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New Threat To Traditional Sports Leagues: Millennials Prefer Watching eSports (venturebeat.com)
Professional sports leagues "officially have a millennial problem," writes VentureBeat, citing some interesting findings from L.E.K. Consulting.
- 40% of millennials prefer watching esports to traditional sports
- 26% of millennial eSports enthusiasts reported a significant uptick in eSports viewing over the past year
- 61% of esports followers said they spent less time watching TV over the past 12 months, and 45% said they had cut back on traditional sports viewing
- Together millennials -- ages 17-34 -- and Generation Z peers -- age 16 and under -- comprise 45% of America's consumer base
"At a certain point, this comes down to a new form of media better serving an upcoming generation of consumers," concludes VentureBeat. "Esports leagues are all online. Most matches stream for free on sites like Twitch. They are available on the web or through smartphone apps. Competitive gaming is easily accessible, and it lives where Millennials are already spending their time."
Maybe that's why Major League Baseball's video streaming company recently paid $300 million for the right to stream League of Legends through 2023.
Millennials are stupid. So are eSports.
"Together millennials -- ages 17-34 -- and Generation Z peers -- age 16 and under -- comprise 45% of America's consumer base"
Whats the entertainment spending power of that group as a percentage compared to others?
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
You mean to tell me the younger generations don't like watching 300 pound men dress in up bullet-proof equipment to be able to run into each head first @ high speeds!?!? Or that MMA stuff with people getting kicked in the head and knocked out?
Esports doesn't:
Require tax hikes to pay for bazillion dollar stadiums every decade lest the team pitch a fit and threaten to leave. Then, to add insult to injury, make you pay for parking, overcharge for shitty food and watered down beer, then make you pay through the nose for tickets. Good tickets are reserved for those with very deep pockets.
Have competitors who make $20, $50, $100M dollar contracts. They throw a fucking ball for fucks sake.
Require a subscription to E$PN or some giant Sports Package just to watch your team play.
I don't really watch neither of them but if I had to make a choice, it wouldn't be traditional sports. Fuck those greedy bastages.
The real threat to sports is the same as the threat to everthing else in the culture: politics. ESPN decided to side against their audience when they fired Curt Schilling, just like Target decided their stores were mostly for transsexuals. Colin Kapernick appeared to choose sides against America during the national anthem at the beginning of games.
There's no end of anti-Trump hatred among celebrities and sports figures, and a lot of this hatred bleeds over into hatred of the millions of Trump voters, and then, like any other obsession, threatens to expand from there.
The audience is deciding they don't need to spend time and money on entertainers and merchants who hate them, so we see the NFL, and ESPN, and Target struggling, and we see low movie attendance on Memorial Day weekend.
Yet one more thing Millennials differ from other generations... Millennials favority sport: posting crap on FB!
I would rather watch eSports than real sports. Hint: I have never watched eSports.
In the time it takes to watch other people play one game of baseball, or even League of Legends, I could win a few games of Hearthstone. I'd rather win at something I can do myself, than watch other people win at a level I can't play at.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Assumption: Referenced on other sites, Mellennials make up 23.3% of the US populace. Claiming 45% including 16 and younger skews the rest of the "data"
Claim: 40% of millennials prefer watching esports to traditional sports
So 40% of 24.3% (so we're looking at 9.32%) prefer esports to sweaty sports.
Isn't that terribly easy to skew? Survey question: "Do you prefer esports or real sports?". If I cannot say "Neither, you insensitive clod" then it skews quickly towards esports. If forced to choose with a BFG to my head, the one I can play in the background on my monitor and ignore while I do other things is the choice.
Claim:26% of millennial eSports enthusiasts reported a significant uptick in eSports viewing over the past year
So 26% of the "enthusiasts" saw an uptick. Umm, define enthusiasts. Even if the assumed full 9.32% that chose esports over sports, 26% of that is just 2.4%
Come on, 2.4% of the populace started watching more esports and the rest seems like inflated presentation.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Never met a male so effeminate that they would reven refuse to watch sports much less what that garbage. Sounds like this writer hates men and is lying to insult us. We know how his kind be.
Start picking your team now,
This is a typical cycle. The old is disregarded by the new generation for the next big thing. Those on the bleeding edge can profit. But now in our corporate sponsored world, it is cheaper for the old vanguard to wait and just purchase the next big thing instead of trying to innovate. Of course, they wouldn't be buying it if they didn't think it was worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than they were paying (otherwise, how could they should 7% growth of income every year).
Apart from Ice Hockey, US mainstream sports are a snoozefest. With the ever decreasing attention span of young people is it little wonder that audiences are voting with their feet.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
The reason I and my friends watch sports is to see feats that we can't perform. Mashing buttons, regaurdless of the result, is not as interesting or compelling as 2 teqms of athelets playing a physical game we like at a world class level using more than just their finger tips.
