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.

Comments

45% of consumer base is misleading

[ThomasBHardy]

"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?

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[Opportunist]

Depends mostly on their parents' income and how much of it they let them squander.

Re: 45% of consumer base is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is dumb. I am a millennial and can do without people like you. I deserve a participation trophy for showing up here and posting. That participation trophy should include mod points so I can censor your dumb post to -1 where it belongs.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[war4peace]

The 17-34 year old ones do have less spending power than older generations, BUT!
This is where details come handy.
You can't only look at spending power as a whole - you need to look at what their spending power goes to.

Say a 40 year old has a discretionary amount of 1000 dollars a month, out of which most goes on booze, trips and porn magazines. They spend zero on eSports.
At the same time, a 21-year old has 200 dollars a month available, out of which 100 goes to eSports and related activities (CS:GO skins and shit like that).

From an eSports perspective, who is your target?

I agree that "45% of America's consumer base" doesn't mean shit as a statistic, but break it down to specifics and the picture changes radically.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[ThomasBHardy]

"porn magazines"

Dude, You're showing your age. :)

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[0100010001010011]

What will be their spending power in a few years? Professional sports are trying to maximize short term profits at the expense of future earnings.

My wife are at the leading edge of the millenials and have lost nearly all interest in the sports we grew up watching and now that we have dispensable income we've found other things to spend it on. We grew up fans of certain teams because we watched them with parents and grandparents on free OTA TV.

After we graduated we tried to keep up with our Alma maters and watch our professional teams but the sports industry decided to make that impossible to do. When we were younger we'd go to a bar and try and catch the game but as we aged that became less and less entertaining.

I even tried to pirate streams for a while because the local team decided it didn't fill enough $$$$ seats so they wouldn't air it. Or because we were closer in nautical miles to another sports team AND it was an NFC vs AFC game that it could only be watched on ESPN4, UNLESS we had the Plaid Sports channel with the blackout exception package. After a while we just gave up and moved on.

I'm watching our younger siblings and their peers do the same. Because they don't have money it's "Pay rent" or "Buy Big10/SEC Network to watch football games" and Rent wins. My school can't figure out why they can't fill seats and it's because 0-12 year olds aren't excited about a team they've never seen play because their parents never watched it while they were growing up. Going to a Big 10 rivalry game was usually a Birthday present for me and my peers, but we watched it on ABC or NBC every other week.

And they can't claim that the technology or demand wasn't there. Mark Cuban started out with phone lines so IU alumni could listen to home Basketball games, that turned into broadcast.com which Yahoo bought out. Professional sports could have charged a simple nominal fee to listen to 'home' games since 2000 and they decided to double down on the Cable route.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[MightyMartian]

There's a best possible moment to drop your tablet in the toilet?

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[Jetstream]

I'm thinking that would be during the flush process, after the recently added "contents" are gone, but the water hasn't started filling back up. So there's a chance you can just towel it off and it'll keep working for you. ;)

Re: 45% of consumer base is misleading

[Hognoxious]

In a range of ethnic styles. And then he'd complain about them being racist caricatures.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[SeattleLawGuy]

Depends mostly on their parents' income and how much of it they let them squander.

Not entirely, though. Kids grow up, and they continue to game as adults, and will likely continue to watch some eSports. eSports also sell games in a serious way.

It's also a business, and while you still have some fly-by-night operations and problems, it's definitely beginning to grow up. Professional players are beginning to realize they shouldn't just trust whatever deal they are offered will be fair, for example. At least some of them are.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[thegarbz]

There's a best possible moment to drop your tablet in the toilet?

Not sure about best, but there's no arguing that before using the toilet is likely preferable to after using it and pre-flush. The worst possible time however can be well well defined as after using the toilet, pre-flush, and post a spicy burrito.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[ceoyoyo]

People watch baseball too. I have trouble thinking of a video game that's more boring to watch than baseball.

Re:45% of consumer base is misleading

[goose-incarnated]

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.

So? I fail to see the appeal of watching men chase a ball around a field and yet it's a big business.

Do not under-estimate the draw of watching people play games. The only reason sport was previously so popular was due to lack of competition for youngsters attention. This is no longer the case - casual games are taking in the majority of the eyeballs of young people these days. So is the internet, online forums, social networking, etc.

Sport matches now have to compete with facebook, words-with-friends, twitter, etc. for attention, and it seems like sport matches are losing this competition for eyeballs. eSports is just another eyeball grabber (a small one at that); the days of celebrity sports worship is drawing to an end due to all the competition, not because of eSports alone.

Not stupid at all

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not stupid at all

[ganjadude]

YET

e stands for exciting

[mentil]

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.

Re:e stands for exciting

[phantomfive]

My own personal reason for watching eSports is to improve my skill by watching them.

