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

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

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. :)

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.

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: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

[ceoyoyo]

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

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.