Is ESPN’s standoff with YouTube TV actually hurting ESPN’s TV ratings? – The New York Times

Sports Business
How has the standoff affected viewership for popular live sports such as college football last Saturday or "Monday Night Football"? Michael Hickey / Getty Images
As the standoff continues between YouTube TV and Disney, with ABC, ESPN and ESPN’s associated networks unavailable to YouTube TV’s 10 million subscribers, an interesting question arises.
Did the absence of ESPN’s games on YouTube TV this past weekend impact ESPN’s TV viewership for popular live sports such as college football last Saturday or “Monday Night Football” earlier this week?
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That question is noisy with confounding factors, opaque correlation does not imply causation details and a possibly unsatisfying, if reasonable, answer: Likely a bit. Not nearly as much as you might think. At least not yet.
ABC had its third-lowest combined audience of the season for its powerful triple-header lineup. Notably, Oklahoma-Tennessee at 7:30 p.m. ET had the lowest audience for a primetime ABC college football game this season.
Before you try to assign that to the absence of some portion of YouTube TV’s 10 million subscribers who might have tuned in previously but couldn’t this week, change the channel over to Fox, which was airing arguably the most compelling baseball game of the decade and delivered staggeringly high TV ratings.
Replying to an industry social media post about Saturday night’s primetime ratings, ESPN content honcho Burke Magnus reasonably pointed out: “Maybe … just maybe … Game 7 of the World Series had an impact on the primetime audience for College Football … or maybe that didn’t fit the conclusion you were trying to create?”
Meanwhile, ABC’s 3:30 p.m. game — Florida-Georgia — was the most-watched college football game of the day, but down 5 percent from the average 3:30 game on ABC. Is that 5 percent dip attributable to the absence of some portion of 10 million potential viewers via YouTube TV? Possibly, but it is well within the margin of error of simply could be lots of things.
That said, longtime sports-media industry leader Ed Desser made a very good point to my colleague Richard Deitsch. “(It is) hard to compare separate events,” said Desser, who was the NBA’s senior media executive for 23 years and is now the president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc. “(There are) lots of extraneous variables. Just because a game is similar to the season average doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been higher had circulation been broader.”
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There was one quirky ratings detail from Saturday that caught my attention: “College GameDay,” ESPN’s flagship pregame show, averaged 2 million viewers on Saturday, per Sports Media Watch, down 300,000 from its nine-week season average and down 500,000 from a week ago.
Now, part of that might have been a small-market show location (Utah) or a smidgen of increased interest in the competing pregame show on Fox (promoting Ohio State-Penn State, a big game even with Penn State reeling this season). However, any sort of smell test also includes the fact that some portion of those missing viewers were YouTube TV users.
“This has quickly proven to be more than a traditional standoff,” Octagon Director of Media Rights Consulting Justin Beitler told Deitsch. “YouTube is unlike most other MVPDs, so the negotiations may be different, but the impact signals are not necessarily unique. ESPN will be watching the P2+ (all people age 2 years and up) viewership, alongside total viewership demographics. As an example, College GameDay was down 29% on Saturday compared to the season average. However, amongst viewers 18-34 years old, viewership was down 54%. So it’s not only about losing viewers, but also losing viewers in key advertising demographics.”
 
A lot of people were surprised that the standoff extended through ESPN’s weekly NFL primetime game, typically a piece of inventory that is as sacrosanct as any regular-season game on the sports calendar. Nevertheless, the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals took the field out of view of YouTube TV’s subscriber base — again, not all 10 million subscribers were going to tune in. More realistically, it would be a very small subset.
Perhaps that could account for the Cowboys-Cardinals game seeing an 8 percent decline from the previous week’s “MNF” game. On the other hand, maybe that decline could be attributed to Week 8 featuring Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, reliably one of the biggest draws in sports TV, the Cardinals not exactly being a top draw or the game being largely non-competitive, especially late.
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So is the absence of ESPN on YouTube TV having an impact on ESPN’s ratings this week on key live sports programming? As mentioned at the top, any answer is probably a bit unsatisfying.
“Anytime you lose 10 million subscribers, it will have some impact on your audience levels,” Desser said. “Also note that YouTube TV skews younger, so the impact is disproportionate demographically.”
Intuitively, you would think that a “Thanos snap” removing 10 million people from your universe of potential audience would have an impact on your show’s TV ratings. However, only a subset of YouTube TV subscribers watch sports, a smaller subset tune in for one game versus another at the same time, and measurement systems only capture a representative sample of the total audience anyway.
The answer isn’t that there was no impact, but the answer also isn’t that ratings are cratering. A sampling of industry sources suggested the viewership impact so far is minimal. Could that change? If the standoff continues, it will certainly be worth tracking and attempting to parse meaningful signals from a wide range of factors that might play into a ratings dip for any given game.
Besides, in the grand scheme of things, a few percentage points off an individual game rating aren’t going to make or break ESPN’s business — certainly not as much as giving up percentage points on the per-subscriber payment YouTube TV will be paying them for distribution rights, which is why the standoff has extended into this week in the first place.
Desser gets the last word:
“Differences in ratings are not going to impact viewers directly,” he said. “It will impact the network and the sports organizations which create the product. There are more forms of competition than ever before, and while live sports has benefited, generally, the fact that the competition is now every great movie, every award-winning television show, documentaries on virtually every subject, and something like YouTube, which is automatically targeted to your particular interests, makes generating a large audience more challenging than ever before.”
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Dan Shanoff is a Managing Editor for The Athletic, focused on Sports Business. Before joining The Athletic, he held editorial and content-development roles at a range of companies including ESPN, USA Today Sports, Monumental and Quickish, a sports-news start-up he founded. He is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has an MBA from Harvard Business School and was an award-winning adjunct instructor in Georgetown’s Sports Industry Management program. Follow Dan on Twitter @danshanoff

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