These numbers do not seem that dratatic.

[ThomasBHardy]

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.

Re:These numbers do not seem that dratatic.

[RazorSharp]

It makes you wonder who paid L.E.K. Consulting to do this study. I guess this is a case of "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." The assertion that professional sports "have a millennial problem" seemed suspicious to me. While it may be true that millennials view and attend less sporting events than previous generations, this study doesn't sound like it necessarily provides evidence of that. Furthermore, it fails to demonstrate that if in fact traditional sports are in some kind of decline, "e-sports" have anything to do with it.

Perhaps they find them more exciting

[RotateLeftByte]

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.

Re: Figures... No wonder the emptier stadiums.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Anything that kills ESPN is fine by me

[ThomasBHardy]

Tired of the general populace subsidizing sports channels.

https://www.outkickthecoverage...

Re:Anything that kills ESPN is fine by me

[fermion]

This is really the key. Revenue for sports is generated because it is one of the few things that generates viewers for broadcast and TV. Broadcast TV was killed with timeshifting, and the only thing that saved it was reality TV, which was cheap, contest TV like dance shows and the like which encouraged views not to time shift, and sports which are seldom time shifted.

ESPN value to cable companies is that men will tend to buy a cable package that includes it, in the same that families will buy Disney and old people will buy Fox News. These channels attract a premium in the carriage fees because they will attract subscribers. But still, a majority of views do not watch these channels, so they mostly make their money, as the poster suggests, through a sociality system in which people who never use the system are forced to subsidize.

In a free market al a cart world in which the consumer only paid the carriage fees for the elected channels Fox and ESPN could not survive. The fees would no longer be hidden from the consumer, so the free market would set much lower fees that would not support the cost structure. An article was posting a few day ago that claimed ESPN could have saved itself by embracing technology. That would have happened only if was able to monetize the technology to consumers. As it has no experience at this, I don't see who it could work.

Disney likely provides enough value to families as free babysitting to survive.

In any case, most sports are toast for the same reason. They depend on inflated broadcast deals that in turn are funded at least in part by carriage fees that are funded in a large part by people who never watch sports. These fees are becoming more scarce by cord cutters.

Streaming deals are funded only by people who stream, i.e. a baseball fan who wants to steam has to pony up at least $100. This is only a month of cable, but it is not longer a hidden cost that might have been included in other bills, so baseball fans might be less likely to subscribe.

So fans go to other less expensive options. Also, schools are not doing nearly as a good a job at indoctrinating students into believing expensive sports are a good use of their hard earned money. Frankly you can get an excellent soccer ticket at the same cost as a nosebleed baseball ticket, and univision is broadcast.

Re:Anything that kills ESPN is fine by me

[Areyoukiddingme]

So fans go to other less expensive options. Also, schools are not doing nearly as a good a job at indoctrinating students into believing expensive sports are a good use of their hard earned money.

Schools in the deep South are still doing yeoman's work making sure good ol' boys like expensive traditional sports. The deep South is where they build multi-million dollar stadiums while the textbooks literally fall apart. It's happened more than once in recent years. My ex is from Texas and has three sons. All three of them joined the football team in high school. Even the pudgy one. Two of the three still watch football, and profess to enjoy it. The formerly pudgy one doesn't. It's high schools in Chicago (and elsewhere in Illinois) that have started school sanctioned League of Legends teams. Times they are a-changin', but if there's one thing they don't like in the deep South, it's change.

Re:Anything that kills ESPN is fine by me

[tepples]

i.e. a baseball fan who wants to steam has to pony up at least $100. This is only a month of cable

A month? Try a year, if the local ISP offers Internet for $62 per month or a bundle of Internet and TV for $70 per month.

Re:Anything that kills ESPN is fine by me

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in high school in the late eighties in California we would have rallies 4 or 5 times a year. What were the rallies about? why the sports teams of course. Everyone on a team was celebrated even if they were bench warmers. It made you want to join a team just for the popularity and status. At the end of the year there was an awards ceremony for scholarship but it was relatively low key in comparison. It gave the impression they were doing it as an obligation. It certainly didn't inspire you to want to study harder.

Re:The real threat: politics

[0100010001010011]

Target

Target is a bit high end for the average Trump supporter.

Fuck ESPN

[Cyberax]

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?

Re: Figures... No wonder the emptier stadiums.

[Hognoxious]

Yup. Public school slang for Association Football.

Another fun fact: In England a "public school" is in fact a top-end private school.

No royalty payable to inventor of ball sport

[tepples]

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.

Let's look at it pessimistically

[mewsenews]

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.

Just 3 little points.

[Northdot]

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.

Re:Traditional sports are boring

[TeknoHog]

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.

Millenials play different sports

[onkelonkel]

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.