The IndyCar Series remains uncompetitive in the marketplace. The ratings for Sonoma, Chicagoland and Motegi are in and they are bad. That said, they could have been worse.
According to Anthony Schoettle of the Indianapolis Business Journal:
Motegi - .14 Rating, 165,000 households (viewers would be greater)
That is actually better than I had expected given the 10:30pm start time.
Sonoma - .25 Rating, 281,000 households
Chicagoland - .24 Rating, 271,000 households
Again, this race performed better than many of us had previously believed. The late start time did not help at all.
On balance, Sonoma has to be a disappointment. It was the only race of the three that started at a reasonable hour for an IndyCar race.
It is also interesting that the DirecTV exodus from Versus did not seem to affect IndyCar. Chicagoland and Sonoma were run prior to the DirecTV blackout. Motegi came after the blackout. Its location and start time seem sufficient to explain the slight drop from the previous two races. The DirecTV impact would appear to be minimal.Much more critical to IndyCar's future on Versus is the strategic direction of the series. At present, IRL management appears to be doing all that it can to make life difficult for its U.S. cable distribution partner.
My valuation of IndyCar team sponsorship will change with these numbers, which are in fact better than my assumed values. It won't change much, but it will increase a bit.
Roggespierre
By how much?? I feel the numbers you presented are in fact pretty close to true market value. If these numbers have risen, it can only be a small percentage point or two. Not enough to justify continuing down the chosen path the IRL continues on. Any thoughts on this Roggespierre??
ReplyDeleteOne item about ratings that no one discusses in the days is that their share is based on the number of households they're available in. A .25 is greater but with less households...
ReplyDeleteIt could be that no one with DirecTV watches Indy. Interesting to note given the preponderance of satellite in rural areas.
Oldwrench,
ReplyDeleteI revised my numbers in the IndyCar Price & Market Value 2.1 article. The difference is about $30K. The top IRL teams are still worth less than $1 million in promotional value.
Best Regards,
Roggespierre
According to Sports Business Daily soon after Versus went dark on DirecTV, their overall national availability dropped from 75 million homes to 61 million homes. Furthermore, according to Versus last week, the free preview on Dish Network and people who switched to cable (their count, of course) added 9 million temporary or permanent homes to that, bringing the total back up to 70 million for the Motegi race. Most satellite TV experts (or those who think they are experts) predicted that Versus ratings without DirecTV would drop between 10-20% based on these figures. The Motegi race dropped much more than that.
ReplyDeleteEven when comparing the two later Saturday night oval races (Chicagoland vs Motegi), the ICS lost about 40% of their viewership (271,000 HH vs 165,000 HH). It's actually slightly more than a 40% loss if you compare it to Sonoma (281,000 HH). Roggespiere, a 40% loss of viewership comparing either race-to-race or late Saturday night oval-to-late Saturday night oval is not "minimal". Do you really think that an oval race starting at 11 PM would drop 40% of its viewers that would have watched if the same oval race started at 10PM? I agree that some would leave, but not 40%. Unless you can point out another factor that would have taken 40% of the ICS viewership away between August and September, I have to disagree with your description of the DirecTV effect on the ICS being "minimal".
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteThe Motegi race aired on Friday night. It began approximately one hour later than the Chicagoland race that aired on Saturday night. HUT (houses using television) levels begin to decrease at 10PM as people go to bed. I have some experience in this area. HUT levels mean a lot. Sonoma is totally irrelevant because it aired on a Sunday afternoon. That is why I was surprised that it barely beat Chicagoland.
We would need to see the share numbers for Chicagoland and Motegi before we could say what the effect of HUT declines might have been. I don't claim to be representative of anything, but I will say that I watched all of Chicagoland. I went to bed midway through Motegi. Typical HUT flows would suggest that I was not alone.
My guess - and in this case it is an educated guess - is that the HUT decrease caused significantly more audience erosion that the DirecTV blackout.
Best Regards,
Roggespierre
Thanks for the correction on the Motegi air date Roggespierre. Once DirecTV turned out the lights on IRL fans like me, it got too dark in here to see the calendar on the wall, especially at 11 PM. :-)
ReplyDeleteI guess as long as we have a series with apparently 165,000 hardcore fan households (Kansas and Motegi average viewership) and 4+ million casual fan households (Indy 500 average viewership), the questions trying to figure out why that is will probably outnumber the answers received. If the NFL's regular season games only drew 5-10% of their average Super Bowl viewership, they would be in major trouble and so would the involved networks. Yet, when it happens frequently with IRL broadcasts (comparing the Indy 500 to basically everything on Versus this year), a disturbingly large number of IRL executives and Internet fans think this is something not to be concerned about at all.
In fact, I'm not really sure between those two groups who is the PT Barnum and who is the mark anymore. As you've pointed out in various articles, the IRL fools companies into seeing value which doesn't exist (Barnum) but then they get fooled by Versus's definition that the IRL is an overpriced "premium property" (mark) in their dispute with DirecTV. The fans conned Versus into giving better coverage (Barnum) but then they then get duped with virtually no mainstream coverage or marketing (mark) after May.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear that you're a victim of the DirecTV mess. There is one additional factor that I did not consider. Because of the Versus blackout on DirecTV, the IRL streamed Motegi live on its website. I give management credit for this; it's good PR and a nice gesture. However, it might have cannibalized its own viewers that would have watched the race on Versus. I was one of them.
