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Title: Ouch! NFL TV ratings drop again as angry fans exercise their own rights
Source:
HotAir
URL Source: https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10 ... rop-more-over-player-protests/
Published: Oct 4, 2017
Author: Andrew Malcolm
Post Date: 2017-10-04 16:03:52 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 1434
Comments: 23
Pretty soon, it could be NFL team owners on their knees begging TV viewers to come back. Once again in Week 4 of the 2017 season, as players continued their sitting-kneeling protests against something, former fans silently exercised their right of free speech using TV remotes. Despite the always insightful, candid commentary of Jon Gruden, this week’s Monday Night game on ESPN lost audience again. It was actually a pretty good game, by all accounts. After the 29-20 win, Kansas City remained the only unbeaten team at 4-0, while Washington fell to 2-2. This game though drew 13% fewer viewers than last week. And the drop was worse — 16% — in the key demo that ad buyers covet. The game drew 11.9 million viewers, down almost two million from last week. Perhaps even more disturbing for the 32 billionaire team owners, another sponsor pulled its ads over the protest controversy. Said Steve Kalafer, a mega-car-dealer and baseball team owner in New Jersey: Kalafer said a decision on his 2018 substantial ad buy remained undecided now pending NFL action. He explained his problem is with the league and owners who failed to give direction to players on how best to exercise their free speech rights while also showing respect to the flag and National Anthem. “Owners buried their heads in the sand,” Kalafer added. The Wall Street Journal reported that despite an appearance of league unity, team owners clashed in a recent meeting over the league’s combative response to White House criticisms. “We made our point,” said league spokesman Joe Lockhart, who used to be Bill Clinton’s spokesman. “There was no point in responding to every tweet or every statement.” Reaction against protests by the multi-millionaire players has been emotional and nationwide with President Trump weighing in. We wrote here Monday about a Georgia high school football team that had its own surprising patriotic response to the pro protests. The next opportunity for angry fans to not view a televised NFL game comes Thursday evening when the Patriots visit the Buccaneers. As a disappointed and likely apocryphal Hollywood producer once said about a box-office flop, “If people don’t want to come, you can’t stop them.” Poster Comment: Another big regional sponsor gone & Budweiser wavering. The National Football League and its owners have shown their fans and marketing partners that they do not have a comprehensive policy to ensure that players stand and show respect for America and our flag during the playing of the national anthem. We have cancelled all of our NFL advertising (for 2017)…As the NFL parses the important nationwide issues of ‘social justice’ and ‘freedom of speech,’ it is clear that a firm direction by them is not forthcoming.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 15.
#1. To: Tooconservative (#0)
Woo Hoo! Crater it! Burn it all down!
Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid. We're seeing a slow steady hemorrhaging. A lot of people who had been watching out of habit and because that is what people talk about are reconsidering spending 4 hours at a time watching games without a lot of action. Saturday, Sunday afternoon, Monday night, Thursday night, it's way overdone. I do think at some point this winter, people get bored with themselves and they start quietly tuning back in. And I think the NFL is counting on that happening. If they just keep dangling that cheese, the mice will return to the maze. They are probably right. OTOH, if they lose Budweiser as sponsor, that could hit their revenues hard enough to make difference. And the networks would start looking for more profitable programming to displace the Thursday night games and maybe one or more of the weekend slots.
Go Bud, go! Trample the NFL under those Clydesdale hooves!
I still think the big threat is the reverse-bandwagon. Just as pols or companies or event organizers or merchants try to create a bandwagon effect to convince people to take part, to be part of the popular crowd or just not wanting to feel left out of The Next Big Thing and we call this a bandwagon effect, there can be such a thing as a reverse-bandwagon, where something like the NFL that has benefited from a bandwagon effect for many years and then starts to lose some of those loyal viewers/fans. At a certain point with people drifting away, the social capital of the NFL diminishes until that trickle of defecting fans turns into a flood. We aren't there yet. But the trend is very dismal for the NFL. Even if they pull out of their nosedive, they face reduced revenues and other problems.
