Should YouTube be Bidding on Baseball?
Could the video juggernaut use more tentpoles?
One of the things that seems clear this year in the television ad market is this:
There was a sports upfront - which was urgent and fast
and the ‘everything else’ upfront, which has lacked urgency - given the glut of supply and the ongoing declines in linear
As someone said to me at Cannes, “I’m not sure why anyone needs to buy the ‘Masked Singer.’” Certainly not right away at least. You sure don’t need grab any “Colbert” inventory.
For YouTube, you could argue, this hardly matters. The company’s share of TV viewing continues to pull away (so much so that it’s making Netflix look stagnant), and it’s where young people congregate. The company just closed out a nearly $10 billion ad quarter, with revenue jumping 13% year over year. Far be it from me to give a company growing at that rate any advice.
After having spent the past week among a bunch of top media buyers and sellers, it’s clear just how much tentpoles - which in TV are mostly sporting events - still really matter, at least to certain brands and buyers. Sports, for example, keep a Warner Discovery or Paramount in the upfront game, and certainly elevate a giant like Amazon - as they are comfortable and predictable - and considered ‘marquee.’
To be sure, there are lots of creators and YouTube shows that are ‘marquee’ to their audiences - but unfortunately for the company, those controlling the budgets are often of a different generation.
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“I believe YouTube continues to take audience share from traditional television, and this trend has been happening year after year,” Known Chief Media Officer Kasha Cacey told me during a recent pod interview at Cannes, as part of my ongoing series with Vueplanner. “The challenge, however, is that YouTube content is fundamentally different from TV content—it's less predictable. You don’t always know exactly what you're going to get. For brands, that uncertainty can still be a hurdle.”
“I think if you're from my generation, you might look at it and think, ‘This isn’t high-quality content,’” Cacey added. “But I also have a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old, and I know that’s where they spend all their time—literally all day….There’s a kind of snobbishness in media sometimes, where people say, “I only want my brand next to premium content.” But the truth is, that’s where the eyeballs are.”
Sports could go a long way in overcoming that snobbishness. There’s a reason that YouTube is broadcasting a single NFL game from Brazil. Not only is it a great sales carrot to dangle, it’s an ideal audition for the league and others. It’s one thing to deliver NFL Sunday Ticket. It’s another to show how different/modern, and potentially more powerful, a YouTube global sports broadcast could be.
Why stop there? I’ve said before that YouTube should maybe have grabbed the NBA. That ship has sailed. But:
Major League Baseball is in play. CNBC said that rights are down to Apple (which would kill the league’s reach IMO), NBC and Apple are in play. Why not YouTube? You could argue (correctly) that MLB is by nature, a slow-moving, not ideal for young people sport. Then again, local sports rights are sticky, and YouTube could surely do a lot to jazz up the presentation of the national pastime
(Side note - not they asked, but MLB might need YouTube more than it needs the league. It’s amazing how poorly the sport markets itself to young people (Where is the baseball version of “Quarterback”?) Burying a shrinking sports on Apple TV makes zeros sense to me).
Could YouTube ever consider an acquisition, such as DAZN? The price would probably be astronomic, as the global streaming service has raised a ton of cash. And who knows what regulators would think. But I have to say, I was impressed with the British streamer’s ability to create an event this summer with the FIFA Club World (it wasn’t perfect). That kind of global event seems ideal for YouTube, which also wants to push further into subscriptions
Or, you could argue that YouTube doesn’t need sports, since it has so much traction around sports through creators and athletes.
I heard from multiple buyers this past week about how as sports ad rates explode, they are looking at partnering directly with athletes and sports influencers, to capture the cultural impact and audience in a more efficient fashion. Plus, as many have noted, this is how many younger fans engage with sports - instead of actually sitting through a three-hour game. You might see more advertisers saying to themselves, ‘why do I need to pay exorbitant rates for live ads in sporting events, when I can get in on the ‘around-the-game’ conversation and culture much cheaper and directly?’
Madison and Wall noted that Google execs reported that 40 billion hours of sports content are consumed annually on YouTube.
So maybe YouTube simply needs to package up a Sports Creator/Athlete network of its own, and bring that to the market in a way that is comparable, or translatable to tentpoles moments on TV. Maybe they already do this to a degree? There seems to be a better way to ‘upfrontize’ this access.
“One real issue is how you buy media [on YouTube],” said Cacey“Because often, you don’t know what kind of content your ad will appear next to. Buying based on audience is great, but it’s still not a perfect system.”
Nobody in media has one of those. But given YouTube’s huge runaway in streaming share over the past two years - you could argue that they should be running away with this year’s upfront.