Most of the writing on this number reads as grief. The publishing industry has lost something it used to have, the loss is real, and the response has been to point out that the loss is real, repeatedly, in increasingly precise percentages.
I want to write the structural version instead.
Zero-click is not a thing that is happening to content. It is a re-pricing of content categories. Some categories were always going to be answered in a sentence — what time the Super Bowl starts, who won the 2014 World Cup, the boiling point of water, the capital of Bolivia. Those queries used to land on a publisher’s page because Google had not yet figured out how to deliver the answer without sending you there. Google has now figured it out. The query no longer needs the page.
The category was never the page. The category was always the answer.
The mistake, going back to the early 2010s SEO arbitrage era, was treating those queries as content. They were not content; they were lookups. A lookup with a clean answer is a lookup that the platform will eventually internalize. The fact that publishers built entire businesses on aggregating lookups was a side effect of Google not yet being good enough to skip the publisher.
The categories that survive zero-click are the ones whose value cannot be compressed into a sentence. Investigative reporting. Long-form analysis. Reviews that synthesize hundreds of data points into a judgment. Personal essays whose argument depends on the writer’s specific authority. Newsletters that subscribers buy because they want one person’s voice in their inbox three times a week. Anything where the judgment is the product, not the lookup.
This is not a comforting thought for most of the publishing industry, because most of the publishing industry was never selling judgment. It was selling lookups dressed up as articles. The dressing-up was the business model. Zero-click is removing the dressing.
The cohort that gets to keep operating in the zero-click era is the cohort whose product was never a commodity in the first place. It is also a smaller cohort. The Verge does a different kind of journalism than the SEO factories whose traffic is down 85% or more. The outlets that have held up better against AI Overviews are the ones whose readers come direct, not through search — the ones that built a relationship rather than a funnel.
There is a real business in zero-click, and it does not look like the old business. It looks like a smaller audience that pays more, comes back more, and trusts the byline. It looks like a newsletter, or a paid Substack, or a private community, or a podcast with a sponsorship instead of programmatic ads. None of that scales to AdSense numbers. All of it survives.
The grief stage of zero-click is over. The structural stage is what the surviving cohort is willing to do that the lookup cohort never had to.
]]>The argument is technically defensible. The argument is also, almost line for line, the same one regional sports network executives offered in 2018 about the cable bundle.
I want to write about why those two arguments belong in the same essay.
Start with the numbers, because the numbers are not in dispute. The disagreement is about what they mean.
A field study published last year tracked 42% of organic queries triggering AI Overviews and measured outbound clicks at 0.38 per search; with AI Overviews removed, the same set of queries produced 0.61 clicks per search. That is a 38% reduction in clicks attributable to the Overview. Other studies have reported organic CTR drops between 34% and 61% on AIO-triggered keywords.
Publisher-level data tells the same story at higher resolution. Wired’s Google traffic is down 62% over the AI Overviews rollout window. The Verge, HowToGeek, and ZDNet have each lost more than 85%. Mashable is down 30%. Digital Trends went from 8.5 million monthly Google clicks in March 2024 to 264,861 in January 2026, which is a number that takes a moment to process. Chartbeat reported that small publishers — sites in the 1,000 to 10,000 daily-pageview range — saw Google referral traffic drop by roughly 60% over two years. The IAB Tech Lab estimated AI summaries reduce publisher traffic 20%–60% on average and translate to roughly $2 billion in annual ad revenue losses across the publishing sector.
These are not edge cases. These are not contested numbers. Even Google does not really dispute them in aggregate; what Google disputes is the claim that the clicks lost were the kind of clicks that ever mattered.
Hold that disagreement in mind, because it is the entire game.
The Google argument, in its strongest form, runs like this.
Search has always had a long tail of low-value clicks. A query like “what time does the Super Bowl start” used to send the user to a page that took eight seconds to load, served a banner ad, and answered the question in one sentence the user could have read in a knowledge panel. The user got nothing valuable from the visit. The publisher got a click that was not going to convert, was not going to retain, was not going to do anything for the business beyond produce one CPM impression at the bottom of the page. AI Overviews remove that click. The publisher loses the impression. The user saves five seconds. Net welfare goes up.
The clicks that survive, in this telling, are the clicks the publisher actually wanted — readers who want to spend time on the page, sign up for the newsletter, return for the next article, become a subscriber. Those readers are the publisher’s real audience. The bounce traffic was always noise.
Google has separately argued that the methodologies used in the public studies are flawed and that the company “consistently directs billions of clicks to websites daily” without observing significant drops in aggregate web traffic. More recently, the company has pointed to AI Overviews CTR rising from 1.3% in late 2025 to 2.4% by February 2026 as evidence that the click-through rate is recovering as the product matures.
I want to be careful here. The defense is not nothing. There genuinely is a category of click that the publisher never monetized well. There genuinely is a recovery underway in raw AIO click-through rates. There genuinely are publishers — direct-traffic newsletters, paid Substacks, vertical specialists — who never depended on the bounce-click economy and are not seeing the decline.
The defense is true. That is the part of the defense that is worth saying out loud, because if it were obviously false, this essay would not be necessary.
The problem with the defense is not that it is false. The problem is that it is the same shape, almost word for word, as a defense I have already watched run its course in my own industry.
"The new product is cannibalizing some of the old product, but the old product still has revenue, and the cannibalized portion was the marginal portion." That sentence describes the AI Overviews defense. It also describes every regional sports network deck I saw between 2017 and 2022.
I have spent enough of my career in sports media to know what the conversation around regional sports networks sounded like in the back half of the last decade. By 2018, cable subscriptions had been declining for six straight years. The DTC narrative was already in motion. ESPN+ had launched. DAZN was building out its U.S. footprint. Cord-cutting headlines ran weekly.
What the RSN side said, repeatedly, was a structurally specific version of the bounce-click argument.
The cable bundle was still, by an enormous margin, the largest revenue source for the franchise. Local rights inside the RSN system paid more per fan than any direct-to-consumer alternative could plausibly replicate. The fans who were leaving cable were, the argument went, the marginal fans — the ones who did not watch enough games to justify the bundle anyway. The fans who actually loved the team would always pay for the bundle, because the bundle was where the games lived. The cord-cutters were leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with sports — they were leaving for Game of Thrones and House of Cards and Netflix originals. Sports was the anchor of the bundle. The anchor would hold.
Every line in that paragraph was true at the time it was spoken. The cable bundle was the largest revenue source. RSN economics did pay more per fan than DTC could match in the late 2010s. Many of the cord-cutters were leaving for reasons unrelated to sports. The structural arguments were directionally correct. The math worked, in the particular accounting frame the RSN executives were operating in.
Diamond Sports Group, the entity that held the largest portfolio of regional sports networks in the country, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2023. It re-emerged as FanDuel Sports Network in early 2025 after a rebrand via FanDuel naming rights, and is now in a second wind-down. Thirteen NBA teams and seven NHL teams and most of the affected MLB clubs spent late 2025 and early 2026 watching their primary local-rights infrastructure dissolve in real time, with most of them now scrambling to assemble local-rights stacks outside the cable bundle.
That is not what an industry that is losing the marginal fan looks like. That is what an industry that priced its model against the marginal fan and found out, too late, that the marginal fan was load-bearing looks like.
The RSN argument’s logical error was not in the math. The math was correct. The error was in the assumption that the categories were stable.
“Marginal fan” is a categorization that depends on what you compare it against. A fan who watches twenty games a year, in the era when the cable bundle is the only delivery system, is a marginal fan — relative to the fan who watches eighty. In a world where DTC streaming exists, that same twenty-game fan becomes the core of a different product. They are someone who would happily pay $15 a month for twenty games, who would not pay $90 a month for the bundle to access the same twenty games. The category of fan did not change. The product changed underneath the category.
When the product changes, the category re-prices.
The RSN executives who used the “marginal fan” frame were not wrong about the marginal fan. They were wrong about what would happen when a different product taught the marginal fan that they were actually a core customer of that product. Every cord-cutter who picked up an NBA League Pass, an MLB.tv subscription, an ESPN+ trial, a YouTube TV vMVPD package, was a fan who had been mis-categorized as marginal in the bundle frame. They were not low-value; they were waiting for a product priced for the way they actually wanted to consume.
The cable bundle did not lose its marginal fans. It lost the category — and discovered, in the loss, that the category had been propping up the entire pricing structure.
Now read the AI Overviews defense again with that pattern in mind.
“The clicks AI Overviews replaced were bounce clicks. The user did not want them. The publisher did not monetize them. The clicks that survive are the high-value ones — the readers who actually wanted the article.”
The mathematical part is, as with the RSN defense, correct. There genuinely is a category of click that bounces. There genuinely is a category of reader that converts. The two categories are real, and they are different.
The structural error is in the assumption that the categories are stable.
What a “bounce click” is depends on what the alternative is. A click that bounces in a world where Google is the entry point to the entire web is a click that the publisher failed to retain. The publisher had the user on the page; the page did not deliver; the user left. That is a publisher problem. A click that bounces in a world where the user can get the answer without ever leaving Google is a click that the publisher never had access to. The user was never going to be on the page in the first place. That is a platform problem. The publisher’s job has changed without anyone telling the publisher.
The “high-value clicks remain” frame is structurally a “core fan stays in the bundle” frame. It is true at the moment it is spoken. It is true the year after. The thing it does not survive is the way the surviving cohort gets retrained.
A reader who used to find Wired through Google now finds the answer to their immediate question in the AI Overview, and never opens Wired again unless they happen to know it exists by name. The reader who does know Wired exists by name and goes there directly is the reader the bounce-click defense says is the real audience. That reader is also a much smaller cohort than the one Wired used to have, and that cohort is not generative — it does not get replenished by the next college student who Googled their way into the Wired universe in 2014, because that pathway is now answered by Google before it reaches the publisher.
The publishers that hold up against this — and there are some — share a pattern with the sports franchises that adapted earliest to the post-RSN world. They built a direct relationship with the audience that did not depend on the platform’s referral.
For the franchises, that has meant team-owned streaming products, free-streaming partnerships outside the cable bundle, and first-party data collection that the RSN never permitted. I wrote a piece a few weeks ago on the parallel mechanism in minor-league baseball, where free local streaming has quietly become the load-bearing layer. The structural shift is from “rented audience through a third-party pipe” to “owned audience through a first-party surface.”
For the publishers, the same shift looks like newsletters that subscribers actually open, paid memberships with retention metrics that make sense, podcasts whose listeners came from the host’s own audience, communities that exist in the publisher’s environment rather than someone else’s feed. None of that is novel. What is new is the realization that the publishers that did not start building the direct relationship five years ago are running out of time to start now.
The bounce-click defense is exactly the kind of argument that delays the start. If a publisher believes the clicks they are losing are the bad ones, the publisher does not feel the urgency to rebuild the audience model. The publisher waits for the AIO CTR recovery curve. The publisher trusts Google’s directional language about quality of clicks improving. The publisher reads the 2.4% AIO CTR figure as a turn rather than a ceiling. And the publisher loses another two years.
I do not think most publishers have those years.