http://nbc4i.com/2017/10/04/nfl-ratings-down-on-weekend-of-boycott/ NBC4i.com [excerpt] The Nielsen company said Tuesday the weekend’s nationally televised games averaged 13.8 million viewers, down from 14.8 million the week before. Opening week registered 16.3 million viewers and the second week had 15.8 million. = = = = = = = = = = Week 01. 16.3 million ±0.0m, % change (cumulative fm Week 1) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Only a what if, but if the current trend continued.... projected continuing trend to lose 1m per week Week 05. 12.8 million - 1.0m, minus 21.5% - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The decline in viewers week by week, using Week 1 as the baseline, indicates a 15.3% cumulative decline since Week 1. A half million viewers were lost on Week 2, a million more on week 3, and yet another million on week 4, for a total of 2.5 million viewers lost in three weeks, and with a downward trendline. They can't lose a million per week forever, but they have incurred significant loss, and network tv series are just starting back up, along with NHL ice hockey and NBA basketball. Next week, bye weeks kick in and there are two less NFL games. Also, early season ratings indicate the two highest rated series on tv are The Big Bang Theory and spinoff Young Sheldon. They had a viewership of 17.2m and 17.7 million. Both move to Thursday night. TNF is going to have some competition.
That alone is pretty disturbing. BBT got tired and formulaic after 3-4 years. Still, no doubt it is popular, here and overseas. You have to consider the NFL hardcores. At what point do they desert the NFL? Is is when the playas decide to burn a flag while the anthem is playing? You'd probably not faze something like 5-10M hardcore NFL fans with that. Trying to think like the NFL owners and the networks, they have to be considering what is their base hardcore audience. They must think it is at least 12M. Still a major audience but much diminished from the height of its power. Even so, their current business model, profits from broadcast, merchandise, endorsements, NFL sponsors, tickets have to look rather different now from what they were a year or two back.
I don't watch either one. I find laugh tracks irritating. But by deliberately moving two series with 17m viewers each straight up against NFL football, CBS is throwing down against the NFL. Thursday Night Football is an NFL weak link. It will be interesting to see what happens. There are no doubt millions of them. Also to be considered are hard core flag wavers. There are millions of them too. A big, big problem is that diminished revenue is not offset by comparable diminished expenses. Very costly contracts do not diminish automatically in response.
They will. If NFL revenues stay down, some of these playas simply won't get as good a contract renewal. They might even join Kaepernick as unemployable but with a similar unemployment insurance deal like he has for $12M even if he doesn't play at all. Kaep's deal isn't all that bad. But it is probably for only one year. Those had to be some very very high premiums he paid.
I have been watching the ESPN listings for attendance. I recall the days when ticket demand exceeded supply, and home games not sold out were blacked out on local tv channels. The Fed government twisted the arm of the NFL and forced it to lift its blackout policy. Most games remained sold out until recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_television_blackout_policies [...] Prior to 1973, all games were blacked out in the home city of origin and on any TV stations located within 75 miles of the team's home city, regardless of whether they were sold out. This policy, dating back to the NFL's emerging television years, resulted in home-city blackouts even during sold-out regular-season games and championship games. For instance, the 1958 "Greatest Game Ever Played" between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants was unavailable to viewers in the New York City market despite the sellout at Yankee Stadium (many fans rented hotel rooms or visited friends in areas of Connecticut or Pennsylvania where signals of TV stations carrying the game were available to watch the game on television, a practice that continued for Giants games through 1972). Similarly, all Super Bowl games prior to Super Bowl VII in January 1973 were not televised in the host city's market. The policy was in effect when, in 1972, the Washington Redskins made the playoffs for only the second time in 27 seasons. Because all home games were blacked-out, politicians – including President Richard Nixon, a devout football fan – were not able to watch their favorite team's home games. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle refused to lift the blackout for the NFC Championship Game, despite a plea from United States Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Kleindienst went on to suggest that the United States Congress re-evaluate the NFL's antitrust exemption. Rozelle agreed to lift the blackout for Super Bowl VII on an "experimental basis", if the game sold-out ten or more days in advance. With the game a sellout, viewers in the Los Angeles area were able to see the NBC telecast of the game. Nonetheless, Congress intervened before the 1973 season anyway, passing Public Law 93-107, which eliminated the blackout of games in the home market so long as the game was sold out by 72 hours before game time. The league will sometimes change this deadline to 48 hours if there are only a few thousand tickets left to be sold; much more rarely, the NFL will occasionally reduce the deadline to 24 hours in special cases. [...] Until September 2014, the NFL blackout rules were sanctioned by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which enforced rules requiring cable and satellite providers to