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Sports Fandom Is Changing. How We Measure A League’s Success Has Not.
As the media landscape continues to evolve, sports fandom continues to be redefined. Yet, archaic TV ratings are still how we measure a league’s success.
2020 was a hell of a rollercoaster for everyone, but perhaps those in the world of sports had the bumpiest ride. Sports — like practically every other industry in the world — was greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, with athletes today commendably taking a greater interest in social issues, the leagues that employ them are increasingly expected to follow suit, and, for the most part in 2020, they did, while simultaneously dealing with the pandemic. Yet, any discussion about how those challenges affected the business of the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL inevitably revolves around one thing: TV ratings.
TV ratings have been around since about the 1950’s, and its primary function remains the same to this day: to provide a demographic measure. The real reason it exists, however, is to allow media companies to convert the attention their products draw into dollars. That has also not changed. This system makes a lot of sense when television sets existed in every household and computers and smartphones had yet to become the norm. If you…