Tired of the general populace subsidizing sports channels.
https://www.outkickthecoverage...
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
It should also reduce sportspeople's salaries to less unreasonable levels. There are a huge amount of savings which can be made there before it will affect anything.
I'm old and better!!
I worked harder!! And when I had kids, I told them to take it easy! Being lazy is the way to go!!
I said, "Son. Work is stupid. Just cruze, jerk off and everything will come your way!"
That's what every one does, right? Why my grandpa raised 5 kids, supported a wife, had a house and and a car on one salary!
Wait! He was an evil GM union electrician. How dare he get the benefits of the capital class with group bargaining!
Management NEEDS complete control so they can reep the benefits of their lobbied laws AND globalization! because I benfit from it!!
See, for every deal they make, I get 52 cents in my IRA!
It doesn't matter that Grandpa lived comfortably on his GM pension - PENSION. No! I got my high fee IRA/401K with shitty returns and my Social Security - if it still exists (thanks Republicans) to fall back on.
Saved more - Libertarians? Well, I used to drink your Kool-Aid and it's wrong. See, I got stuck in 2001, and 2008 - investing in blue chips - boring crap not the high flying crap like today's Tesla or Amazon, but GE, GM, IBM, - BLUE chips!!! I DID NOT take risks!! The stock market was SAFE - RIGHT!!!! Privatization was SAFE - RIGHT!!!!
I still got screwed!!!
ESPN (and the US sport in general) is an exercise in determining how deeply they can screw their customers. They don't offer any real web streaming, they require expensive cable subscriptions, they have geographic restrictions and so on. And on top of that, all of the "traditional" US sports are BORING - matches might take many hours and are usually excruciatingly slow with all the timeouts and replacements.
Is it such a wonder that people who are not slaves to American Hand Egg prefer something more alive and user-friendly?
Good number perspective.
More number perspective.
1% of USA is like 3 million people with say (worst case) $2000 of disposable entertainment dollars a year. That could mean 6 billion dollars potentially in play. Only 1% listen to classical music --it's still around. You can keep a whole lot of people in business with billion dollar markets. The NFL is only worth about 6 billion.
The biggest movie this weekend was "Wonder Woman" bringing in 100 million. That's only 10 million at $10 a throw.
Oligopolies have been dicking consumers around for so long that they are jumping ship as soon as they find a raft.
Table-ized A.I.
The NBA, NHL, MLB etc. should adopt the NFL/UCL/EPL paradigm: less, but more meaningful, games. One or two games per week - but games that actually MATTER. Who's gonna watch 1 out of 82 (or whatever the number actually is these days) regular season games when that particular game might matter very little in the grand scheme of things? Once a playoff spot is assured, even the teams sit out their main stars...basically nothing matters until the playoffs.
That's why I stopped watching the NBA and the NHL. I don't have time for that - watching or catching up on 4-5 games per week. So you snooze over the regular season...then you start ignoring the first round of the playoffs...then everything.
Cap regular seasons off at 30 games. Make the playoffs best-of-three (except the finals, which can be best-of-five). Then it would be interesting, and followable for the casual fan.
It's more fun to participate
I read
"There are three sports. Motor racing, mountain climbing, and bullfighting. All the rest are games." - Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's point was that sport involves a tangible risk of death.
Yes, I know people have died while playing video games, but that is not a typical scenario. Video games are not sport, PERIOD.
If you want to watch REAL sport, watch the next MotoGP race. 340 pound motorcycles which have 250 horsepower are being ridden by superbly skilled humans at speeds up to 220 mph. No video game can possibly compare.
And everyone is a critic nowadays. You know you would never play as good as the ones you are watching, but oh dear me if the striker misses a penalty kick. There is almost no recognition of the good things the players do. I wonder if it is because they spend half of the time whining in order to get an unfair advantage. I am sure kids these days are learning from the pros. At least the kids do not learn from the fights their fathers contribute to while they play the junior league.
I know these statements are not reason why I would watch eSports, but these ones are the reasons why I do not watch any sport on TV nowadays.
Seriously, it's ALWAYS the same thing. You either watch some grown ass men beat each other up or watch them run after some piece of rubber/plastic/inflated skin.
There's no fun in that.
Not to mention, simply watching is not fun. At least with e-sports games(or any other game really), ANYONE can join a game if they want while watching the game play out at the same time and try to imitate whatever you see on video. You can't do that with traditional sports. You can't just show up at some sport field and say "hey can I play?" to whoever is there.
um parents made more money
there kids are working more and for a lot less
get over it fuckers your all over priced
you want that cash , give everyone more money instead a buying yourselves gold butholes er teeth
Millenials have found a new way to waste their miserable, pointless, empty lives watching other people actually live theirs.
It will be pretty cool when they drop the prices and let me bring in food to fill some seats :-)
Ball sports doesn't:
Require permission from a game's inventor just to start your own league. Many publishers of proprietary video games used as esports assert their exclusive right to perform their games publicly, demanding either a royalty per match or even to shut down streams entirely. See "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland.
