they need to charge X for their ESPN contracts and Y for their Fox contracts, and Z for their Viacom, etc.
But the demand doesn't match that. Michigan fans aren't demanding Illinois Volleyball Coverage or even a new field for Field Hockey. But under the bundled model Michigan fans can put Comcast over a barrell until they agree to make my mom pay a premium for BTN (and then the college model w/ Title IX and amateurism rules pushes that money into weird and silly places). When you ask consumers straight-up what they'd pay to have ESPN channels, they'll say $10. If ESPN demands $35, very few people will pay it, and black markets will proliferate until ESPN comes down. Likely then ESPN has to go into bankruptcy to get out of their contracts. The only way they get people to pay that now is by cheating.
They might also explain that most of their content has to run super-lean (hi reality TV!) unless they're producing something that will either a) Translate to an aftermarket ownership medium (e.g. Planet Earth), or b) Go on a premium network, which are the Hong Kong of the communist cable market. With more choice over what they want to watch, TV viewers are gravitatitng to a few well-produced shows, but it's the internet, aftermarket sales, and Netflix--a la carte media--driving that.
They also have a very large upcharge over operational costs because they're a regulated industry that has to continually buy influence to subvert the wishes of a democratic public to avoid having to operate in a capitalist environment.
So no, high cable bills aren't funding good TV--they're funding a boondoggle and political protection money to keep it running. The idea that they can give you $110 in programming for $90 is an Urban Meyer level sales pitch: they'll sell you as little as they can for as much as they can, and consumers will pay as little as possible for as much of what they want as possible. Right now that market is out of whack because the supply side uses non-market intervention techniques to short-circuit it. They can believe what they're selling is worth $110, but in any economy, the price isn't what you want to sell it for, but what the buyer is willing to pay.
The whole point is that espn can't function at $10/month because even if every single person who has ever watched espn pays 10$ month (they wouldn't) they'd still have to file for bankruptcy. The same thing goes for FX, HGTV, CW, etc. Those channels can't function the way they currently exist based off just their audiences paying $10 per month.
That's the whole point, in an unbundled world you don't get to pay $10 for espn and $20 for netflix. Netflix has the money to create new shows because they get tons of money from people to subscribe to also watch other networks. How much are people willing to pay for netflix when its literally just netflix content on there and nothing else? Because that is what it would be. There are hundreds of articles about how undbundling is bad for consumers. Every pro unbundling argument uses current prices for things like hulu and netflix to creata a utopia situation and that just isn't how this would work. And that doesn't even take into account the reality that intenet providers are the same as cable providers so the costs of everyone's internet will be going up even as everyone needs increased bandwith to stream. So congrats on getting to pay $80 month for internet, $20 a month for espn, $20 month for hbo and $20 month for fox and be paying the same amount for 5 channels and internet as you do now for cable. What a win for consumers.
http://time.com/money/3658613/cable-tv-unbundle-downside-airlines-a-la-…;
Just look at the airline industry. People put the lowest baseline price above all other factors, in turn airlines created incredibly shitty low baseline fares with tons of add on fees so that by the time a person gets to a comfortable flight with a checked bag they are spending more as much if not more as before the existence of super cheap fares from the spirtis or fronteirs of the world. Yes some people benefit from those fares existing but the overall experience of airline passenger is going down not up as people increasingly have to pay for things that just used to be included
Why can't ESPN function on $10 a month from probably 20 million people? Is $240 million a year not enough? I mean, today that answer is "yes" but what specifically is it about sports that should cost that much? A lot of sports are quickly approaching the saturation point where consumers are not going to pay those exorbitant prices for cable access, tickets, jerseys, etc.
What would be truly great is if this has a cascading effect on sports in general by greatly reducing things like $20-30 million salaries for pro athletes, $80+ tickets for fans, $250 million buildings whose expense falls squarely on taxpayers, etc.