I would contend that the IRL isn't fooling anybody. The few sponsors that are in IndyCar racing are extracting value somewhere, usually in a completely separate market. Some (Honda, Firestone) are having their participation subsidized by the IRL and its teams. Others (Target, McDonald's) have leveraged their supply chains. The rest are either fan boys who don't really care about comparative ROI or relations of drivers that will go wherever the drivers go.
Frankly, I can't believe that the IMS Board does not hold IRL managers accountable for television ratings. We are talking about the most fundamental quantifiable element of market acceptance. Bad ratings are not inconveniences. They are unmistakable measures of market rejection.
I am beginning to suspect that Versus knew exactly what it was getting with the IRL. Advertising purchases by APEX Brasil, Firestone and other IRL partners likely offset the minimal investment that was required of Versus. That is the way of IRL management.
That said, I agree that the coverage has been good and that Versus has delivered on its promise to give ample promotion to the lousy IndyCar product.
The prevailing culture at the IMS and IRL is one that is focused on sales. Product development, customer focus, and supply chain management are neither understood nor considered. After all, failing to manage the business can always be overcome if you just sell, sell, sell. It doesn't matter whether you're selling a racing series or exotic Brazilian food. If you just sell something, then everything will be okay.
But we know that everything is not okay. The IMS and IRL will come to recognize this at some point. As a lifelong fan of the Indianapolis 500 and IndyCar racing, I hope that recognition and corrective action are not too late.
Best of luck to you with regards to DirecTV. That really sucks.
Warm Regards,
Roggespierre
Thanks for the kind words regarding DirecTV. Just on their website alone, the IRL seems to be confused about how they want to serve their
ReplyDeleteDirecTV fans.
1. On the front page, they ask DirecTV subscribers to demand that Versus be reinstated. It's been 6 weeks since DirecTV started their warning crawls during the World Athletics Championships. I doubt my single voice is what will break this ice jam any time soon.
2. The IRL posted a "news article" and a stickied forum posting a few weeks ago about Dish Network's 3 month long free preview of Versus. Despite being a DirecTV customer for nearly 10 years, thanks to their policy of resetting a 2 year programming commitment when you receive a "free" box upgrade like I did in January, moving to Dish for Motegi would have cost me a $300 cancellation fee. That's not a reasonable option, especially if the IRL wanted that $300 from me in the form of ticket and merchandise purchases or sponsor support.
3. A Downforce administrator on their forum posted twice asking people to host "viewing parties for Motegi and Homestead" because "they are a lot of fun". In the apartment complex on my block, about half of the residents in the past 18 months either have been jailed or are no longer tenants because they are currently jailed. I wouldn't go there at 1:30 PM, much less at 1:30 AM for Motegi. Many of my other neighbors either have DirecTV or they don't pay extra to get Versus.
4. The IRL also offered streaming on their site for free. Although it was a nice gesture, being forced to watch the race on a computer monitor 25% of the size of my living room TV while my $80 per month fee to DirecTV sits idle really isn't an option I would consider or enjoy.
The phrase "lifelong fan" describes it for me too. I saw my first Indy 500 when I was 5 years old. If coverage was on TV at all back then, it was spotty, almost always tape delayed and never flag-to-flag. People elsewhere on the Internet (especially fans that would fall into the "lifer" category), seem to think that a similar lack of coverage for DirecTV subscribers now isn't a problem. Retro styling only goes so far these days as a marketing strategy. Eventually, most people want to return to the present.
When the IRL began racing in 1996, they had 5 races that were broadcast on ABC. Right now, if you are a subscriber to DirecTV, all you are guaranteed to see are 5 IndyCar races on ABC next season. As the IRL moves (limps?) into its 15th season (two full seasons after The Merge), I'm expected to basically start over coverage wise?
The longer the IRL seems content on TV coverage not being reasonably available to long time fans like me, the more likely I am to find out that I can live without them. Exactly how many hoops should a fan jump though before they decide to take a road with fewer hoops in the way? Unfortunately, I may find my limit on that issue soon if, in fact, I haven't done so already.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteFirst, may I suggest that you consider moving to a different neighborhood? I've spent more time than I care to remember in locations that sound a lot like your present neck of the woods. I don't miss those days.
Regarding Versus, I think that we should consider a possibility that typically gets very little attention. ESPN/ABC not only reduced its IRL commitment to five events this year, but also "allowed" the IRL to get out of its contract a year early.
ESPN can choose to air virtually any sports property that it wants. It did not want a single IRL race this year. It did take four non-Indy races and put them on ABC in early Sunday afternoon time slots when the affiliates would otherwise have aired infomercial.
ESPN/ABC had already paid for the 2009 IRL season. The cost was sunk. It still opted to let the league go. Perhaps it concluded that mergification was a dud. Kudos to ESPN if that is in fact true. The league gained a few more teams in need of financial support and a few more international road racers who can not be sold to a U.S. audience.
Who can blame ESPN for having not been impressed? I suspect that Versus was the best of few viable alternatives.
Getting Versus back on DirecTV might require NHL fans physically threatening the honchos at Liberty Media. That scenario seems entirely possible to me.
I hope for your sake that it works.
Best Regards,
Roggespierre