I am not saying AI Overviews are a bad product for users. They are an excellent product for users. The compression of “look up a fact” into a single result is a real welfare gain, and the welfare gain is going to keep showing up in usage.
I am not saying Google is lying. The bounce-click argument is internally consistent. The CTR recovery is real. The category of valuable click that survives the Overview is a real category. None of that is in question.
I am saying that “true and operationally fatal” is a category that exists, and the AI Overviews defense — like the RSN defense before it — sits squarely inside that category. The defense is correct in its premises and wrong in its conclusion, and the wrongness shows up not in the next quarter but in the cohort math three to five years out.
The most useful thing I can offer, having watched the same shape of argument play out once already, is the observation that the inside of the cliff and the bottom of the cliff look the same in the accounting until they do not.
I would not be optimizing for AI Overviews citations. I would not be trying to game the new SERP. I would not be spending the next twelve months in the SEO conference circuit waiting for a CTR recovery that is not coming back to its old shape.
I would be doing what the franchises that survived the RSN collapse did. I would be building the direct surface. I would be moving the audience off Google’s rails and onto a relationship the platform cannot disintermediate. I would be giving up some short-term traffic to invest in a model the next product cycle cannot collapse.
That is the part of the answer that none of the defenses, mine or Google’s, makes easier. Building a direct audience is harder than running an SEO factory. Running an SEO factory was supposed to be the business. The business changed.
The bounce-click defense is the sound of an industry that has not yet noticed that the business changed.
That sound is familiar. I have heard it before.
]]>In November, Apple announced that MLS Season Pass would no longer be sold as a separate product. Every match in the league, on every Saturday and Wednesday and Sunday, is now part of the regular Apple TV subscription — same price, more inventory, no upcharge, no separate authentication flow. The standalone MLS subscription was the front of a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal Apple signed in 2022. Three seasons in, Apple folded the wrapper.
The same Apple TV bundle now also carries Friday Night Baseball — two MLB games each Friday, weekly doubleheaders through the regular season, exclusive to the platform. F1 races. Eventually, more.
Read those two moves together and the strategy gets obvious.
Apple is not buying sports rights to make money on sports. Apple is buying sports rights to lower churn and raise sign-ups for the rest of the Services bucket. That is the whole game. Every other major sports-rights buyer in 2026 is running a P&L on the rights themselves — selling ads against the inventory, building subscription tiers around the live games, splitting cable affiliate fees with the partner pipes. Disney, NBC, Amazon, ESPN, Paramount: each one of them has to make the rights deal pay for itself in the same fiscal year, on the same line item, against the same partners.
Apple is not running that model.
Apple TV+ exists, in its parent company’s framing, to reduce churn and justify Apple One bundle pricing. Sports rights, inside that framing, are not a P&L line. They are a customer-acquisition cost. The metric that matters is not whether the MLB or MLS rights pay back per game; it is whether the new subscriber stays in the ecosystem — keeps using iCloud, keeps paying for Apple Music, eventually upgrades the iPhone, eventually buys the Watch.
The deal structure tells the strategy. Two games a week, on a Friday night, with no stand-alone subscription option, in a bundle that also includes a streaming service most subscribers signed up for to watch Severance — that is not how you build a P&L. That is how you build a habit.
It is also why the MLS folding move is so telling. A traditional rights buyer would have run the math on MLS Season Pass standalone — how many subscribers, what ARPU, what marginal contribution to rights amortization — and either kept the wrapper or renegotiated the deal. Apple ran a different calculation: how many people will start paying for Apple TV who weren’t, how many will stop canceling, how many will move from monthly to annual. The standalone MLS revenue was leaving a larger Services number on the table.
This is what it looks like when sports rights are priced against a different P&L than the partners use.
The other buyers cannot run this model. The other buyers do not have an iPhone to amortize against. That, more than anything else, is why Apple’s sports strategy looks idiosyncratic from the outside. From the inside, it is the only model that makes sense for the company actually buying the rights.
]]>The first World Cup I watched was Italy 1990. I was a kid in India. The matches kicked off after midnight, India time, and ran past 3am. I stayed up. I missed school. The day after the final on July 8, 1990 — Andreas Brehme, weaker foot, 85th minute — I did not show up for the first day at my new middle school. I have written about this before, so I will not belabor the personal part. The relevant fact for this essay is the next one.
I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since.
That is nine tournaments. Italy 1990. United States 1994. France 1998. Korea-Japan 2002. Germany 2006. South Africa 2010. Brazil 2014. Russia 2018. Qatar 2022. Somewhere on the order of five hundred and fifty matches (1990 and 1994 each ran 52 matches across 24 teams; 1998 onwards 64 matches across 32). All of them, live, in the middle of someone’s night.
Through those nine tournaments, the constant has been the magicians — and the moments that nine tournaments later I still cannot un-remember.
This essay is about both.
I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since.
The Maradona of 1990 was not the Maradona of 1986. The 1986 Maradona — the Hand of God, the Goal of the Century, all in the same quarter-final against England — was the most famous footballer who had ever lived, at the absolute height of his powers. The 1990 Maradona was already breaking down. Ankle-injured, surrounded by a poor Argentina side that lost its opening match to Cameroon 1-0 at the San Siro and scraped through the group in third place.
I will tell you what I remember. The round of 16, Argentina against Brazil, in Turin. A 1-0 game built on a Brazilian side that hit the post repeatedly and could not put the ball away. In the 80th minute, Maradona — being man-marked, with two more defenders nearby — picked up the ball at the halfway line, slalomed past four players, and slid it to Claudio Caniggia for the only goal of the match. It was a four-second sequence that held three men’s worth of work and one man’s worth of magic. Argentina won. Brazil went home.
That was the Maradona moment of 1990. He produced one. It got Argentina through to the next round. He was running on willpower. There were no others.
In the final at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, West Germany’s defender Guido Buchwald man-marked Maradona for ninety minutes. Brehme converted a late penalty with his theoretically weaker foot. West Germany 1, Argentina 0. At the final whistle, Maradona burst into tears. He blamed the referee. The cameras lingered. The whole stadium watched the magician cry.
That tournament holds the record for the lowest goals-per-game average in World Cup history — 2.21 across 52 matches — and is remembered by historians of the game as the most defensive, most negative World Cup that has been played. It is also, for me, the World Cup that recruited me to football for life. Some of that is a function of being twelve. Most of it is a function of Maradona, even past his peak, being a man who could turn a defensive 1-0 into a moment that survived its tournament.
Maradona died on November 25, 2020, at the age of 60, of cardiac arrest, while recovering from brain surgery for a blood clot. He was between two World Cups when he went — Russia 2018 was already in the books, Qatar 2022 was still two years away. I do not know how I was supposed to feel. I am still not sure I am over it.
The other side of the Stadio Olimpico that night was a German team that was, on paper, the best Germany had fielded in two decades. The captain was Lothar Matthäus, that year’s Ballon d’Or winner. The forwards were Rudi Völler and Jürgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann was 25, lean, two-footed, almost unfair in the air. He scored three goals in the tournament and was, alongside Matthäus, the structural spine of a team that dropped only two points in seven games.
The Klinsmann magic was different from the Maradona magic. Where Maradona’s was personal — the four-defender slalom, the ankle holding together by force of will — Klinsmann’s was structural. He did not run past four men. He arrived at exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and the ball arrived too. He was the kind of magician who made the magic look like the system, and made the system look like something inevitable. Germany, that summer, was inevitable.
There was also the joy of him. The diving celebration he made his signature in the years after — head-first, arms forward, sliding ten meters across the grass on his stomach — was a self-aware reference to the European reputation that German strikers dove. He turned the joke on himself, and on the system, and made it part of the iconography of ’90s football. The country that produced him is not, as a national stereotype, a joyful one. He was the joyful German. That, too, was a kind of magic.
I want to be careful here, because to say “Ronaldo” without qualification in 2026 is to invite an entirely different argument about an entirely different player. The Ronaldo I am talking about is Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, the original, the Fenômeno, the Brazilian who scored eight goals in the 2002 tournament and won the Golden Boot. There is a generation now that did not see him play, and I am sorry for them.
The 1998 Ronaldo was 21 years old and the best forward in the world by a margin so large the question was uninteresting. He carried Brazil to the final in Paris. And then, on the morning of the final against France, something went badly wrong in his hotel room. He convulsed. His body shook uncontrollably. He foamed at the mouth. His teammate Roberto Carlos was the one who first found him. He was taken to a hospital, given a clean bill of health, returned to the squad, and inserted into the starting lineup at the very last moment, against medical advice and against common sense. He was, on the pitch that night, a ghost of himself. France won 3-0. Zidane scored twice. We will get to Zidane.
The 2002 Ronaldo was a different man. He had spent four years rebuilding two destroyed knees. He had been written off, multiple times, by people whose job was to write off footballers. He came back. He scored eight goals — a tally that earned him the Golden Boot and tied him for the most goals in a World Cup since the 1970s. He scored both goals in the final against Germany. The first one was a poacher’s strike off a Rivaldo shot that Oliver Kahn parried straight at his feet. The second one was vintage — Ronaldo collecting a pass at the top of the box, taking one touch to set himself, and lashing the ball into the corner with the inside of his right foot. Brazil 2, Germany 0. Brazil won its fifth World Cup.
The 2002 final is the only World Cup final I have watched in which the winner was, transparently and unmistakably, the answer to a question the universe had owed someone for four years. It is also, as a matter of pure footballing skill, the cleanest performance by an out-and-out striker that I have ever seen in a final. Both things were true at once. That is rare. That is what I mean by magic.
Zinedine Zidane never quite fit the template of the magician. He was not fast. He did not score a lot. He did not slalom past four defenders. What he did was control the geometry of a football match for ninety minutes at a time, in a way that the people defending against him could feel but could not stop.
The 1998 final was the apotheosis. France against Brazil at the Stade de France. The Brazil that, twenty-four hours earlier, had received the first version of the Ronaldo news. Zidane scored two goals — both headers, both from corners — in the first half. France 2-0 at the break. Petit added a third in stoppage time. France 3, Brazil 0. A team that had never won a World Cup beat the team that was supposed to win every World Cup. Zidane scored two of the three goals with his head. He was historically not known for heading the ball, which made the moment funnier and stranger and more permanent.
The 2006 final was the other apotheosis, and the inverse of the first. France against Italy in Berlin. Zidane scored an audacious chipped penalty in the seventh minute. It hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced behind the line, and bounced out. He was thirty-four years old. He had announced before the tournament that this would be his last competitive match, win or lose. He played the entire game like a man who knew exactly how much was left. And then, in the 110th minute of the final — the second period of extra time, with the score 1-1 — Marco Materazzi said something to him about his sister, and Zidane turned around, and headbutted Materazzi in the chest, and was sent off, and walked past the World Cup trophy on his way to the tunnel without looking at it. Italy won on penalties.
It is one of the most studied moments in the history of the sport. There are essays about what Materazzi said. There are essays about whether Zidane regrets it. He has said he does and does not. The thing I keep coming back to is that the same player produced both finals — the one in 1998 in which he was the entire reason a country won a World Cup it had never won, and the one in 2006 in which he was the entire reason a country lost a World Cup it deserved to win. The same head. Eight years apart.