Let's look at it this way: ESPN paid $15 billion to cover Monday Night Football in 2011 (contracted to run through 2021).
Yes, they are better off paying $20 less per month if their consumption of content is unchanged, right?
What I kept thinking about while reading this are the top four Michigan blogs that I follow daily and how they fit these models:
- MGoBlog - In depth analysis, witty writing, solid forum for reader contributions, no real click bait or T&A.
- UMHoops - Great analysis, solid writting, lacks the "hot take" aspects that are a nice part of MGoBlog at times. Dylan has had to go the Patreon route to survive despite having a kick-ass site of content. I hope he's able to survive because we need a site that does quality work like his.
- Touch the Banner - Lighter mix of topical news, hot-takes, analysis, and T&A.
- Maize & Brew - The SBNation side of things. You can get the simple stuff here, but the analysis and hot takes are so erratic that it has become a tough follow. Some days I find something well done and interesting, then it might be weeks before I do again.
For me, it has gotten a lot harder to follow ESPN because I have to sift through so many stupid videos and hot-takes from morons to find the quality information. The Ringer isn't quite Grantland, but I find myself far more likely to stumble on an interesting or well-written piece there.
This is a good summary, though I only visit 1 & 2 daily; 3 & 4 only when someone here points out good content at one of them.
With the Xs & Os articles, I don't think the paucity of comments reflects a lack of interest or value in that type of content. Rather, I think it has to do with the way users consume and utilize that material.
There are certainly some people here (not only Space Cowboy, but he's certainly the clearest example) who can log in, see the latest Xs & Os article to drop, read it over, and immeditely make intelligent comments. But I can't really do that and having studied football schematics in some depth in recent years, I'd have to imagine most people are more like me than SC.
However, I do usually skim through--if not read in detail--those Xs & Os articles and kind of mentally note they exist. Then later, when I am trying to learn about a particular concept or analyze a given play, I refer back to those articles and read and study them (I usually also incorporate what I I learn into my own user-generated content, FWIW). But this could be months or years after the article first came out--so by then I am very unlikely to leave a comment on it.
I second this. I love Seth's technical write ups. But after reading them, the best comment I would be able to offer is "I didn't know about these things until I read this. Discuss."
Edit: Actually, I have engaged in good discussion for some of the stat analysis posts. I love those too.
To Seth's point about using your parents' cable subscription to stream at your house. That has to end some point, right? There has to be some technological way to tell that an account is being used to frequently stream cable offerings in a residence that is not the residence of the main account (as opposed to mobile connections, workplaces, hotels, random occasional places). At some point, the cable companies have to crack down on that. Cord cutting is not a minor problem anymore. Cable companies will eventually strike back at what they see as stealing. When that happens, it will be interesting to see what happens to the cord cutting movement.
I think the eventual pay a la carte method, at least for sports, won't be the channel concept we have now. It will be some form of payment for just live sports (i.e., no studio shows). Either paying for all of a specific content (NFL, NBA, NCAA, or even just specific team), or to all of ESPN's live sports broadcasts (or Fox's, etc.).
On the "news" side of sports media. I do think most reporting is going to eventually come from national writers who break major stories at ESPN, etc., the teams themselves, and then team or region specific sports sites providing smaller breaking news. The era of the "beat" reporter seems to be ending.
It's possible the cable companies will try to restrict cord-cutting and unauthorized use, but that counteracts their current push to get their content on as many platforms as possible. It seems like the majority of cable ads now feature people watching stuff on their phone or other devices away from their actual TV.
I don't think that has to be counteracting what they are pushing. To me, it's only counteracting if the only way to crack down on sharing accounts is to stop the streaming of cable networks entirely. There's obviously value in allowing streaming to current customers. There's additional eyeballs on your programming that you otherwise wouldn't have. However, cable companies' intention isn't to gain those eyballs at the cost of their carriage fees in a second/third/fourth household. There has to be a technological way to stop the majority of account sharing, while allowing legitimate out-of-home customer streaming.