not distribute any sports telecast that had been blacked out by a broadcast television station within their market of service. On September 9, 2014, USA Today published an editorial from FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, which stated that he was submitting a proposal to "get rid of the FCC's blackout rules once and for all", to be voted on by the agency's members on September 30 of that year, declaring such policies to be "obsolete". On September 30, 2014, the Commission voted unanimously to repeal the FCC's blackout rules. However, the removal of these rules are, to an extent, purely symbolic; the NFL can still enforce its blackout policies on a contractual basis with television networks, stations, and service providers – a process made feasible by the large amount of leverage the league places on its media partners. Ultimately, no games would be blacked out at all during the 2014 season. On March 23, 2015, the NFL's owners voted to suspend the blackout rules for the 2015 NFL season, meaning that all games would be televised in their home markets, regardless of ticket sales. The suspension will continue into the 2016 season; commissioner Roger Goodell stated that the league needed to further investigate the impact of removing the blackout rules before such a change is made permament. While the league never explicitly stated such, the blackout suspension will continue into 2017. What is not symbolic is that threats to the NFL anti-trust exemption persuades the NFL to sit, lay down, or roll over as Congress desires. They blacked out home games not sold out for over forty years. Ticket demand exceeded supply and games sold out regularly. With demand exceeding supply, they could lose some demand for tickets and it would not show up as empty seats at the stadiums. Half the games for week 4 failed to sell to capacity. The week 5 Pats @ Bucs Thursday game failed to sell to capacity. The initial losses were hidden by different people buying the available tickets. Ticket demand has fallen to the point where games are not selling out. Further erosion of demand will directly result in more empty seats. Week 4 - games with attendance under capacity 92% Bengals @Browns 95% Bills @ Falcons 94% Jags @ Jets 91% Lions @ Vikings 96% Panthers @ Pats **% Eagles @ Chargers 25,374 (cap ~27K) 97% Giant @ Bucs 97% Redskins @ Chiefs **% Saints @ Dolphins 84, 423 (Wembley cap 86,000 for Am. football) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Week 5 - games with attendance under capacity 98% Pats @ Bucs
#16. To: nolu chan (#15)
Your list of stadium occupancy at the end of your post is interesting, suggestive even. What will be more telling is how much seats are being discounted in various cities, how low the price goes with scalpers, etc. Of course they can sell out and make it a practice to do so, just to continue the confidence game of their huge popularity. Empty seats in those stadiums makes viewers at home think that stadium tickets aren't all that desirable. So they don't want empty seats visible on TV or on social media posts by fans as that is likely to cause a downward spiral in ticket prices and demand. Something like this could be building across the league and remain largely unnoticed. Sports reporters may be largely compromised on reporting things like this as news as they may be inclined to protect the NFL as a sport industry and not write stuff that could harm it. Also, their access for interviews could be threatened by reporting such stories.
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#2. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
Woo Hoo! Crater it! Burn it all down!
#3. To: Tooconservative (#2)
OTOH, if they lose Budweiser as sponsor, that could hit their revenues hard enough to make difference.
#4. To: Vicomte13 (#3)
#5. To: Tooconservative, Vicomte13 (#4)
We aren't there yet. But the trend is very dismal for the NFL.
NFL ratings down on weekend of boycott
By Associated Press
Published: October 4, 2017, 6:25 am
Week 02. 15.8 million -0.5m, minus 3.0%
Week 03. 14.8 million -1.0m, minus 9.2%
Week 04. 13.8 million -1.0m, minus 15.3%
Week 06. 11.8 million - 1.0m, minus 27.6%
#6. To: nolu chan (#5)
(Edited)
Also, early season ratings indicate the two highest rated series on tv are The Big Bang Theory and spinoff Young Sheldon.
#10. To: Tooconservative (#6)
BBT got tired and formulaic after 3-4 years. Still, no doubt it is popular, here and overseas.
You have to consider the NFL hardcores.
Trying to think like the NFL owners and the networks, they have to be considering what is their base hardcore audience. They must think it is at least 12M. Still a major audience but much diminished from the height of its power.
#11. To: nolu chan (#10)
A big, big problem is that diminished revenue is not offset by comparable diminished expenses. Very costly contracts do not diminish automatically in response.
#13. To: Tooconservative (#11)
If NFL revenues stay down, some of these playas simply won't get as good a contract renewal.
#15. To: All (#13)
From 1973 through 2014, the NFL maintained a blackout policy that states that a home game cannot be televised in the team's local market if all tickets are not sold out 72 hours prior to its start time. This makes the NFL the only major professional sports league in the US that requires teams to sell out tickets in order to broadcast a game on television locally. Although nationally-televised games in the other leagues are often blacked out on the national networks on which the game is airing in the local markets of the participating teams, they can still be seen on the local broadcast TV station or regional sports network that normally holds their local/regional broadcast rights. The league blackout policy has been suspended on a year-to-year basis since 2015.
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