That, too, is the magic. The magic is not always good. The magic is a refusal to be a system.
The magicians produced moments. So did people who were not magicians. The most-remembered goals of the World Cup are a list that runs deeper than any list of players, because the World Cup is about the moment more than it is about the man — and the World Cup is the rare arena where a player who is otherwise a footnote can manufacture a moment that survives him.
Dennis Bergkamp, France 1998, 90th minute, against Argentina in Marseille. Frank de Boer hit a long, looping ball from inside his own half. Bergkamp ran underneath it, took it down with the outside of his right foot in a single touch that defied physics, took a second touch to push the ball past Roberto Ayala, and a third touch to lash it past the Argentine goalkeeper Carlos Roa. Three touches. Three different functions. One goal. Argentina out. The Dutch announcer, Jack van Gelder, screamed Bergkamp’s name three times in succession on a frequency that has not been heard since on Dutch television. There is no debate among football people about the technical content of that goal. It is the single best argument I know that a footballer can produce, in three seconds, a sequence that thirty years later still has not been bettered.
Roberto Baggio, USA 1994 final, penalty shootout against Brazil. Il Divin Codino — the Divine Ponytail — had carried Italy to the final almost single-handedly, scoring five goals on his way through the knockouts on legs that were visibly failing. Italy and Brazil drew 0-0 through 120 minutes. Penalties. Baresi missed. Massaro missed. With Italy needing Baggio to convert to keep the tournament alive, Il Divin Codino put the ball on the spot, ran up, and ballooned the kick over the bar. Brazil won its fourth World Cup. Baggio stood with his hands on his hips, head down, in the most-replayed image of footballing devastation that exists. He told an interviewer many years later, in a quote that is not embellished: “I failed that time, and it affected me for years.”
Saudi Arabia 2, Argentina 1, Qatar 2022. Group stage opener. Argentina entered the tournament on a 36-match unbeaten run dating back to 2019. The team had Lionel Messi at the height of his late career. Saudi Arabia’s lineup featured exactly zero players from a top-five European league. Argentina led 1-0 after a Messi penalty. In the second half, in the space of five minutes, Saleh Al-Shehri and Salem Al-Dawsari scored two of the most outrageous goals the tournament would produce. The Al-Dawsari goal in particular — a curled finish into the top corner from outside the box, off a touch he had no right to — would have been a Goal of the Tournament candidate even if the team scoring it had been Brazil. Argentina lost. The 36-match streak ended in 90 minutes. Gracenote later called it the most surprising result in World Cup history. Three weeks later, Argentina won the tournament.
Lionel Messi, Qatar 2022 final, against France. Messi scored. Di María scored. Argentina led 2-0 with ten minutes to go. Then Mbappé scored. Then Mbappé scored again, ninety seconds later, and the game went to extra time. Then Messi scored, in the 108th minute, and Argentina led 3-2. Then Mbappé scored a third, in the 118th minute, the second hat trick in a World Cup final in history. Penalty shootout. Argentina won. Messi, at thirty-five, on his fifth World Cup, lifted the trophy he had been chasing for almost two decades. The image of Messi being carried around the pitch on his teammates’ shoulders, holding a trophy he had spent his entire career being told he could not win, is the closest thing to an unmixed happy ending that the modern World Cup has produced.
These are five moments. There are fifty more I could list. The point is that the World Cup is the only sporting event that consistently produces moments at this density, with this much history attached to each one, in front of an audience this large. There is no equivalent in any other sport. That is why I have not missed a game.
The structural thing the World Cup does, that nothing else does, is that it lets a single moment in a single match become a permanent fixture of a billion people’s mental furniture. The Maradona slalom, the Bergkamp touch, Zidane’s headbutt, Baggio’s miss, the Al-Dawsari curler, the Messi lift — these are not local events. They are global ones, simultaneous ones, watched in real time by audiences that no other event on earth assembles. The 2022 final was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people across all platforms, which is roughly one in five humans alive.
The thing nine tournaments has taught me is that the moments are the asset. Not the matches, not the standings, not even the trophies — the moments. Most of the World Cup matches are bad. The 1990 tournament I just spent six paragraphs writing about was 2.21 goals per game. Most of those goals were ugly. I have sat through hundreds of bad World Cup matches in the middle of my night, and I have stayed because the math of the moment is asymmetric: most matches will not produce one, but the ones that do will sit in your memory for thirty-six years.
The other thing I want to say is that the magicians are not interchangeable with the system. The system can produce a tournament. The magicians produce the moments. Brazil 2002 had Ronaldo. France 1998 had Zidane. Argentina 1990 had Maradona, on one ankle, dragging a mediocre team to a final he should have won. Argentina 2022 had Messi. None of these tournaments would be remembered the way they are remembered without the man at the center.
The system needs the magician. The magician does not need the system. That is the asymmetry that makes football, as a global sport, work.
In six days the next tournament begins. I do not know who its magicians will be. I have guesses — there is a French phenomenon, an English midfielder, a 17-year-old Spaniard, a Brazilian winger who has been the best in the world for some part of every season since 2023 — but the guesses are not the point. The point is that the magicians of 2026 are not yet known. The names are still incomplete. The list is being written across the next six weeks, in 104 matches, in 16 cities across three countries, ending at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.
There’s a kid, in Lagos and Mumbai and Tokyo and Manila, watching a midnight match on whatever screen he or she can find, is the kid I was. And the math of the moment will work for that kid too. Most of the matches will be ordinary. One or two of them will produce something he or she will carry for the next thirty-six years.
]]>By April, the docket had drawn nearly 9,000 comments. Ninety-eight percent of them expressed frustration with the migration of sports to streaming, and hoped that broadcast would remain the primary surface for watching their teams.
I want to be careful about how I read that number. Regulatory comment dockets are self-selected and skew loud. The 9,000 do not represent a national poll. What they represent is the slice of the country that took the time to file a public comment with a federal agency on a topic most people do not know is being studied. That slice is, by definition, the most frustrated, the most articulate, and — politically — the most useful.
This is the moment when a market problem starts to become a political one.
For the past five years, “sports going to streaming” has been a market story. League negotiates with platform. Platform pays. Fan adapts. Fan pays. The fan’s options were, in order, accept-and-pay, accept-and-pirate, or accept-and-quit. The frustration was real but it was a consumer frustration, measurable in churn, in social-media venting, and in subscription fatigue numbers that fed straight into the bundle-collapse story I wrote about a few weeks ago.
The FCC docket adds a fourth option to that list. Accept, pay, and complain to your senator.
That fourth option does not have to win to matter. It only has to exist. A live regulatory thread, with public comments stacking up at 98% one-direction frustration, becomes a political input. It becomes something a member of Congress can hold up at a hearing. It becomes a paragraph in a senator’s letter to a league commissioner. It becomes a question at the next antitrust hearing about the NFL or the NBA or the cable bundle that is dying without ever quite collapsing.
I do not know whether the FCC will issue rules. I doubt the agency has the appetite or the legal scaffolding to seriously regulate sports rights distribution. But that is not how political layers work. Political layers do not need to win to alter the math.
FCC Commissioner Trusty has already cited the comment count by name in public statements. That is not a regulatory action. It is a sign that the next league negotiation, the next exclusive-streaming announcement, the next paywalled playoff round, will be priced against a constituency that did not exist three years ago.
The market problem just acquired a political layer. That layer does not negotiate the way buyers and sellers do.
That changes the next deal.
]]>Sportico reported that Prime Video’s first season of NBA coverage delivered an audience with a median age of 46.9. The same league, on linear partners, ran 56. A nine-year split between the same teams playing the same games on the same nights, distributed by different pipes.
Most coverage of that number has filed it as color. A footnote inside a recap of “broadcast still leads, streaming is closing.” That framing misses the asset.
The 9-year spread is not a fact about the audience. It is a fact about the buyer.
A 46-year-old fan is monetized differently than a 56-year-old fan. They buy different alcohol, different cars, different financial products, different travel packages, different jerseys, different sneakers, different sportsbook positions. They take different risks. They convert at different rates on different creative. They get reached on different surfaces. The CPM curves are not the same. The lifetime-value curves are not the same. The downstream commerce attached to the eyeball is not the same.
Two networks selling the same game pull two different audiences with two different commercial profiles. The ad load is not interchangeable. The sponsorship inventory is not interchangeable. The data layer underneath the broadcast — who tuned in, for how long, what they did next — is not interchangeable.
At Victory+, our median age is 36.
That number sits ten years younger than Prime Video and twenty years younger than linear. It is not because we are doing something clever with content. It is because the 36-year-old who wants to watch hockey or soccer or basketball already knows how to find a free streaming app on their phone and is not going to dig out a coaxial cable to do it.
The 56-year-old NBA fan still pays for a linear subscription. The 46-year-old NBA fan is willing to download Prime Video and authenticate. The 36-year-old fan opens an app, which already has a video session running by the time the masthead loads.
Each of these is a real audience. None of them is the future. The whole thing is the future, distributed across three different commercial profiles that cannot be aggregated into one.
The next bid table will be priced on this. The buyer who can do something specific with a 36-year-old that linear cannot do with a 56-year-old wins the cohort that compounds. The buyer who treats the age spread as background noise pays cable money for cable demographics.
The number is not a footnote. It is the chart.
]]>Twelve days later, CNBC published its 2026 WNBA franchise valuations. The headline was that the league finally had its first billion-dollar team. The Golden State Valkyries — an expansion franchise that did not exist three years ago, a team that has played one season — were worth $1B. The league average came in at $460M.
Both numbers are larger than the entire WNBA was estimated to be worth five years ago.
I want to write about why those two announcements belong in the same essay. They are not the same kind of news. One is a local-rights deal in a mid-size DMA. The other is an investor-press valuation event in the most expensive city in the country. But the same shift moves them both. The WNBA is entering its second media-rights cycle from a position of cultural relevance rather than historical inertia. That is rarer than it sounds. And the math underneath the league is starting to look different.
The Golden State Valkyries paid a $50M expansion fee in 2023 and started play in May 2025. After exactly one season, CNBC’s 2026 list put the franchise at $1 billion; Sportico’s separate methodology landed at $850M. Different numbers, different math, same direction. Both are extraordinary returns on a $50M ticket.
A valuation is not a transaction price. No one has actually paid $1B for the Valkyries, and no one is going to. But valuations get tested in two places — at sale, and at expansion. The expansion test is already running. The WNBA’s three most recent expansion teams paid $50M (Toronto Tempo), $50M (Valkyries), and $75M (Portland Fire). The next cohort — Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, debuting by 2030 — are paying $250M apiece.
That is the league pricing the next entrants against the asset class that the Valkyries just demonstrated. From $50M to $250M in three years. The league does not need a transaction to ratify the valuation; it has already been ratified by the next round of buyers.
Sportico’s methodology marks the league’s average value up 59% year-over-year. The Valkyries themselves are up roughly $350M from Sportico’s number a year ago — more than the entire expansion fee the franchise paid to enter the league. The 2025 ownership group that wrote the $50M check has, on paper, made back somewhere between 16x and 20x in eighteen months.