I'd still be very interested in seeing what happens after a crackdown. Nobody I know that has gone the cord cutting route has done it without piggybacking on someone else's account for something. Would cord cutting still be as popular as it is if you could no longer stream sports, certain network's shows, etc. essentially for free? I have my doubts.
The technology certainly exists to do a much better job of restricting access to their content. There are a couple of things in the way of deploying it:
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They can't get together on this without subjecting themselves to anti-trust laws. If you've ever streamed something you didn't buy you probably already know things like your father-in-law's Wow account works on your Comcast internet, but your brother's Comcast account with HBO on it doesn't. That's because it's super hard for these companies to monitor who's using whose account from a competitor, even if they all would like to. If you're logging into a UVerse account at your Time Warner home, Time Warner can't ask UVerse "Hey, does this subscriber live at this address?" like it can ask itself. And finding a way around that function would mean a level of collusion that could get their whole industry Bell'd. Or they could make it so you can only use your streaming service at your own address, but then their competitors will hammer you with that.
- There are huge downsides to deploying security. Like all DRM, the more effort you put into protecting yourself from any theft, the less people want to be there. You could theoretically end all shoplifting if you had armed police officers stationed in all dressing rooms, but who the hell would want to shop there? The demographic of people who steal cable leans toward Young people who Don't Yet Pay for Cable. If their first interaction with Comcast is Comcast threatening legal action for something that costs you nothing, you probably just cost yourself a ton of money in the future. It takes a very special set of circumstances to be able to threaten consumers into buying your product, and those circumstances are the kind that don't tend to last in a free society.
The anti-trust argument doesn't move me. There is no per se bar on competitors communicating with each other or even working together. As long as there's no anti-competitive effect, it's kosher. I'm sure they could come to some agreement to share sufficient information to make this type of policing possible that would pass anti-trust muster. I'd also imagine that any argument that the cooperation is only intended to prevent widespread theft rather than attempts to limit competition in the market would be well taken in a rule of reason analysis.
I hear you on the second point. But what is the alternative? Cable companies are losing business in subscribers. Cable companies also tend to own content providers which are also losing money. They can't continue to bleed in two major parts of their business. I would say that the threats wouldn't be on the thief, but on the original subscriber (if the cable companies are smart). They lose their ability to stream, the thief loses the ability to steal but is never actually threatened.
Simmons said that Grantland didn't make money because ESPN didn't think it was necessary to promote it. He said in his podcast that he asked numerous times to have more visible promotion on the fron page of ESPN, but I guess they didn't see the need.
That's kind of bullshit. It was never the above-the-fold headline, but there was always a link to a Grantland story or two on the main page of ESPN. That's like 10,000% more visibility than any other startup sportswriting site out there.
i haven't looked, but i'll bet you that there's a stephen a 'hot take' video in the top five hits on espn.com. there's a still frame of him on one side, mouth wide open, and max kellerman on the other, looking confused and frightened. they never gave grantland that kind of real estate, at least not on a consistent basis.
Do UFRs get fewer substantive comments now that Borges is gone, or just fewer comments containing variations of "FUUUUUUCK" and facepalm gifs?
Every Borges UFR started with a handful of the "Borges knows more than you about football, how dare you criticize him!" comments, and devolved into flames from there.
Hope this is Kosher, but: for anyone who was interested enough to read this article, UMhoops.com absolutely falls under the category of "paywall-worthy" site, for any avid Michigan basketball fan (a lot of good B1G-general basketball info, too). They recently moved to the Paetron model. I have absolutely no affiliation to the website, just a huge fan; and I think those who appreciate things like UFR would like UMhoops' content.
Kosher? Hell man, I co-sign. Dylan and his staff produce awesome content and going to a Patreon model removes any vestigal competition between us that I think neither side ever felt existed in the first place. I'd like to advertise UMHoops here, and I'm sure we plan to link to them even more now to get more people supporting it and keep it going.
