Are millennials moving the goalposts for premium sports?
Sports has long been the mainstay for traditional TV networks – best viewed live, in high definition, and drawing huge audiences – by its nature it has been best suited to broadcast, and largely immune to the pressures afflicting other genres of broadcast content such as scripted drama, comedy and factual programming. But Ampere research suggests that young millennials are being lured away from watching sport by the plethora of other content on offer in the TV and online video market. Across over 30,000 internet users Ampere has surveyed in Europe and the USA in 2015 and 2016, roughly 10% indicated that sport was their favourite genre of content. Of these respondents, just 11.1% were aged between 18 and 24, compared to 13.5% of the surveyed population – 17% lower than would be expected. This appears to be a recent trend. US and UK research from 2004-2005 indicates that historically the 18-24 group was a proportionally more important component of popular league fan bases. This suggests that fandom is ageing with the fans themselves, and not making the full transition to younger groups.
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