These are the kind of multiples you see at the inflection point of an asset class, not in the steady state of one. The interesting question is which they are.
In July 2024, alongside the NBA’s $76 billion announcement, the WNBA announced its own 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal. $200M per year. Three partners — Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon Prime Video — a cohort the league did not have at the table during the previous round. USA Network signed a separate 11-year extension in 2025, expanding the package further. The first season under the deal is the season tipping off next week.
For most of the league’s history, national rights ran through ESPN at a reported $60M per year — a sum that, by 2024, was small enough to be invisible inside the parent NBA-ESPN structure. The new deal is more than three times that, structurally separated, and distributed across partners whose interests in the league are not all the same. ESPN is buying the legacy audience. NBC is buying inventory for Peacock. Amazon is buying the cohort that has decided streaming is where sports live.
The 2026 schedule reflects all three buyers. A record 216 nationally televised games, spread across ABC, ESPN, NBC, Peacock, NBCSN, Prime Video, CBS, Paramount+, ION, USA Network, and NBA TV. Every single Indiana Fever game will be nationally televised — the first time any WNBA team has had its full 44-game schedule go national. The CBS package alone runs 20 games on broadcast TV, reaching the kind of free-over-the-air audience the league has not had in decades.
The number to sit with is not the $2.2B. It is the cohort.
A media-rights deal is a price the partners pay against an audience they expect to find — and the audience the WNBA's partners are paying for is one that did not exist three years ago.
Most professional leagues hit their second media-rights deal carrying the inertia of the first. The first deal was almost always done at a moment when the league was selling potential — small audiences, modest production, a partner betting that the line will go up. The second deal then gets priced against whatever the league has actually delivered between the two — which historically has meant either modest growth or modest decline relative to the partner’s original underwriting. Either way, the shape of the audience tends to be continuous between cycles.
The WNBA’s second cycle is structurally different. The league is being repriced not against its own steady-state arc, but against a categorical reset that happened in years three through five of the first deal. Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, Angel Reese, and the broader cohort of 2024–25 stars did not just grow the audience — they shifted the audience demographically and culturally. Average WNBA attendance hit 11,148 in 2025, breaking a 23-year-old record, and total league attendance crossed 3 million for the first time. ESPN networks averaged 1.2 million viewers across the regular season — the most-watched ever. Both numbers held even through Caitlin Clark’s months-long groin injury.
That last detail matters more than the headline numbers. A growth story that holds when the headline name is on the bench is a different category of growth story than one that does not.
That is rarer than it sounds.
The NBA’s second media cycle, in 2002, was bigger than its first but built on a similar structural premise — the league had been on a slow, steady cultural climb for fifteen years. The NHL’s was a step down. MLB’s, even at its peak, was a regional patchwork. Most American professional sports leagues, when they price their second cycle, are pricing against a continuation. The WNBA in 2026 is pricing against a reset.
The 2024 deal was negotiated near the top of a wave. The first season under the deal is now testing whether the wave was a wave or a step change.
So far, the answer reads like a step change.
The harder question is what happens to the local rights stack. National deals get the headlines. Local deals fund the steady-state economics of franchises — the practice facility, the player development staff, the operations team, the unsexy parts of the P&L that show up in year three rather than year one. For the NBA and the NHL, regional sports networks were the cable bundle’s gift to franchise economics, and the cable bundle is in public, accelerating collapse.
For the WNBA, the regional layer has historically been thin. Many teams have not had an RSN deal at all. Some have had local cable arrangements that look more like courtesy than commerce. When Diamond / FanDuel Sports Network filed for Chapter 7 protection earlier this year and started shedding teams, the affected WNBA franchises were not facing a renegotiation. They were facing a vacuum.
That vacuum is the thing that matters.
The Lynx were the first WNBA team to hand local rights to a streaming platform. Twenty-six regular-season games and three preseason games on Victory+, free, no sign-up wall, fully produced. The logic is straightforward and worth saying out loud — in a league where local rights have historically not been a meaningful revenue line, swapping them for distribution upstream of monetization is not a sacrifice. It is a category trade. We are trading “the small cash that local cable used to send” for “the larger audience that free streaming can build.”
Two weeks later, the Atlanta Dream became the second. Every locally broadcast Dream game, free, on Victory+ — same model, same financial logic, in a much larger DMA. The deal sits alongside the Dream’s existing linear partnership with Gray Media’s Peachtree TV — a multi-rail local stack rather than a streaming-or-linear binary. Tom Friend laid the deal out in SBJ on the day it broke.
It is also a data trade. Free streaming distribution generates first-party engagement data that no linear local deal could generate. The Lynx now know which games their viewers tuned in for, how long they stayed, whether they came back. They know which markets within the broader Twin Cities region are converting and which aren’t. None of that information was available to a team that lived inside an RSN bundle. Most of it is still not available to teams that do.
Local rights as a data play is not the same business as local rights as a cash play.
I want to be careful here. I work at Victory+. Both deals are ones I am proud of. I do not want to overclaim. Two teams do not solve the WNBA’s local-rights problem on their own. Most franchises do not yet have a streaming-first local partner ready to take rights at scale. Many do not yet have a local partner of any kind. What the Lynx and Dream deals do together is put a marker down — two publicly-announced, multi-year, free-to-fan deals between competitive WNBA franchises and a streaming platform that the league can point to in conversations with every other team that asks “what does the post-RSN model look like?”
The answer to that question is no longer hypothetical. The second call has been made.
I do not want to write the part of this essay that ignores the skeptic’s reading.
Here it is, in full force.
The WNBA’s audience growth has been unusually concentrated around a small number of stars, primarily one team, primarily one network’s coverage of one part of the season. When Clark was injured for much of the second half of 2025, the league’s average viewership did hold — but it held with caveats. The skeptic notes the caveats. The skeptic also notes that the new collective bargaining agreement, reached in tentative form in March 2026, pulls the league’s revenue share toward roughly 20% of basketball-related income — which means a meaningful portion of the higher rights fees gets absorbed by a labor side that has been underpaid for two decades. The skeptic reads the $2.2B and the $1B and asks whether the unit economics actually flow through to the operating P&L.
These are real questions. I do not think they invalidate the structural argument. The unit economics flowing through is exactly what the higher labor share is supposed to enable — players who can build careers stateside instead of taking offseason contracts overseas, retention of the top of the cohort, marketing inventory at the player level that the league owns. The CBA is the labor side of the same flywheel that the rights deal is the media side of.
But the skeptic is not wrong about how thin the top of the cohort is.
The WNBA in 2026 is a league where the top six teams generate a disproportionate share of the attention, the top eight or nine players a disproportionate share of the highlights, and the top one or two markets a disproportionate share of the ticket revenue. The deal — the rights deal, the valuations, the local-rights aisle — was priced against that cohort. If the cohort thins faster than the league can backfill, the structural argument frays. That is the bear case, and it deserves to be on the page.
The bull case is that the league has demonstrated it can backfill. A’ja Wilson is not a marketing project; she is a generational center who has now won the MVP four times. Paige Bueckers, the 2025 first overall pick, led all rookies in scoring and assists in her debut season and won Rookie of the Year for Dallas. Angel Reese has moved to Atlanta and is a first-team All-WNBA candidate. The Valkyries, the Tempo, and the Fire are all entering 2026 with rosters built to compete, not just to occupy a slot. The headline name will not always be Caitlin Clark. The reset is broader than one player, even if the chart-toppers are still concentrated.
The first $1B WNBA team is not the last. Sportico already values the Liberty and the Fever in striking range. By the time CNBC publishes its 2027 valuations next May, the league will likely have two or three franchises across the line and an average comfortably north of $600M.
What I will be watching is which teams in the second cohort get there.
If the next teams to cross $1B are the legacy franchises — the Liberty, the Aces, the Fever — the story is “the league lifts everyone.” That is the predictable version. If it is one of the new expansion teams — the Tempo, the Fire, or one of the 2028–30 entrants — the story is something different. It is “the WNBA is now an asset class where the new entrants compound faster than the incumbents.” That is the version where the league becomes a repeatable expansion story rather than a one-time growth story.
I think we are closer to the second version than the first. The Valkyries are the proof of concept.
The other thing I will be watching is the local-rights aisle. After the Lynx and the Dream, if even two or three more teams follow into streaming-first local in the next two seasons — and I suspect they will, because the math is the math — the WNBA will have done in two years what the NHL has not done in twenty: built a coherent local-rights stack outside the cable bundle, with first-party data flowing back to the team and the league. That stack did not exist a month ago. It has two nodes now.
The 2026 season tips off next week. 216 national broadcasts, three new partners reaching audiences the league did not used to have, two expansion franchises, and a billion-dollar ceiling that no one in this league had seen before.
The first billion-dollar team is the headline. The shape of the second one is the story.
]]>The math, at the time, was compelling. Affiliated minor league baseball ran on player-development subsidies from the parent clubs, thin gate revenue, limited sponsorship, and almost no meaningful broadcast revenue. For most of its history, a AAA club’s television deal — if it had one — was a token agreement with a regional cable affiliate that produced a handful of games a year at barely-above-cost production. The AA and A-ball clubs had even less. The revenue line was tiny, the cost line was stubborn, and the parent MLB clubs, doing their own post-2020 math on developmental cost per prospect, decided that forty of these teams were not worth the carry.
It is worth stating the decision in its own terms. It was not cynical. It was, at that moment, defensible.
Here is what I want to argue: by the time that decision was made, the unit economics of minor league broadcasting had already flipped. The broadcast layer had quietly become something it had never been before — a plausible path to real audience and real local revenue, at near-zero incremental cost. The teams that got cut were the teams whose economic case had already changed, and the people making the decision did not know it. Because the measurement layer to know it did not exist yet.
Most of the minor league teams we cut were not dying. They were about to be reborn. Nobody was watching closely enough to notice.
To see what has changed, it helps to remember what a minor league broadcast used to be.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, if a AAA team produced a television broadcast at all, it was typically a deal with a local cable affiliate that carried a handful of home games a season. The production was modest — a couple of cameras, a local broadcaster, a small crew — and the economics were brutal. Production cost ran into the tens of thousands of dollars per game. Ad inventory was sold locally at rates that, on a typical Tuesday night game drawing a few thousand in-venue attendees and a few thousand more on television, could not remotely cover the production cost. The math only worked when the cable carrier paid a rights fee — which meant the team was effectively subsidized by the cable bundle, the same way every small piece of local sports programming has historically been subsidized by the cable bundle.
When the bundle started collapsing — which I have written about at length — the rights-fee subsidy collapsed with it. Regional sports networks started filing for bankruptcy; Diamond Sports Group, operator of the Bally Sports RSN portfolio, filed for Chapter 11 in March 2023 carrying roughly $8 billion in debt. The small line items on RSN rights cards — the AAA club’s ten-game package, the AHL team’s Sunday afternoon slot, the USL team’s highlight show — were the first things cut. By 2019, most minor league teams outside of the largest markets had no functional broadcast revenue at all. Their games were either not televised or streamed on obscure platforms with production that, to put it charitably, looked like what you could produce with a laptop and a single fixed camera in center field.