I am aware that the MLB, NFL, and NBA leagues tightly control broadcasts of their matches. But they have no legal standing against broadcasts of matches of a different league playing the same sport, unlike publishers of proprietary video games. The closest thing in ball sports to the exclusive right of the publisher of a proprietary video game is probably Arena Football League's patent on the use of rebound nets in indoor gridiron football. But other indoor gridiron football leagues successfully designed around that patent, and patents expire much sooner than copyrights anyway.
I sort of see your point for baseball.
But what works for soccer and gridiron football might not work for basketball and ice hockey. A football pitch is much bigger than a basketball court or ice hockey rink. This means there are fewer seats per match to sell, which requires more matches per year for a given revenue level.
We're in the end still talking about watching people play video games. Unless they are WAY more interesting than the average "Let's play" on YouTube, I fail to see the appeal.
Sure, but people enjoy different forms of entertainment, and enough people enjoy this that it is now a business model.
And while it may be more interesting than the *average* let's play on youtube, a lot of it is a streaming sport. Having your own personal stream as well as contractually playing on the team stream for a certain time each day is normal.
Real lawyers write in C++
You can't just show up at some sport field and say "hey can I play?" to whoever is there.
Then what are the 10-foot-high hoop and backboard at the city park for if not pickup basketball? Or are you like Willie, finding that a match has almost always started without you?
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Millenials are being saddled with giant student debt loads at the same time they are being expected to pay forward to social assistance programs that are being utilized by boomers on their slow shuffle off the planet.
The megacorps that own America can't have it both ways -- they can't pressure wages downward with the threat of outsourcing and then expect the oppressed people to cough up for expensive entertainment, whether it's movie tickets, sit down restaurants, or live sporting events. All those industries claim to be suffering but what did they expect? People, especially young people, are losing their ability to spend on trivialities.
1) Lets stop calling games as "sports". This includes poker, chess, and anything involving computer button pressing. Not to denigrate such things, but they are competitive games, not sports.
2) Live televised sports have become so "monetized" with commercials that many are virtually unwatchable. For a generation used to Netflix and adblocked Youtube, it's a non-starter. Have you tried to watch a football game in the past few years? There is a commercial almost every whistle. Constant bombardment.
3) Most Millenials grew up playing video games, not playing a pickup game of baseball/football/tennis/whatever with their friends. So watching such sports lacks the vicarious thrill of people who did play them. Simply not as interesting to them on a primal level as older generations. Vice-versa with the eSports games.
College gamer-girls get paid just as much in donations on Twitch as those that do webcam porn and you don't even have to have talent. Those poor adolescent morons....Those kids get creepy in the chats too.
Title say "Millennials Prefer Watching eSports", and summary says 40% of them prefer watching eSports. Since when 40% became a majority?
That would take way too much work to get off the couch.
... I can't get into those esports. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What? Real sports? With all those fit athletes who promote unhealthy, unattainable body norms and their ableist propaganda? Millennials can't watch that. They'd rather be playing video games where a 300kg retarded, blue-haired Gorrila Mutant can still be a hero. Hooray for the liberation of the oppressed basement dwelling landwhales!
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
You should have seen the Alumni at my old University flip out when the new Director of Athletics cut funding for Football and Baseball and put the money into Ultimate and Soccer because that's what the kids were actually playing.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Beats watching a bunch of sweaty men move a ball around.
Let us not forget that the relatively young are much more easily sold to by marketers than those who have already chosen and settled into their rut. Even if the 35-60 crowd or the 61-80 crowd has more money, it is much harder to sway those people to shift their spending. Plus, sports has probably already captured as much of the 35-80 crowd as it can reasonably expect to get. This is not to say that the 17-34 crowd are dumber spenders than older folks, but rather that they remain undecided spenders. They are the better opportunity for marketers.
"The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I am 50 and have never been interested in spectator sport - to me it is a pointless exercise. Why should I watch some team play another team? I care nothing for it.
BUT I love e-SPORT. Watching Starcraft was great and then I switched to League of Legends. I still have zero interest in spectator sport.
And think the way to fame and fortune isn't getting off their fat, lazy asses and learning a sport, it's watching 'pro' gamers fiddle with their joysticks.
My kids are gonna eat these lazy fuckers for lunch.
Pax Vobiscum
Is that the fooseballers taking over are going to run esports. It will go from watching online to pay per view and from enjoying the lulz to doping for apm. Anyone ever watch the espn StarCraft casts and notice how the announcers started screaming at every little boring thing to try to make it sound like a football cast? Stay off of my twitch feeds you lames!
I think you're talking about games.
Jesus christ why is this on Slashdot? Any article that uses the word "Millennial" should be blacklisted from the site by virtue of the fact that every single one is an attack article against literal millions on the grounds of being born in a timeframe of almost two decades.