Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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
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.
I'm pretty sure when you ask millennials you'll find that they don't give a shit about Trump. I'm fairly certain, the answer you get is that "I don't care whether he or that other guy won".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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.
Fun fact: "soccer" came from the brits. It was the upper-class and correct term for the sport, with "football" being a term for other games. It was British class hatred of the upper class which drove the term "soccer" into disuse, not some American misunderstanding.
Tired of the general populace subsidizing sports channels.
https://www.outkickthecoverage...
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
"The reason I and my friends watch sports is to see feats that we can't perform"
You could sit on a bench for free and watch people go to work.
(said entirely in jest, because it's too good a jab to pass up) :)
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Target
Target is a bit high end for the average Trump supporter.
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?
Baseball ("no contact" sport) is included. Apparently millennials don't like to watch classic sports on TV in general. I wonder if this is because they don't like physical activity in general or unlike previous generations they don't consider professional athletes their heroes.
Also, is the trend same for new solo sports such as X-sports (mountain biking, snowtubing and similar)?
Most millennials I know are very active but generally prefer solo "non-mainstream" activities (parasailing, board-sailing, mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking etc.). Even if you turn these into broadcasting events (streaming footage from camera attached to athlete's body) it still fits better less formal Internet streaming than TV format. I wonder if these would be as popular broadcasts as eSports.
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.
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?
WTF? I knew of one case of this personally, and I always thought it was just some isolated, crazed nutjob.
He was homosexual, but at the time I didn't think that was part of it for him. I just thought he was fucking insane. But there are more of them out there? Licking public toilet seats?
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.
Yup. Public school slang for Association Football.
Another fun fact: In England a "public school" is in fact a top-end private school.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's more fun to participate
I read
Because it's always trolling? Or do you just like censorship?
Silencing someone else's opinion just because you may dislike it, and don't want to tarnish your eyes reading it is not a valid reason. If you don't like it, don't read it. Also you could just set your user settings to block the AC account, and not block it for everyone.
The purpose of creating an account, is because you have an interest in the community and want to be a part of it.
The problem with requiring an account is that you shut out people who want to get to know the community before fully committing to it. For them, if they can't interact with the community, if they can't find their niche, then it's not worth getting involved with.
You also wind up creating an ideology bubble that's rather hard to penetrate. As most people who would challenge the community's groupthink wouldn't want to do so on a regular enough basis to justify creating an account. (Never mind that even if they do, they will be the subject of constant ridicule by the community.) Most wouldn't even have the courage required to do so in this day and age. As such the community becomes intellectually isolated, and stagnates as a result. Anyone that goes against the groupthink becomes a "traitor" and is forced out with enough violations, by becoming the target of multiple flamewars for nothing more than speaking their mind.
But then again, I suppose none of that means anything to you Mr. Registered User, considering you need to be protected from us ACs.
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.
open discussion is important, but a -2 to shit-bin stuff into neverneverland would be possibly useful. make it so not-logged-in users can't even see them. would make the site a bit more presentable, and possibly attract better commentards to join the fray.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I say may as well experiment since the Slashdot groupthink / ideology as basically Naziism as this point.
Believe me, I can way more than afford TV on my $80k/year income, I just think TV is crap. Essentially it comes down to this: 500 channels and nothing good is on, and you have to waste a third of your time watching commercials. Even when you can skip commercials with DVRs, it's just annoying. And besides that modern TV providers rarely support third party DVRs these days, and their in-house DVRs very often forbid skipping commercials.
So fuck TV, it's just something old people do.
BTW, I legally became an adult in the year 2000, so I'm a millennial. But I'm also 35, and TFA seems to say millennials have to be 17 to 34, which is odd because the definition of millennial is somebody who became an adult after the turn of the millennium, which I certainly did. Maybe I'm a borderline case, I'm not sure.
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.
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.
Anyone can play, as long as they buy the license for the closed-source game software from the single manufacturer. Not exactly like learning football with some random spheroid.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Title say "Millennials Prefer Watching eSports", and summary says 40% of them prefer watching eSports. Since when 40% became a majority?