That was the reality going into 2020. A minor league broadcast was a cost center. A small cost center, often a zero-revenue cost center, but a cost center. The case for keeping an affiliated team alive had to be made on player development, on civic value, on stadium economics, on anything except the broadcast.
And then three things happened in parallel that nobody in the room during the 2020 contraction was tracking.
The first thing that happened is that the distribution layer changed completely.
Free ad-supported television — FAST, in the jargon — went from a curiosity to an infrastructure. The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Amazon’s Freevee (now Prime Video with ads), Pluto TV, Tubi, and a long tail of platform-specific FAST offerings collectively built out a connected-TV distribution network that reaches a large and still-growing fraction of American households. Parks Associates measured FAST usage at roughly 45% of U.S. internet households in Q1 2025, with Nielsen’s Gauge reporting the Roku Channel alone pulling nearly 3% of all TV-viewing time by mid-2025. The usage curve has flattened from its early explosion but the installed base is now structural.
The important thing about FAST is not the reach — although the reach is enormous. The important thing is the economics.
A FAST channel, once produced, costs almost nothing to distribute. The platforms do the distribution in exchange for a share of the ad inventory. The channel operator produces or aggregates the content and sells the ad impressions, typically through a combination of direct sales and programmatic. A sports channel on a FAST platform does not pay carriage fees. It does not negotiate with cable MSOs. It does not print subscriber circulars. It does not need a national sales force. It uploads a playlist, runs an ad server, and waits to see if people watch.
For most content categories, the FAST economics are marginal. The CPMs are lower than premium streaming, the audience is diffuse, and the competition for the same eyeballs is fierce. FAST has historically worked best for library content — old sitcoms, classic Westerns, reality show reruns — where the content is already produced and the incremental distribution cost is literally zero.
Sports is different. Sports is live. Sports delivers synchronous audience. Sports attracts a specific kind of advertiser — local, regional, national — who will pay a premium to reach viewers at the moment of peak engagement. On a FAST channel, a live sports event performs like nothing else in the category. It is, in platform terms, the most valuable inventory on the grid.
The unit economics of a minor league broadcast on a FAST channel, properly understood, look radically different from the unit economics on cable. Production cost is still a real line item — though connected-TV-native production has itself gotten cheaper, as the tools have matured and the expectations around broadcast polish have evolved away from the traditional-TV standard. Distribution cost is effectively zero. Ad inventory is sold against a live audience in real time. And the audience, once the channel is discoverable, can scale to numbers that would have been unthinkable for the same content on cable.
This is not theoretical. Victory+’s Sunday Night Soccer product — which I have written about at length — is the clearest instantiation I know of this model at work in American sports. Victory+’s NWSL Sunday Night Soccer franchise launched in March 2026 with 25 primetime matches on a free ad-supported platform, with no carriage friction between the fan and the game, building a primetime audience for a sport that on cable could never have justified the slot. If the model works for the NWSL, which operates at a revenue tier far below the big four American leagues, it works a fortiori for a minor league broadcast at a tier below that. The economics are more permissive, not less, the further down the pyramid you go — because the incremental cost to produce and distribute is the same, and the competition for your specific local audience is lower.
The second thing that happened is that the cost of producing a competent broadcast collapsed.
I want to be careful here, because there is a meaningful distinction between a competent broadcast and a premium broadcast. A nationally-televised NBA game is a multi-million-dollar production. It involves dozens of cameras, a production truck, a full broadcast crew, graphics engines, replay systems, commentator booths, and every piece of equipment a major network can throw at the event. That kind of production is not getting cheaper in a linear way.
What has gotten dramatically cheaper is the mid-tier. The broadcast that used to require a regional-sports-network production budget — a handful of cameras, a produced feed, graphics, replays, a play-by-play team — can now be produced at a fraction of historical cost, using a combination of fixed-camera systems, software-based graphics, remote production, and automated switching. I do not have a widely-disclosed per-game cost comparison I can cite here; operators guard those numbers tightly, and the setups vary enough from venue to venue that a single benchmark would be misleading anyway. What is not in dispute is the direction of the curve.
The cost curve has not just dropped. It has shifted in structure. Historically, a broadcast production was heavy on variable cost — a crew, a truck, a rights-holder fee, per-game expenses. Today, an increasing share of the stack is fixed — software licenses, installed cameras, amortized equipment — with variable costs trending toward negligible. Once the system is in place, the marginal cost of producing one more game is small enough that a team can credibly broadcast every home game it plays, from its AA-level Tuesday night affair to its Saturday promotional giveaway night, without the production economics forcing a choice about which games to carry.
This is the ballgame, to borrow the obvious metaphor. The historical constraint on minor league broadcasting was not demand. It was supply. Teams could not afford to produce enough games for broadcast to matter as a business line. Fans wanted to watch their team, the team could not afford to give them the product, and the distribution layer did not exist to monetize the product anyway.
Remove the production-cost constraint. Remove the distribution-cost constraint. Now what is the shape of the business?
The shape of the business is this: a minor league team, in 2026, can produce every game of its schedule on connected-TV-ready infrastructure, distribute those games through FAST and direct-to-consumer apps at near-zero marginal cost, sell ad inventory against a demonstrably engaged local audience, and generate a broadcast revenue line that, for the first time in the sport’s history, is a real fraction of total team revenue rather than a rounding error.
The team that could have existed in 2026, in other words, is not the team that the 2020 contraction decision was based on.
The third thing that happened is more subtle, and I think more important than the first two.
Local ad CPMs — cost per thousand impressions for a local audience — have held up dramatically better than national CPMs in the connected-TV transition. There is a reason for this. Local advertisers are specific. A local car dealer, a regional bank, a chain of local restaurants, a state-level political campaign — these advertisers do not need a national audience. They need a local audience. And a local audience is exactly what a minor league broadcast delivers, by definition, at high density.
National sports broadcasts have been grappling with a CPM compression problem for most of the past decade. As audiences fragment, national reach gets more expensive per viewer to achieve, and advertisers have plenty of substitutes in digital and social. The CPM a national broadcaster can command for inventory is trending in one direction, and it is not up.
Local CPMs tell a different story. A minor league team in a mid-sized market — pick any city with a AAA club that lost affiliation in 2020 — has an audience that is substantially concentrated in a specific DMA. The fan base is local. The advertisers who want to reach that fan base are local. The match between inventory and buyer is essentially one-to-one, with none of the leakage that national inventory suffers when half the audience is outside the advertiser’s geographic target.
I do not have proprietary numbers I can share here, and I will not invent any. The major programmatic platforms have begun publishing directional data on CTV CPMs for live-sports inventory, but the local-versus-national split on FAST-distributed regional sports is not something any operator has disclosed cleanly. The absence is itself the tell — a market this clearly bifurcated and this commercially consequential would, in a more transparent category, be a published benchmark. What I can say, directionally and structurally, is that the local-CPM advantage is the single most underpriced factor in the current sports-media economy. It is the thing that makes minor league broadcasting an economically live proposition rather than a charitable one. It is the thing that, if you had been tracking it in 2019, would have changed your answer on which MiLB teams were economically viable going into 2020.
Nobody was tracking it in 2019. The measurement layer did not exist.
The MiLB 2020 contraction was made on the basis of a conventional accounting of minor league economics. Gate revenue, sponsorship, concessions, merchandise, rights fees. The conventional accounting produced a conventional answer: these teams were marginal, the player-development subsidy from MLB did not cover the gap for all of them, and the total system cost could be reduced by cutting the bottom third.
The unconventional question — which nobody at the negotiating table could answer, because the tools did not exist — was: if we held everything else constant and layered in a modern connected-TV distribution strategy, what would these teams’ economics look like in 2026?
I think the honest answer is that a meaningful fraction of the cut teams would have been economically viable under the FAST-era distribution stack. Not all of them. Some of the cuts were genuinely correct on the merits — markets without sufficient population, stadiums without sufficient capital maintenance, ownership without sufficient commitment. But some of the cuts were based on a snapshot of broadcast economics that was already obsolete at the moment the snapshot was taken.
The teams that are now operating in the independent leagues — the Atlantic League, the American Association, the Pioneer League, the Frontier League — are running, in several cases, exactly the playbook I am describing. They are producing FAST-ready broadcasts of every home game. They are distributing through a mix of team-owned apps, FAST channel partnerships, and regional connected-TV agreements. They are selling local ad inventory at local-CPM rates against an audience that shows up, in real numbers, on a Tuesday night in a mid-sized city because the team is their team and there is no longer a paywall between them and the broadcast. Team-level independent-league viewership and local ad revenue figures are not consistently disclosed; where individual clubs have published numbers, they are directional rather than comparable.
Whether those teams are thriving on these economics alone — I would not go that far. Independent baseball remains a thin-margin business. But the broadcast line is no longer zero. It is a real, growing, material contributor to the P&L, and it is growing at a pace that the 2020 decision-makers would not have predicted because they did not have the data to predict it.
I want to widen the aperture, because this is not just a baseball story.
The United Soccer League — USL — has been building out its broadcast infrastructure on essentially the model I am describing. The league’s 2025 national package pairs three CBS network matches and twenty-two CBS Sports Network windows with the ongoing ESPN relationship, while team-level streaming apps and the USL Television Network fill in the long-tail local distribution. USL has also cited an upward trendline in CBS-broadcast match viewership through the 2025 season as evidence that the model is working.
Whether the USL’s current audience is large in absolute terms is not the right question. The right question is whether the audience is large relative to the cost to produce it, and on that metric, the USL is doing something that was not possible under the prior distribution stack. A professional soccer league at the second or third tier of the American soccer pyramid, broadcasting every match of every team on distribution rails that reach the overwhelming majority of connected homes, is a thing that simply did not exist in 2019.
The NWSL’s proposed second-division reserve league, now targeted for a 2027 launch after its original 2026 plan slipped, is another proof point in motion. The infrastructure investment required to broadcast reserve-league matches is, under the old model, prohibitive. Under the FAST model, it is a marginal addition to an existing production stack — and the reserve audience is a highly engaged subset of the main audience, with local-CPM characteristics that ought to behave similarly to or better than the parent league in certain markets. Reserve-league viewership and local-ad-revenue figures will not be reportable until after launch; the thesis is structural, not backtested.
The same pattern shows up in minor hockey (AHL, ECHL), in lower-tier basketball (G League, independent regional leagues), in college sports at the tier below the power-conference media deals, in high school sports at the state-championship level. Victory+’s five-year deal to broadcast the Texas high school football championships globally for free, beginning with the 2025 season, is exactly the kind of distribution that would have been inconceivable on cable, because cable had no economic mechanism to deliver state-championship-level content to a national audience at a production cost the property could support. FAST has that mechanism. The audience followed.
If I could go back to 2019 and put one thing in front of the people making the MiLB contraction decision, it would be this:
The broadcast layer is about to invert. The distribution cost is going to zero. The production cost is going to a fraction of its current level. The local-CPM market is going to survive the cord-cutting transition in a way that the national CPM market is not. The audience for your team’s games — actual viewable broadcasts of actual games, produced at competent quality — is going to be larger, not smaller, five years from now than it is today. Price the decision against that reality, not against the reality of the current RSN-era book.
