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It’s not an “apples to apples comparison.”
Makes you kind of chuckle when you hear that statement in reference to Major League Soccer’s deal with Apple TV vs. traditional television rights deals.
After waiting for most of the last three years to get some idea of how many people are watching the games on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV, we got numbers in the last couple of weeks.
Commissioner Don Garber, at the MLS All-Star Game, said, “We’re averaging 120,000 unique viewers per match. That’s an increase of almost 50% compared to last year. Distribution has helped drive a lot of that. Now you can get MLS Season Pass on Comcast, on Direct TV, for the first time of any sports league, providing access to fans through EA FC Mobile.”
He used that same number in early August at a Front Office Sports (FOS) event in New York. What the folks around the league tell us continually is that the numbers are not calculated the same way as the old-fashioned linear TV ratings. The number of unique viewers is not the same as the average viewers.
In the old days, let’s say yesterday, television entities estimated their audience through a ratings system, which captures the average number of viewers in a particular window. The science is better than ever, but not great. And never will be. For a very long time, I have been an advocate of new and better ways to identify how many people are viewing, reading, consuming, or otherwise spending time with media content.
Which brings us back to unique viewers. What I can ascertain from several sources, including directly from a person who has worked in the streaming business for a number of years, is that a unique viewer is the single person who counts toward the number of views. The total reflects the number of specific individuals who watch, not the total number of views.
I’ve been told, not surprisingly, that nearly all of the Top 20 audiences this season are from the Sunday Night Soccer matchups on MLS Season Pass.
Dan Courtemanche, MLS Executive VP and Chief Communications Officer, said that fans on MLS Season Pass are highly intentional in how they engage. “Unlike passive channel-surfing on linear,” he said, “viewers are actively choosing to watch a specific match across platforms and devices.”
He says that reflects a different kind of engagement. “It goes deeper than the traditional viewership metrics might suggest.”
It’s unclear if the number we’ve shared here includes viewers outside of the United States. Although Garber had an intriguing comment at the Aug. 4 FOS event Huddle in the Hamptons. After signing Messi he said, “I’m as interested in who’s watching in Argentina, who’s watching in Colombia, Brazil, who’s watching in Japan, China and throughout the Middle East as I am interested in Columbus, Ohio.”
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We are interested in those international numbers. If you’ve traveled overseas and have accessed MLS games, you know what a nice treat it is to get the games outside of our shores. I’ve been told MLS games are available on Apple devices and apps in more than one hundred countries.
“The media and the pundits just don’t get it yet,” Garber said. “So, I’m not sure we are where we need to be. But I know that we’re going to have to get there soon. Other than the hassle of people complaining about it, we feel pretty good.”
The commissioner might feel better with a little jab at the media, but the rest of that comment feels like he’s saying the 120,000 is not good enough. I would love to know what is good enough.
One can assume the Messi games and the Sunday Night Soccer games are exceeding 120,000 unique viewers. And that many of the other matchups are not getting that kind of an audience. Again, we don’t know how many are watching globally. Theoretically the number of people watching the Columbus Crew around the country and around the world on Apple exceeds the number of people who were watching the team on local television, which was how most games were seen before 2023.
An MLS source told me the age of the soccer viewer on MLS Season Pass is 10 years younger than the viewer on linear TV, a figure that likely also applies to cable viewers. The future of both linear television and cable is for another lengthy chat.
In the future we may never get audience numbers publicly from any of the streamers, in any of the sports. As an example, Peacock doesn’t tell you how many watched a mid-season college basketball game. Real audience numbers, real engagement numbers, real product value, whatever the metric, is shared with advertisers, but it’s not essential they share it with the audience. Unless of course the numbers are awesome.
We might only learn if a partnership is successful by one of two simple actions, either it gets extended or they break up.
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