Logged in just to say that the Xs and Os articles are some of my favorites on the site. I've never played, coached, or been to a coaching clinic but I love the details of the game and it's really enjoyable to learn. The articles are so thorough that there's nothing to contribute in comments other than, "Thanks! This was super interesting."
And to all, I really appreciate the lack of T&A on this site. It helps that the only distaste that my wife has for this site is my time spent reading rather than also having to deal with that.
Great conversation. Interesting to hear your points as insiders in the industry.
I'd just like to point out that DRAFTAGEDDON falls into the EMBRACE DEBATE category for most of us. So please just remember that each time you guys talk about your fantasy league of which none of the rest of us are members.
The rage these days isn't to collect a bunch of talent and attract readers/viewers/listeners organically. People no longer want to digest and emulate smart, but rather feel smart without putting in any sort of effort to get there. So the gimmick on radio and at ESPN is to hire people to say outrageously stupid things like "10 reasons why T.J. McConnell is a better player than LeBron James" and have the community blow up. Then have unpaid interns troll everyone howling with WTFs to keep the threads going. Because WHAT the community says doesn't matter. What matters is clicks & comments of any nature; in the end they're stripped of context and presented as numbers to sell ads with. So, yeah, clickbait. But I think clickbait is misunderstood as a business model. If all you wanted is a visceral reaction you can just insult your own audience. Clickbait is about getting them to feel righteously superior and compelled to engage in the melee. You're never gonna go highbrow if your entire business model is kiting Dunning-Kruger morons.
Thing is, ESPN wants cable subscribers to dish out $35+ per month for their video version of clickbait when you can find idiots on the Internet for free. So for those of us who CAN afford $200/month to watch just one channel, we'd damn well better get our money's worth. Why the hell would we want to do that for the sports equivalent of Buzzfeed?? It's the state of journalism in general; every outlet is crying that they can't do real journalism if there's no revenue, when all the high-brow sorts are saying you abandoned journalism FIRST you schmucks!
MGoBlog is the exception that proves the rule. Michigan is one of the few schools in the nation that has huge numbers of alumni and historically has both academics and football continually ranked in the Top 20. MGoBlog directly caters to one of the few fanbases that can sustain such. It's self-limiting by design; it's never going to be a model for the market as a whole.
As for who will be paying for the accounts that grant access to streaming services, I'm guessing it will be very similar to what a group of my friends do. They're all professionals that own their own homes, most are married, and they're of the age where they are described as being the beginning of the Millenial generation. Their solution to the costs of cable has been for each one to pay for one service, and then they all share the access. Essentially, they've created their own co-op to manage the costs.
I'm curious if you are quite aware of how profitable Patreon can be. I follow several couples that are monetizing their sailing blogs with it. They've gone from paying for beer with ads and donation buttons to being able to fund marina stays and upgrades to their yachts with Patreon. Granted, that is based on producing good to excellent video content, but they don't lock all of their content behind a paywall either.
Seth, I will make sure to post comments on your X's and O's columns in the future. I love them and read them word for word. Thanks for the insight.
Speaking of subscription sites, just a reminder that umhoops.com recently started to use this model and is more than halfway to their goal.
Tip of the cap to you Brian.
So this is anecdotal but
"anecdotally I know so many women who’d engage more if the culture wasn’t such a turnoff."
Can you or someone explain this more? What culture and what turnoff?
The sexualized culture of guys talking about stuff.
Every time you see a "That's what she said" joke you're seeing that culture. Any time there's a picture or discussion of a woman posted for her sexual desirability. All of that stuff. There used to be Kate Upton gif threads posted here on the regular. It's one thing to tell someone "just don't click on the thread," but a lot of people don't want to interact in other threads with people they know are making crude jokes and ogling Kate Upton.
Personally I appreciate that this site has cracked down on that stuff. Not perfect, but better.
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