That conversation did not happen. The tools to have it did not exist in a usable form. The industry trade press of 2019 was still covering cord-cutting as a narrative rather than as a structural reset, and the measurement firms were still producing reports built around the old bundle-era assumptions. The minor league teams making the case for their own survival were doing so on the basis of gate revenue and civic value, not on the basis of a broadcast economic model that had not yet been invented.
The measurement layer has caught up, mostly. Connected-TV measurement is real. Device-level attribution is real. Programmatic reporting on live-sports inventory is real. In 2026, a minor league team making the case for its own broadcast economics has tools available that its 2019 counterpart did not.
The question is whether the system will use them.
I want to end on something that I think is more important than the regret-cast about 2020.
The structural shift I have described is not hypothetical. It is happening right now, in leagues that had the flexibility to adapt, on platforms that had the distribution to carry it, in markets that had the local demand to sustain it. The USL is doing it. The NWSL and its reserve infrastructure are doing it. The independent baseball leagues are doing it. College sports at multiple tiers below the power conferences are doing it. High school championships are doing it.
The leagues and teams that are doing it are, in aggregate, building the most interesting thing in American sports media right now — a second layer of broadcast infrastructure, below the national rights deals, that is growing at a pace that the existing trade coverage is not fully capturing because the trade coverage is still oriented toward the national-rights megadeals.
The economics of that second layer work. They did not work five years ago. They work now.
The MiLB contraction is a historical event and I am not going to relitigate it game by game. But the pattern it represents — the pattern of making strategic decisions about the survival of small-market sports properties on the basis of a broadcast-economics snapshot that is already obsolete — is a pattern that could repeat. College football is making versions of this decision right now, as conferences realign and tier-two and tier-three programs try to figure out their media futures. High school athletic associations are making versions of this decision as they decide whether to participate in the FAST-era distribution stack or hold out for a cable-era deal that is never coming back. Independent leagues in every sport are making versions of this decision as they decide how much to invest in broadcast infrastructure today against a return that takes time to materialize.
The decision should be made with the right model. The old model — broadcast is a cost center, the audience does not exist, the distribution layer cannot carry small-market content economically — is wrong. It has been wrong for several years. It is getting more wrong every year.
The new model is that a minor league broadcast, properly produced and distributed, is an audience engine operating at costs that make the math work at scale far smaller than anyone assumed was viable under the old stack.
The doors are open. Somebody is going to build in this space, at tier after tier below the national deals, and build something significantly larger than the current coverage suggests is possible. The teams and leagues that figure this out first will look, in retrospect, like they saw something that was hiding in plain sight.
It was. It still is.
]]>In that version, you produce a certain number of hours of content at a certain cost per hour, you distribute those hours across a certain number of subscribers, and you optimize the ratio. Content cost over engaged households. Cost per minute delivered. Cost per minute watched, if you are being rigorous about it. The variables are legible. The finance team can model them. The board can argue about them. Whole decks — entire strategy offsites — are organized around the denominator in that ratio.
And that ratio is, I have come to believe, describing the wrong business.
The scarce input in streaming is not minutes produced. Minutes produced is extraordinarily cheap and getting cheaper. The scarce input is minutes earned — and by earned I mean attention that is arousal-weighted, in the sense that Daniel Kahneman used the word in his 1973 book Attention and Effort. Attention with the pupils a little dilated. Attention that expands the pool rather than draining it. The kind of attention that, when the credits roll, leaves a person wanting to come back tomorrow instead of wanting to cancel before the next billing cycle.
The services that win the next decade will not be the ones that get the cheapest per-hour cost of content. They will be the ones that learn to put a price on mild disappointment — the half-watched episode, the trailer that did not land, the Tuesday night where the user opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, and closed it again. That Tuesday night is where the business is actually being won or lost. And almost no P&L I have ever seen has a line for it.
Every streaming finance team I have worked with or alongside treats content cost as a numerator problem. How much did we spend to produce the hour. How much did we license it for. How does that amortize over the window. Those are real questions and I do not mean to dismiss them.
But the denominator is where the business actually lives, and the denominator is almost always wrong.
The typical denominator is some version of minutes consumed. Total viewing hours. Average daily active minutes. Minutes per paid member. The dashboard metrics that sit in every streaming executive’s Monday morning email. And each of those metrics silently assumes that a minute is a minute is a minute — that the forty-fifth minute of a half-watched procedural carries the same weight as the final minute of a championship game, or the closing minute of a show that made someone text three friends immediately after.
They do not carry the same weight. They do not even carry weights in the same order of magnitude.
I wrote about this in the attention essay — the thing Kahneman observed, more than fifty years ago, was that attention is not a fixed budget. It is a pool whose size fluctuates with arousal. Ten minutes of genuinely riveted attention recruits more cognitive capacity than ten minutes of half-awake scrolling, and it lays down more memory, and it is worth more to an advertiser, and it earns more loyalty from the viewer, and it makes the next subscription decision easier instead of harder.
A minute of riveted attention is not 1.5x a minute of distracted attention. It is something more like 5x or 10x, depending on what you are measuring. And nobody’s P&L knows that.
Consider two shows. Both cost the same to produce. Both land the same raw minutes-watched number in the first month. The finance team looks at them and concludes they are equivalent investments.
Show A is the one people put on while folding laundry. They hear dialogue. They catch the beats. They do not remember, a week later, a single line of it. They will renew their subscription, probably, but nothing about this show is the reason.
Show B is the one that made someone turn their phone over on the coffee table. That held them still for forty-two minutes. That they then talked about at work the next morning. That they mentioned to a friend at dinner that weekend. That, six weeks later, they remembered to check if a new season was coming.
The denominators are equal. The businesses are not equal. One of them is producing attention that compounds. The other is producing the television equivalent of ambient lighting — which has its uses, but should not be priced as if it is the thing carrying the service.
I do not think the industry has a vocabulary for this gap yet. Or rather, it has one — engagement, retention cohorts, the various loyalty scores — but the vocabulary lives in the marketing organization, and the content-investment decisions live in the finance organization, and they are looking at different spreadsheets.
The unit economics of boredom is the cost of that disconnect. Every show greenlit on the assumption that a minute is a minute is a show that slightly drains the pool. Every show greenlit on the assumption that arousal-weighted attention is the real input is a show that grows it.
Here is the claim I have been circling toward: the most expensive thing on a streaming P&L is not the content line. It is not the marketing line. It is not the technology line.
It is the user who, on a given Tuesday, opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, did not find something they wanted, and closed it without watching anything.
The most expensive thing on a streaming P&L is the user who opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, did not find something they wanted, and closed it without watching anything.— the thesis
That user has not churned. Not yet. They have not generated a support ticket. They have not triggered any threshold on any dashboard. In most reporting frameworks, that Tuesday does not exist. The minutes consumed is zero, which means it does not show up in the denominator, which means it does not move the cost-per-minute number, which means the finance team does not have a reason to care.
But that Tuesday is the beginning of the churn. That Tuesday is where the mental accounting starts to shift — from “I use this service” to “I pay for this service and I do not really use it that much.” That Tuesday is the one that shows up, six months later, as a cancellation that the retention team will spend a quarter trying to model and will mostly fail to model, because the actual cause is buried in a behavior that was never measured in the first place.
Mild disappointment is expensive. It is the single most expensive thing in the business. And the reason it does not appear on any P&L is that it does not produce an immediate transaction. It produces a slow, invisible draining of the reservoir of goodwill that every subscription product runs on.
The services that win the next decade will be the ones that learn to put a number on that Tuesday. Not a precise number — nobody will ever have a perfect model of mild disappointment — but a directional number. A number that changes the order of the items on the product roadmap. A number that makes the content team and the UX team and the pricing team have a different conversation than they are currently having.
I do not think the fix is complicated, at the level of concept. It is just unfashionable.
A correct denominator would weight minutes by arousal. It would distinguish between the show that someone watched while half-asleep and the show that someone watched with their phone face-down. It would distinguish between the trailer that played because autoplay fired and the trailer that played because someone clicked on it. It would have a way of saying: this hour of content produced engaged attention, and that hour of content produced ambient attention, and those two hours are not the same input.
The industry has fragments of this. Completion rate is a fragment. Rewatch rate is a fragment. Share rate is a fragment. Whether somebody searched the title by name, versus arrived at it through a recommendation row, is a fragment. The time between sessions is a fragment.
Stitched together, those fragments would make a weighted-minutes metric that actually matched what the business is trying to do. But I have not seen anybody stitch them together publicly. No major streamer has disclosed a weighted-attention metric that goes beyond variations on completion rate, watch time, and the standard engagement scores that anchor every earnings-call talking point. The fragments sit in separate dashboards owned by separate teams who each have local incentives that do not compose.
The companies that stitch it together first — and then actually re-organize their greenlight decisions around the stitched number — will have an advantage that is hard to describe in a deck but will show up, eventually, as lower churn, higher ARPU, and a library that compounds in value instead of eroding.
I want to use Netflix as an example here, and I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.
Netflix launched its ad-supported tier on November 3, 2022. It has adjusted pricing in October 2023, again in January 2025, and again in early 2026 — with the Basic plan quietly phased out for existing subscribers through 2024 in between. It has, along the way, become — on public reporting — the most profitable subscription streamer by a significant margin, with the best combination of engagement, retention, and unit economics in the category.
The standard story about Netflix’s advantage is that it had a head start. That it has the deepest library. That its recommendation system is better. All of that is true, and none of it, I think, is the main thing.
The main thing is that Netflix has spent a decade treating content as if the denominator is arousal-weighted attention and not raw minutes. They do not disclose the internal machinery. They do not publish a weighted-engagement score. But the decisions they make — the shows they cancel that were hitting raw-minute targets but not share-and-talk-about-it targets, the originals they re-up on evidence that goes beyond completion rate, the willingness to let library content carry the low-intensity side of the business while originals carry the high-intensity side — read like the decisions of a company that has quietly built a better denominator.
Other services are reading the same raw-minute numbers and drawing different conclusions, because the numbers are not actually the same numbers. A Netflix minute and a Peacock minute and a Paramount+ minute all get called “a minute” in the trade press. They are not the same unit. They carry different densities of earned attention, which means different retention impact, which means different unit economics, even at identical content spend.
Consider the ongoing narrative around Paramount, which was folded into the Skydance structure when that merger closed on August 7, 2025. The public story has been a DTC turnaround — some good quarters, some harder quarters, an ongoing question about whether the combined company has the scale to be a standalone streamer or whether it ends up as a content supplier into somebody else’s bundle.
The framework question underneath the turnaround narrative is the one this essay is about. You can get a DTC P&L to look better in the short term by two very different routes. You can optimize the numerator — cheaper content, less content, more library mix, fewer originals, tighter marketing — or you can optimize the denominator, which means producing fewer but more arousal-weighted hours and measuring them correctly.
