Katie Nolan’s
Fox Sports 1 show debuted with 99,000 viewers March 15, a number that is twice as big as I was expecting. But it’s also one that’s well below the numbers of people who regularly watched her online show.
During the week of Feb. 23, Bill Simmons’ “Grantland Basketball Hour” aired four times on ESPN2. The shows combined to average just 155,000 viewers that week, a fraction of the audience that downloads Simmons’ wildly successful podcast each week.
And over on NBC Sports Network, “Men in Blazers” pulled just 48,000 viewers March 14, a far cry from the number of people who click on the podcast each week.
Why do people with big digital audiences still desire to be on television, regardless of the time slot? Consistently, digital stars who expand to television find smaller and less passionate audiences. Are we any closer to a day when someone with a big digital audience turns down a television offer?
That’s not going to happen any time soon, thanks largely to
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Sports execs are patterning new shows such as Fox Sports 1’s “Garbage Time,” ESPN2’s “Grantland Basketball Hour” and NBCSN’s “Men in Blazers” after the shows of Jimmy Fallon (top, with Kristen Stewart) and Jimmy Kimmel, whose segments can be sliced into digital video-friendly clips.
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Jimmy Fallon and
Jimmy Kimmel, two television stars who have cultivated huge digital audiences. In fact, sports TV executives say they are less interested in television ratings for these kinds of shows. Rather, they want to develop programming that drives traffic to all of their platforms.
Sports TV executives are patterning their studio shows after Fallon, Kimmel and “Saturday Night Live,” shows that are produced in a way that video clips are easy to share in social media. “SNL” clips are uploaded to YouTube almost as soon as they air on NBC.
Last month NBCUniversal President and CEO Steve Burke said 70 percent of Fallon’s overall views come from digital, not television. At deadline, a clip of President Obama reading “Mean Tweets” on Kimmel had registered more than 18 million views, an astounding figure.
Sports TV studio shows are following the same pattern. That was the idea behind Nolan’s show, “Garbage Time.” Pete Vlastelica, Fox Sports executive vice president of digital, who seemed happy the day its debut ratings came out, was more enthused by some of the show’s digital numbers than television.
“For a show like this, we’re also including online viewership of the clips in our overall assessment,” Vlastelica said. “We’re designing this show to capture that part of the audience engagement.”
Fox posted the full show on both YouTube and Facebook. It also posted seven clips of the half-hour show on those platforms, from the 20-second intro to a five-minute bit with comedian Adam Carolla. “TV ratings are just one part of this story,” Vlastelica said. “We’re looking at total multiplatform views over a three-day period, and television is one of those platforms.
NBC Sports Group has the same idea with “Men In Blazers,” which started out as a successful podcast. Now, the show resides across all of NBC Sports’ platforms and helps supplement the group’s English Premier League content, said Ron Wechsler, senior vice president of original programming and development at NBC Sports.
“We have Premier League rights, so being able to incorporate them into our world helped create instant community,” Wechsler said. “That was really important for us.”
The idea of slicing up studio shows into easily shareable clips isn’t new for sports networks, though it’s happening a lot more frequently these days, according to several sports TV executives. On an SXSW panel in Austin earlier this month,
ESPN Radio host
Colin Cowherd said that he used this strategy of short segments during the weekday afternoon show “
SportsNation.” Cowherd said he found that shorter TV segments are more likely to become viral videos online.
Speaking on a separate SXSW panel, Marie Donoghue, ESPN executive vice president of global strategy and original content, agreed with Cowherd. Comparing Simmons’ podcast with the “Grantland Basketball Hour,” Donoghue said the TV segments have to be shorter and tighter with a lot more video.
“It’s pretty easy to translate TV to digital,” she said. “If it’s a good segment on television, it’s a good segment on digital.”
Even though the show’s producers have adapted for television, Donoghue said Simmons and Jalen Rose have tried to bring digital elements to the television show. “We actually are finding that we’re translating an online podcast sensibility because if you watch all our sports television, whether you do games or studio shows, people don’t really talk like they do in real life,” Donoghue said. “We do that on podcasts and we do that a little bit on the ‘Grantland Basketball Hour.’”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