The borderline is birth ca. 1980. My wife was born in 1977, her brother in 1981. Culturally, she is Gen X, he is Gen Y/millenial.
... 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.
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!?!?
Not a fan of football (either variety) so I'm not defending it in any way... but football seems to be doing better among young people than baseball or basketball. One exception is China, where for some weird reason everyone is going bonkers over NBA basketball.
Or that MMA stuff with people getting kicked in the head and knocked out?
This comment reveals your basement-dwelling, videogame-playing, hentai-fapping mindset. If you actually lived among other humans and interacted with them, you might get a better grasp of their behavior. A fight always draws a crowd. People are drawn to violence, it's a primal instinct. Pay attention and you might notice that every commercial motion picture ever made has copious amounts of violence. Well okay there are a few movies that don't have violence, but these don't make any money and young people certainly don't watch them. The top box office movies every year are comic book violence-fests (teenage boy magnets). Or sci-fi violence-fests (Avatar).
As for MMA itself, I was under the impression that it was more popular among young people than traditional boxing. I can see the appeal as it offers a more variety of tactics and (usually) offers more action per minute, with less possibility of a snoozefest like Mayweather-Pacquiao.
It doesn't cost anything to make another account...
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
There's an even more important reason to allow anonymous posting that's mentioned in the FAQ and I've personally utilized several times. Sometimes you have a very good contribution, that winds up highly scored, that for various reasons you just don't want linked to a username that itself or by its other posts can readily reveal your identity, and making a whole new account just for that one comment is just too burdensome to bother. Ultimately I agree with the policy that you just lose more than you gain, especially since any registered user can automatically put AC and -1 and their threshold higher if they aren't interested in it.
The ones who have a gpg pubkey on Slashdot are less anonymous, especially if the pubkey has their real name associated with it.
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)
So you admit to being a lazy deluded Millenia?
And the point is.... you are entitled to it?
ok.....I'm not disagreeing with you, but how is that different from the generalisations?
Did you take reading comprehension? It just it looks like you didn't. Millenia? Are you just stupid, yeah?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
So, in 30 or so years (I honestly forget when that song came out), there has either been a 1000% improvement. Or 0% change. Or both.
I've lost the comment from someone who was complaining about advertising time on the TV. That's been a [SHRUG] to me since I re-entered the TV market a little over a decade ago (after 1.8 decades out of it. There is advertising-fed TV available, if you care to watch it. I don't; I prefer to pay the £145/ year ($US 187.5/year) to legally watch some of the best programming in the world (even Americans admit to that), without adverts. And the Ad-funded TV is restricted to 4x2.5 minute slots/hour. Which I fast-forward, on those very rare occasions they produce something worth watching.
Outside the motorbike racing, is there sport on TV? Why?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
I think you're talking about games.
... just like Target decided their stores were mostly for transsexuals.
Hyperbole meter pegged.
To me, sports jumped the shark about a decade ago.
Anyways you can get ad free TV here, it's called Netflix, HBO Now, and bittorrent. And that TV is generally worth my time, but I don't consider it TV in the sense that I'm not watching linear broadcast content.
What is their annual fee, compared to the Beeb? As I said, the Beeb costs GBP145/yr (USD ~187), while the lowest range of the commercial providers is about GBP 450/yr (USD, about 600).
Really, it does surprise me the the Beeb hasn't made greater efforts to secure (and supply) people outside Britain and the external territories. I smell the smell of politicians being pressurised by for-profit media companies. Murdoch - I'm looking at YOU!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Netflix is about $120/year. HBO varies.
I've watched BBC content before and I'm not really that into it, which I guess you can attribute to cultural differences. Meanwhile, domestic content here tends to be quite good. For example Game of Thrones, Lost, Married with Children, The Walking Dead, Black Sails, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Firefly, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Silicon Valley, are all among my all-time favorites.
Oh no - tell a lie, I've maybe seen one or two episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Some robot that goes "wibbly wibbly" and has a tambourine hanging on it's chest?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"