Route one looks good for two quarters and then the churn math catches up, because the library is slowly draining the reservoir of earned attention. Route two looks worse for two quarters and then starts to compound, because the content is laying down the kind of memory and loyalty that reduces the cost of the next renewal decision.
Almost every DTC turnaround I have watched from the outside has been built on route one. And almost every one that has actually worked over a multi-year horizon has, under the hood, been built on route two. The first is visible on the P&L immediately. The second becomes visible on the P&L eventually, but it starts on a spreadsheet nobody is looking at yet.
There is one place where the industry is, almost by accident, being forced to price attention correctly. The ad tier.
When a service sells ad inventory, the advertiser does not care about minutes consumed in the abstract. They care about impressions that are actually impressions — that land on attention that is actually there, that produce brand recall that is actually measurable, that convert at rates that are actually defensible. Advertisers have been doing this kind of math, in television and print and digital, for fifty years. They are not perfect at it. But they are far ahead of the streaming P&L at it.
When a streaming service goes down the ad-tier road — as most of the category has, since 2022 — it imports, whether it realizes it or not, the advertiser’s weighted view of a minute. Live sports minutes are worth more than library drama minutes. Finale minutes are worth more than premiere minutes, sometimes. Morning minutes are worth less than evening minutes. Minutes on a television set in a living room are worth more than minutes on a phone on a commute. The CPMs are not uniform, and the non-uniformity is not a pricing quirk — it is an admission, by a market, that a minute is not a minute.
That admission is the most interesting thing happening in streaming finance right now. It is the beginning of an attention-weighted P&L, and it is arriving through the ad organization rather than the subscription organization, which is why most strategy conversations have not absorbed it yet.
There is a wrinkle to the Tuesday-night thesis that depends on which side of the streaming business you sit on.
For an SVOD service, the Tuesday-night user — opened the app, scrolled, closed without watching — is a churn warning. The user paid a flat fee, did the mental work of opening the app, and walked away with nothing in the pocket. The next renewal decision just got harder. The reservoir of goodwill drained slightly. That Tuesday, on an SVOD sheet, is cost.
For an AVOD service, the same Tuesday reads almost the opposite way. The user opened the app. They scrolled. They were looking for something to watch. They did not find it tonight, and the platform ought to be unhappy about that. But they showed up — which means they are exactly the kind of user the AVOD model exists to monetize over time. They demonstrated intent. They self-identified as engaged audience.
That Tuesday, on an AVOD sheet, is not the beginning of churn. It is signal. A flag against a known user that says here is someone who wanted to be entertained — give them better next time. The platform now knows something it did not know yesterday: this is the kind of person who opens the app on a Tuesday looking for something to spend time with. That is the input the AVOD business is built around. SVOD has to earn the renewal; AVOD has to earn the next session, and the next session is already half-earned the moment the user shows up.
The same behavioral data — opened, scrolled, did not watch — is cost on one P&L and signal on the other. Most strategy conversations elide this. They use “streaming” as a single category and assume the unit economics travel. They do not. The Tuesday inverts the moment the revenue model does.
It is also why AVOD economics survive at content tiers that would obliterate an SVOD library. If every session produces signal regardless of completion, a library of low-arousal content is not a tax — it is inventory that earns its keep on the showing-up itself, while a smaller arousal-weighted layer carries the moments advertisers will pay the most for. The SVOD platform has no equivalent. Every session has to contribute to the renewal decision, because the renewal decision is the entire revenue event.
If the framework I am describing is right — and I think it is, and I think the next decade will prove it — then several things that currently look like mysteries will stop looking like mysteries.
Why does a service that has ten times the raw library of a competitor lose subscribers at a higher rate? Because the library is mostly ambient-attention content, and the competitor’s smaller library is mostly arousal-weighted content, and the attention-weighted denominator favors the competitor even though the minutes-watched dashboard favors the incumbent.
Why does a live-sports package that costs a fortune still pay back, when the per-minute cost looks indefensible on a spreadsheet? Because a minute of live sports is not a minute of library drama. Live is the highest-arousal content in the television ecosystem, which means it is the densest earned-attention inventory available, which means the real per-unit cost — properly weighted — is a fraction of what the naive math suggests.
Why do streaming services keep rediscovering that their biggest retention lever is a small number of shows that people actually love, and not a large number of shows that people will technically watch? Because earned attention compounds and ambient attention does not. The math has been telling them this for a decade. They have been looking at the wrong math.
Why does the “value” tier — the cheapest, most library-heavy tier — churn so much harder than the premium, originals-heavy tier, even after accounting for price sensitivity? Because the cheap tier is almost entirely a low-arousal product. It is optimized for the denominator the P&L measures and not for the denominator the user is actually experiencing. It wins on the spreadsheet and loses in the brain.
I will not pretend this reframe is simple to operationalize. It requires content teams and data teams and product teams and finance teams to all agree that they have been looking at the wrong number, and then to agree on what the new number should be, and then to stay agreed on it for long enough for the first wave of contrary-looking quarterly results to come in and not cause a panic.
That is a lot of agreement in an industry that is not, historically, famous for it.
But the economics are going to force the reframe regardless. The services that continue to optimize for cheap minutes will keep producing cheap minutes, and their denominators will keep looking good, and their churn will keep being inexplicable, and their content libraries will keep failing to compound. The services that figure out how to price the cost of mild disappointment — the Tuesday night when the user opened the app and found nothing — will keep building libraries that get more valuable over time, not less.
This is not a content-quality argument. It is a measurement argument. You cannot run a business on the wrong denominator for more than about a decade before the business starts to disagree with the spreadsheet, and in this business we are now about a decade in.
The unit economics of boredom is a line item that does not exist on any P&L I have ever seen. It is the most important line item in the category.
Put it on the sheet.
]]>Eleven years is a long time.
I keep coming back to that duration. Eleven years ago was 2015. Snapchat was what teenagers were on. TikTok did not exist in the United States — ByteDance did not merge Musical.ly into TikTok in the US until August 2018. Netflix had not yet made Stranger Things, which premiered in July 2016. Regional sports networks were still a functioning business. Amazon did not carry its first NFL streams until the 2017 Thursday Night Football sublicense — and did not own exclusive NFL rights until the eleven-year Thursday Night Football deal that began in 2022. The idea that a single streaming service — any streaming service — would pay a league in the NBA’s range for rights would have sounded like a category error.
Eleven years from now is 2036.
I do not know what media looks like in 2036. Neither does Adam Silver. Neither does Bob Iger, and neither does Andy Jassy. What everyone did at the negotiating table in 2024 — which is what you always do in a media rights negotiation — was extrapolate from what had just happened and add a premium for scarcity. That is the right move, given the tools available. The NBA, to its credit, got paid for the cultural weight it actually carries in 2024. The partners, to their credit, paid for live inventory that has held its value better than almost anything else in the television economy.
But here is the thing about extrapolation. It works until it doesn’t.
I think the second half of this contract will feel like a different sport than the first half. Not because basketball will change — basketball does not change — but because three tectonic shifts are already underway underneath the deal, and each of them will keep moving, regardless of what the contract says.
The deal is not wrong. The world underneath it is changing.
Before I get into what is shifting, it is worth being clear about what the deal was priced against. Not the number — the number is a function of competitive dynamics between three well-capitalized bidders — but the assumptions embedded in the number.
Assumption one: linear television, while shrinking, still has enough reach and advertising value to justify ESPN and NBC paying what they paid. The cable bundle is collapsing — I have written about this — but collapsing slowly enough that the tail is still lucrative.
Assumption two: the NBA remains the second-most-valuable American sports property, behind only the NFL, and there is no credible competitor for the audience it aggregates on a Tuesday night in February.
Assumption three: streaming — primarily through Amazon, but also through the digital tails of Disney and NBC — will pick up enough of the audience that does not watch linear to fill the gap. That the NBA can, essentially, migrate its audience from cable to streaming without losing the monetization layer that makes the rights worth what they are.
Each of these assumptions is defensible in 2024. I am not sure any of them survives 2030 without significant asterisks.
The deal was priced against a demographic, behavioral, and distribution reality that is already shifting.
There are three shifts I want to walk through. I have opinions about each. I do not have perfect data about any of them, because nobody does — the measurement infrastructure for the media economy in 2026 is still built for a world that ended around 2018. Where I have specific figures, I will cite them. Where I do not, I will say so and argue structurally. Structural arguments do not need false specificity to land.
There is a particular kind of NBA fan that I suspect the league is aware of but does not fully know how to price.
This fan can tell you, unprompted, about the Victor Wembanyama dunk from last week, the Luka Dončić step-back that went viral on Sunday, the LeBron-to-Bronny highlight that racked up tens of millions of plays in under an hour. This fan knows every player, knows every contract, knows every trade rumor, knows which rookie is about to pop and which veteran is on the decline.
This fan may not have watched a full NBA game in months. Maybe years.
I want to be careful here, because I do not have proprietary viewership data, and the public data is partial. What the public data does say, though, is that the audience on streaming is running much younger than the audience on linear. Sports Media Watch reported that NBA on Prime Video had a median age of 46.8 through the first weeks of the 2025-26 season — about eight years younger than the linear networks. Sportico put the NBA on Prime median age at 49.4 across the full season window against 56.2 for linear NBA. The direction is unmistakable: the split audience is the story, and the linear half is aging. What I can say, as someone who spends a lot of time inside the sports media business, is that the anecdotal pattern around clip-first fandom is unmistakable too. The NBA’s cultural center — the place where the league lives in the popular imagination — increasingly sits inside social clips, inside group chats, inside short-form vertical video, inside fantasy and betting apps that deliver the moment without the match.
This is not a clip versus game binary. Clips are generative of games — plenty of people watch the full broadcast because a clip hooked them. But there is a growing cohort for whom the clip is the product. The game is a dependency, not a destination.
If you are selling eleven years of linear and streaming rights against the assumption that the full-game audience converts at historical rates, this cohort is your problem. Because the monetization model for a sixteen-second vertical clip viewed on Instagram is not the same as the monetization model for two and a half hours of a Lakers-Celtics broadcast. Not close. Not even in the same order of magnitude on a per-minute basis.
The NBA understands this better than most leagues. The league office has been unusually willing to let clips proliferate, to work with creators, to accept that cultural reach is upstream of paid viewership. I think that instinct is correct. But the instinct does not solve the economics. Cultural reach at clip scale does not, on its own, pay for eleven-year rights deals priced against full-game viewership.
Somewhere in that gap is a generation of fans who love the NBA and will not, as a rule, sit down for a full game. The league’s partners bought inventory assuming this gap does not widen. I think it is almost certain to widen.
What happens when it does?
One answer is that the full-game audience gets older, denser, and more valuable per viewer — a smaller but more monetizable core, which is what has happened to every mature television franchise in history. That is a defensible outcome but a shrinking one. Another answer is that the NBA, alongside its partners, invents a product that sits between the clip and the game — a ten-minute curated watch, a fourth-quarter-only stream, an AI-generated highlight pass personalized to the fan. The partners have the engineering capacity to do this. The question is whether the league and the partners agree on who owns the rights to that intermediate surface, and whether the money follows.
