The Sports Business Journal today published an intriguing issue centering on sports television ratings. With the World Series, NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals all coming off of record low ratings — and with the Daytona 500, NCAA Tournament and BCS all down significantly — such an issue rarely becomes as topical as it is today.
Presented are excerpts from three pieces published by the Journal, including a roundtable discussion with representatives from the major network sports divisions.
“Networks, leagues battle perceptions in ratings dips“, John Ourand.
The situation is frustrating league and network executives to no end. Not so much by the ratings declines, most of which were expected. Rather, network executives are irritated by how the media is reporting the numbers and the dire warnings they portend.
In talking about the ratings for this year?s NBA Finals, John Skipper, ESPN?s executive vice president of content, complained about a New York Times game story that he said included three paragraphs about the series? dismal ratings. ?It?s shocking to see how mainstream this has become,? Skipper said. ?Ten to 15 years ago, you didn?t see ratings stories in the sports pages.?
But reporting TV ratings has become a staple of today?s sports reports, much like newspapers? entertainment sections keep score of box office receipts for movies, and network and league executives are girding themselves for more negative ratings stories for years to come.
?We will continue to see ratings challenges if you continue to look at the television broadcasts of single games in single seasons,? Skipper said. ?It?s not that complicated. I don?t know why anyone would be surprised by this.?
Despite the drop in ratings, executives insist that they are in good shape. Researchers at the four biggest broadcast networks say sports ratings are not dropping nearly as fast as prime-time entertainment programming. In fact, they say sports programming, especially when it is live, is holding up relatively well. …
Even with the quality of choice and fragmentation, network executives decry the Chicken Littles who insist that sports programming is mortally wounded, with viewers fleeing and never coming back. All it takes is an attractive matchup, preferably with big-market clubs, to keep TV ratings from bottoming out.
?We spend very little time wringing our hands about these ratings,? ESPN?s Skipper said after the NBA Finals. ?I can tell you this,? Skipper said. ?If Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker were wearing New York Knicks uniforms, we wouldn?t be talking about the lowest-rated series of all time.?
What are ratings for?
Chris LaPlaca, ESPN/ABC Sports: Ratings are not done so the press can keep score. They are done so we can all go to our advertisers and show them what they bought. Over time, the press has used them to keep score, which is kind of silly, but it is the reality of our business.
Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports: In a lot of cases, ratings? fluctuations are circumstantial. They are not actually about whether there?s an increase or decrease in popularity. They have more to do with the score, the weather, the matchup, things that aren?t really reflective of how many people are interested in Major League Baseball.
McCarley: A week in and week out comparison of a tenth of a ratings point or a couple of percentage points and doing that every week is like trying to find the tallest midget. You are going in little increments, up and down the whole way.
What frustrates you about how the media reports television ratings?
Wade: SportsBusiness Journal and USA Today run ratings tables that have no context and compares apples to oranges. The issue is that SportsBusiness Journal has the space to put those numbers in context.
LaPlaca: I?ll tell you that people who read the sports section don?t care about that table. I don?t think it belongs in the sports pages. I don?t think sports fans care about ratings so much.
Mulvihill: I don?t know. You have Mike Francesa guessing about sports ratings all the time. The way that you most frequently engage in being a sports fan is by watching television. It is human nature to be curious about how many other people are doing this, too. I don?t think it is an overwhelming interest but I think there is enough interest to justify the existence of those charts.
Dan Higgins, Golf Channel: A lot of the consumer media that report ratings often don?t even know what they are talking about. They try their best to report a rating but they haven?t peeled back the layers and they haven?t seen actually what that rating means to that network.
How is new media and video affecting ratings?
Petruzzi: Now you have all of these digital platforms and wireless platforms. It is extending an advertiser?s reach. How do you start measuring all of that? How do you start recording all of that? Are we going to be five years from now just talking about television ratings? Probably not.
LaPlaca: Television ratings are looked at as almost the sole arbiter of the health of a sport. That?s not entirely a full picture. It is a big part of the picture, but if you are selling out all of your games and you have official sponsors that are happy about what you are doing for them, there are other metrics that they use. If you guys want to be leaders, you might talk about other metrics that you might create to speak to the health of the sport.
Are overnights reliable?
Barbara Zidovsky, Nielsen Sports: A lot of publications run into problems when they start talking about an overnight number. That is a local number versus a national number versus a cable number. That is very, very frustrating. You might be talking about the Daytona 500 down in Orlando and then all of a sudden, ?yeah, we got this tremendous rating,? but it is really not the national number.
McCarley: We?re putting them out because it is like a five-day forecast for weather. On Monday you are predicting what Thursday?s temperature is going to be like. Wakshlag: It is an early indicator but the truth is the local market number is always bigger than the national one. Quite frankly, nobody uses those numbers.
“The skinny on sports properties and ratings“
College basketball: A glut of games on TV hasn?t helped the sport?s broadcast ratings, which are down across the board. The NCAA Tournament slipped 16 percent from 1996 to 2006 (from a 7.5 to a 6.3). CBS?s regular-season coverage dropped 19 percent in that time (2.1 to 1.7) and ABC?s dropped 33 percent (1.8 to 1.2).
College football: Like other major properties, college football?s marquee events showed big declines this year. The BCS championship game dropped 13 percent, and the Orange Bowl dropped 43 percent. But weekly numbers are solid, and college football received a boost from ABC, which aired 12 games on Saturday nights last season, and received a 5.0 rating.
MLB: Last year?s World Series was the lowest rated ever, pulling a 10.1 prime-time number, but the sport has not seen significant ratings deterioration in its weekly ratings over the past year (Fox and ESPN both are up this year, so far), and its local TV packages are some of the strongest around.
NASCAR: One of the biggest questions in the business is whether NASCAR ratings can return to growth. Last year?s ratings were down, and this year?s are showing more erosion. But it?s still a top-tier property and is one of the few sports to see a ratings uptick in the past decade, with the Daytona 500 pulling a 9.2 rating in 1996 and a 10.2 rating this year, an 11 percent increase.
NBA: The league?s regular-season ratings are down 23 percent over the past five years on ABC, from a 2.6 in 2002-03 to a 2.0 in the most recent season. And this year?s Finals hit an all-time low of a 6.2 rating. Nine years seems like a lifetime ago, when Michael Jordan?s last championship pulled an 18.7 for the Finals on NBC in 1998, and the regular season averaged a 4.6. But the league is convinced that the numbers are cyclical and that better matchups, and more exciting basketball, will spark a rebound in the future.
NHL: The league just can?t seem to get any traction. It had wretched ratings for the Stanley Cup Finals ? its lowest ever for the event. NBC pulled a 1.1 regular-season rating this year, flat with six years earlier when ABC had the games in 2000-01. Despite the league?s insistence that its demos are young and affluent, the total number of viewers is low enough to cause concern.
NFL: The undisputed ratings champion of American sports, the league has been widening the gap between itself and everyone else for a decade. While all demos are strong, the only hint of weakness is that the poorest performing demos are the youngest. But they?re probably following the games online.
For the complete pieces, including analysis of properties such as the Olympics and PGA Tour, visit sportsbusinessjournal.com.
