Weekly Roundup – July 23rd, 2024

"The WNBA’s dream scenario last night -- Caitlin Clark flipping a bounce pass to Angel Reese for a bunny layup in the All-Star Game -- punctuated what Commissioner Cathy Engelbert called a “historic" first half of the season. All the drama (Diana Taurasi saying Clark will have trouble in a “grown women’s league" or Chennedy Carter’s flagrant hip-check on Clark) was a distant memory as even NBA Commissioner Adam Silver flew into Phoenix for the sold-out game with his young daughter.
Prior to tipoff, Engelbert rattled off the league’s metrics of growth this season: highest attendance in 26 years, an overall attendance rise of 45%, 16 game broadcasts of at least 1 million viewers, WNBA app usage up 530%, D2C league pass subscriptions up 360% and all-star voting volume up 600%. She even borrowed Silver’s patented phrase to describe her league: “growth stock."

"In catering to two separate wings of soccer fandom, Fox and Univision may be building an audience that is more than the sum of its parts.
For American television, the quadrennial pairing of the UEFA Euro 2024 and Copa America soccer tournaments was a golden opportunity. The tournaments fueled each other; Euros during the day led into Copa at night, Copa then set the stage for the Euros the following day. While it was nothing new for Univision to broadcast both tournaments, that had not previously been the case on English-language television. ESPN carried the Euros for years, while Copa America aired on Fox Sports (or going further back, beIN Sports).
Last week’s finals delivered two of the biggest sports audiences all year, more than ten million combined for the Euro final and north of 13 million for Copa America — the latter scoring over six million each on FOX and Univision. Underlying the success are two distinct strategies for pulling disparate audiences to the same product.
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Univision and Fox have sharply different approaches to soccer coverage. Fox aired the Copa and Euros under a “Summer of Soccer” branding, part of a concerted effort to focus specifically on international summer tournaments.
The same cannot be said of Univision. “For us,” Univision president of global sports Olek Loewenstein told SMW, “soccer is not a thing that happens in June and July and then you disappear and come back [next] June and July.” The Copa and Euros are the peak of a year-round soccer lineup that will soon shift to the Leagues Cup, Liga MX and eventually the Champions League. Those peaks are still considerable, but for Univision the focus is on providing a “stable offering of soccer throughout the year.”

"For many sports fans, their social media feeds are dominated with highlights, scores, and all the other news and drama when their favorite teams are in season.
But team social media managers still have to feed the content machine during the dreaded offseason.
“I want to make sure that the Liberty is at the forefront; that you’re not going to forget about us,” Charlie DeSadier, social media coordinator for the New York Liberty, told Marketing Brew. “We’re still going to give you that grade-A content that we’re going to give you in the regular season.”
Without consistent access to players and in-game action, that job gets a little harder, and many team social media managers have to contend with declines in engagement. Still, they’ve figured out ways to keep their teams’ pages populated, even without the action of the season.
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Many teams post recaps and highlights when their seasons end, sports social media marketers told us, but sometimes, their most popular offseason content isn’t about their own records—or even their own sports.
Man City, for example, posted a photo of manager Pep Guardiola alongside Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla when the Celtics won the NBA Finals in June, and one of the Yard Goats’ most viral posts was of Tom Brady photoshopped into one of their jerseys when he announced his retirement, Meckfessel said. (Translation: Boston sports are apparently good for engagement.)
A recent high-performing post for the Liberty had nothing to do with sports at all: Instead, DeSadier had players weigh in on the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef, which engaged hip-hop fans who might not typically come across the Liberty’s content otherwise, she said, a key part of the team’s marketing strategy."

"A year and a half after launching ads, ads are finally making a meaningful contribution to Netflix’s bottom line.
Last quarter, Netflix grew its overall revenue by 17% year over year – a huge jump from Q2 last year, when that number was just 3%. Now that the platform’s ad-supported membership is hitting a certain level of scale, ad revenue is becoming a source of profit, CFO Spencer Neumann told shareholders during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
Netflix’s operating margins last quarter grew 5% YOY, and “we see a lot of room to continue to grow profit margin,” Neumann said, pointing to the sign-up rate for the ad-supported plan.
Currently, 45% of new member sign-ups are for the ads plan, up from 40% in April."

"For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models.
Now, that data is drying up.
Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group.
The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an “emerging crisis in consent,” as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.
The researchers estimate that in the three data sets — called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma — 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt."

"The American news landscape is fractured and polarized, with no outlet singularly gaining the public's attention or trust. Party identification, and to some extent age, divide American media consumption. Most adults say that at least half their news consumption is politics-related, and most major news sources are perceived by Americans as either left- or right-leaning.
Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to trust the news in general, as well as to trust most specific outlets. Republicans — and Americans in general — are more likely to classify news sources as liberal than as conservative, though there are exceptions. Democrats and Republicans find some common ground when it comes to sources for financial news, but hold vastly different opinions on other news sources, including the two used most often: CNN and Fox News."

"IZEA surveyed over 1,200 US-based consumers to seek out new data on influencers' income and aspirations.
Many workers across industries would make the leap to content creation if they could.
IZEA found that 54% of 18-to 60-year-olds would quit their jobs to become full-time influencers.
The money they could make is a big factor; 36% had household incomes of over $100,000 in 2023."