I have argued before that the universal remote control — that physical object that defined how a household watched sports for forty years — is dead, and with it, the assumption that an entire family sits down in front of one screen at one time. The NBA fan of 2030 is not sitting in the living room at 8pm Eastern waiting for the opening tip. That fan is on a phone, on a commute, on a treadmill, watching whatever the algorithm served, which may or may not be the game their rights-holder paid to broadcast.
Extrapolate that for eleven years. Now ask yourself whether the NBA’s next decade looks like the last one.
For most of my adult life, the NBA’s international story has been a one-way street. Players from everywhere in the world come to the NBA, because the NBA is where the best basketball is played and where the money is. International fans watch the NBA because it is where their national hero plays. The league has marketed itself, correctly, as the global top of the pyramid.
That story is starting to have exceptions.
The EuroLeague is getting better. Not in some abstract aspirational sense — in a direct, measurable, year-over-year sense. The caliber of basketball in the EuroLeague, the depth of rosters, the coaching, the tactical sophistication — all of it has been on an upward trajectory, accelerated by the fact that a growing number of elite international players are choosing to stay in Europe longer, choosing to return to Europe at a point in their careers where a decade ago they would have stuck it out in the NBA, and in some cases choosing to go to Europe from the NBA.
The Australian NBL has become a credible development alternative for top American prospects — LaMelo Ball signed with the Illawarra Hawks in 2019 on his way to being drafted third overall, R. J. Hampton played for the New Zealand Breakers before going 24th in 2020, and others have used the NBL Next Stars program as a path to the NBA draft, giving the NBL a recurring American-interest storyline that it did not have a decade ago. The Basketball Africa League, founded in 2019 by the NBA and FIBA and tipping off in 2021, is building out a competitive infrastructure on a continent whose basketball talent pipeline is, by every credible estimate, underexploited by a factor of many. The Philippines, Japan, and parts of Latin America all have domestic leagues growing faster than most American commentators realize.
None of this is a threat to the NBA in the competitive sense. The NBA will remain the top league in the world for the foreseeable future. The talent will continue to flow toward it. I am not predicting the NBA gets dethroned. I do not think that is happening.
But the media rights math does not care about which league is the best league. The media rights math cares about where the attention goes.
If the share of elite basketball consumption watched outside the NBA rises — even modestly, even incrementally, even only in specific international markets where the NBA has historically sold a lot of League Pass — that is a direct hit on the growth assumption embedded in the $76 billion. The league has spent the last twenty years arguing, credibly, that it is a global growth story with an underpenetrated international audience. That was definitely true when I started watching the Bulls beat all comers in the 90s. That is still true - though the ubiquity of Lakers / Warriors / Yankees merch around the world suggests the league has made a LOT of headway. It may be less true in 2030 than it was in 2024.
The NBA does not publicly disclose League Pass international subscriber growth at the country level. What the EuroLeague has disclosed is telling in its own right — EuroLeague.TV reported a 37% year-over-year increase in OTT subscriptions alongside the viewership growth cited above. The absence of a comparable NBA disclosure is, at minimum, something a second-half-of-deal bidder should notice.
The second-order effect is subtler but I think more important. The NBA has historically been able to define the sport of basketball internationally — what the game looks like, how it is played, what kids in playgrounds from Manila to Madrid emulate. That hegemony has started to fracture. A kid in Belgrade today can watch Nikola Jokić dominate the NBA playoffs and watch the EuroLeague final live and follow the ABA League standings, all without friction, all on the same device. The kid’s mental model of professional basketball is not NBA-centric the way it was in 2008. It is basketball-centric, with the NBA as one very prominent node in a graph.
A kid who grows up with that mental model is not lost to the NBA. But that kid is a different kind of customer than the kid who grew up thinking the NBA was basketball. And in media economics, different kinds of customers monetize at different rates.
Eleven years gives a lot of runway for mental models to shift.
Here is the shift I am most confident about, because it is already here and it is already the dominant mode of engagement for a large and growing segment of the NBA audience.
The most engaging NBA product in America, for millions of fans, is not the broadcast. It is the live-bet surface inside FanDuel, DraftKings, or their peer sportsbooks. The game is happening — but the game is happening inside an app where every possession is priced, every matchup is surfaced, every player prop is available to be played, reloaded, hedged, cashed out. The broadcast is a window on the action. The app is a participatory layer on top of the action. For a certain kind of fan, the app is now the primary interface and the broadcast is the ambient soundtrack.
I am not going to invent specific product-feature claims about any particular sportsbook. Operator-level NBA in-play handle, player-prop market counts per game, and bets-per-user metrics for 2025-26 are not disclosed at the granularity that would let me cite a number. Flutter’s FanDuel disclosures and the comparable DraftKings earnings commentary describe a product that is aggressively expanding the in-play surface — same-game parlays, player-prop injury protection, live-priced bet-builder markets — without publishing the per-game market counts.
What I will argue structurally is this: the sportsbook product gets better every year, and the broadcast product, structurally, does not. A broadcast in 2035 will still be a broadcast — a produced video feed of a basketball game with play-by-play commentary and advertising breaks. A sportsbook app in 2035 will be whatever the product teams at FanDuel and DraftKings and every competitor can ship in eleven years of iteration. The gap between those two surfaces, measured in engagement density per minute, is going to widen, not narrow.
The NBA, on the current structure, is a licensor to the sportsbooks. It sells data rights, integrity fees, official-partner designations. It does not, in any structural sense, own the live-bet surface. The sportsbooks own that. The sportsbooks are building the product that, increasingly, is how the NBA gets consumed.
I think the league cannot keep treating sportsbooks as licensees.
Not because the commercial deals are bad — the commercial deals are fine — but because the most engaging surface of your own product is being built by someone else, and that someone else is not obligated to optimize for the health of the league. The sportsbook optimizes for handle, for retention, for in-app engagement, for lifetime value. Those metrics correlate with a healthy NBA most of the time. They do not correlate all of the time. The divergences are where the problems live.
Consider the player-prop market. A sportsbook offering thousands of player props per game is, effectively, giving every bench player a market cap. Every rotation decision by a coach affects a market. Every stat-padding garbage-time minute is a payout event for somebody. The incentive structure that the sportsbook is introducing into the sport — at a scale that simply did not exist a decade ago — is not something the league designed. It is something the league is accommodating.
The second-half-of-the-contract question is whether the league remains accommodating or whether it tries to bring the live-bet surface inside the tent. The NBA has structural advantages here. It controls the officials, the data feeds, the schedule, the broadcast, the rules. If it wanted to ship a first-party betting-integrated product — and more importantly, if it wanted its media partners to ship such a product — it has the assets to do it. Amazon, especially, has the engineering and distribution to make an integrated watch-and-bet surface real inside Prime Video in a way no traditional broadcaster can. (Quick plug: we do too at Victory+)
Do I think this happens cleanly? No. Regulatory environments vary state by state. The league’s integrity concerns are real and well-founded. The history of sports betting and sports leagues is complicated by decades of mutual antagonism that the last several years have not fully undone. But the economic pressure to close the gap between the broadcast and the bet is going to keep rising for the entire duration of this contract.
Somewhere in the second half of this deal, somebody — league, partner, sportsbook, or some consortium of all three — is going to ship an integrated product that feels, to the fan, like the way to watch the NBA. And when that happens, every metric in the rights deal will need to be re-understood. Because the definition of what it means to “watch” an NBA game will have shifted.
I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.
I am not claiming the NBA is in decline. It is not. By every measure that matters — revenue, player talent, international presence, cultural relevance — the league is in the healthiest position in its history. The 2024 media deal is the strongest single piece of evidence for that health, not a counterexample to it.
I am also not claiming the partners made a bad deal. Disney, NBC, and Amazon each got what they needed. Disney got ESPN’s marquee property for another cycle, which is existentially important to ESPN. NBC got a top-tier sports franchise to slot against football in a post-Comcast-cable world. Amazon got the thing it has been building toward since the NFL Thursday night package: legitimacy as a live-sports destination, with the scale of basketball’s hundreds of annual game windows to keep Prime subscribers coming back. Each of those outcomes was worth what each partner paid, measured against the alternatives available in 2024.
What I am claiming is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: the world underneath the deal is not holding still for eleven years.
Generational inversion means the cohort growing into peak-consumption age does not consume basketball the way the cohort paying for cable consumed basketball. International reconsolidation means the growth assumption about international League Pass and global audience share has more competition than it did. The betting-content merge means the most engaging surface of the sport is being built outside the rights-holder’s product and will keep being built there unless the league intervenes structurally.
Any one of these is manageable. All three, compounding over eleven years, produce a different sport.
The NBA has navigated transitions before. The shift from network to cable. The shift from cable to streaming. The Jordan retirement. The lockouts. The analytics revolution. The globalization of talent. The league has been, among major American sports institutions, the most willing to adapt — the most willing to let the product evolve, the most willing to experiment with rules and formats, the most willing to lean into cultural currents rather than fight them. That disposition is why the 2024 deal got priced where it did.
I think the same disposition is going to be required to get through 2035 intact. Not just intact — to come out the other side with the league meaningfully stronger than it is today, which is the bar the partners paid for. It will require a product roadmap that treats clip culture as a first-class citizen rather than a leakage problem. It will require an international strategy that assumes competitive pressure on attention rather than assuming uncontested growth. It will require a betting-and-media integration that the league owns rather than licenses.
None of that is impossible. Some of it is already underway. But the gap between what the contract assumes and what the world is about to deliver is, I think, wider than the people who signed the contract are prepared for.
I wrote last summer about what isn’t changing in live sports — that even amid every wave of disruption in the media economy, live sports remains the most resilient asset in television, because the thing it delivers (synchronous mass attention, unfakeable human drama, ritual and identity) is the thing that gets scarcer as everything else gets more abundant.
I still believe that. Nothing I have written here contradicts it.
The NBA will remain, across any plausible version of the next decade, one of the three or four most valuable sports properties in the world. The 2035 finals will draw a massive audience, across whatever combination of screens exists in 2035. Fans will still feel the same thing watching a Game 7 that I felt watching the 1990 World Cup final on a black-and-white television in India. That part does not change.
What changes is everything around the core. How the game gets to the fan. Who builds the product layer on top of the game. How the attention gets sliced, priced, and monetized. Where the cultural center of the sport lives when nobody is watching a full broadcast. Which leagues the international fan considers peer competition versus lower-tier alternatives.
These are the things the rights deal cannot freeze in place.
The first half of the contract will look a lot like the last cycle. Linear will shrink on schedule. Streaming will grow on schedule. The league will be healthy and profitable and culturally dominant in the ways it has been for the last fifteen years. Everyone will feel good about the deal.
The second half is where the interesting questions live. Not whether the NBA survives — it obviously does — but whether the product the partners bought in 2024 still exists, in any recognizable form, in 2035.
I think it will exist. I think it will have to have been rebuilt at least once, probably twice, along the way. And I think the partners who understand that upfront — who treat the rights deal as a license to build, not a license to extract — are the ones who come out of 2035 with something worth having.
The deal is not wrong. It is a snapshot of a sport priced at a moment.
The moment is already moving.
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