This Week’s Obsession: The Future of Sports Media
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The Question:
What's the Future of Sports Media like?
The Responses:
BiSB: Very Professional Podcasts.
David: Visual podcasts.
Ace: A vast web of two-minute autoplay videos with 30-second ad lead-ins.
Brian: Why is autoplay even an option? Why have you forsaken us, computer scientists?
Seth: Ask the legions of ad network peddlers who got my email when I joined the IAB newsletter. Someone saw on a spreadsheet that videos get incrementally higher ad rates and took this to all the board rooms in America.
Brian: It can't be incremental, can it? It has to be vastly different for the level of effort everyone is putting into video nobody watches
Seth: Rates are so dependent on so many factors that any generalization is necessarily incremental.
Brian: Anyway, it seems to me like there are a few different models for sports content that are viable. I would like you guys to guess at the models.
Ace: Grantland. RIP.
Seth: /giphy pours one out
Brian: Boutique prestige content is indeed one.
- PROS: good content written by people who don't feel like monkeys in the click factory.
- CONS: apparently doesn't make money? I kind of dispute that Grantland didn't make money because it couldn't, especially given the immediate and huge success of Simmons's podcast.
Seth: Obviously we’re rooting for this one. It depends on the media environment. The market of people who want to think long and hard about anything is so small I spent most of my life not knowing we were even a demographic. In a consolidated market like cable TV, the easy numbers favor the lowest intellectual demographic, so that becomes the ONLY market served (Hi TV news!). The internet is an open environment, so boutiques can find their market.
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But they have to grow from the bottom-up. Grantland could be making money, but ESPN was structurally incapable of understanding how or why it did. Nobody who thinks putting Skip Bayless or Steven A. Smith on TV is a good idea knows the first thing about marketing to people who fire off braincells for fun. The best thing for everybody would have been to spin it off.
Ace: The other issue with those prestige sites is writers tend to get snatched up. Grantland was a pretty unbelievable collection of talent that The Ringer has had a hard time replicating.
Brian: Yeah, a lot of them want to move on to doing other things because they can. This is not so much an issue with Graham Couch.
The ringer is also stuck on Medium, which is a terrible decision because it feels like a part of something instead of its own thing. That's fine if you're yet another Gannett site but bad if you're trying to be bougie.
Other boutique prestige shops include VICE Sports, The New York Times, Sports on Earth, and The Classical. The former two are parts of much larger organizations, the latter two basically died and live on as husks that don't pay many people.
So this is a dodgy and ephemeral way to live.
[Hit the JUMP for other ideas, like not paying for trash, more diagrams, or embracing “Embrace Debate.”]
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BiSB: You guys aren't gonna like my prediction, which is full and final victory by Embrace Debate. It generates clicks, which is the safest thing an executive can pitch.
Brian: Is Embrace debate even content? It feels like filler because by god 10 AM to 5 PM exists every damn day.
Ace: I feel that that ends up falling under a larger General Clickbait umbrella.
Brian: Deadspin had a good piece on this: this TAKEWAR between FS1 and ESPN is fighting over audiences so small that Nielsen doesn't even measure them.
What all of this investment has bought FS1 is an audience nearly large enough to be semi-reliably measured, and the best proof they can offer that the strategy is working for the network overall is that the audience doesn’t turn the channel when a simulcast of a braying donkey’s radio show comes on. For all the money and attention that has been lavished upon Second Take, slightly more people are watching a damn simulcast of a radio show.
Seth: Yeah that whole genre seems like it was built to win in an environment of 100 cable channels, and viewers who press the up button through them until two people yelling at each other over LeBron stops them. That world is coming to an end.
Brian: I would like to restore our faith in humanity by reminding you once again that nobody watches these shows. They seem designed to be on at the gym.
Adam:That's what I don't understand about ESPN's stated strategy. They say they want people that can do things across different platforms but how do you write EMBRACE DEBATE content without it basically being a transcript of a conversation between Statler and Waldorf?
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| Rebuilding Rutgers: one triggered Michigan fan at a time |
BiSB: Clay Travis.
Brian: First, fuck Clay Travis.
BiSB: Say something outrageous, and the debate is between Stupid Author and Outraged Readers
Seth: Ah, the Drew Sharp method: find the largest possible fanbase and say something that will extremely offend them. I think Danny Kanell tried this yesterday.
Brian: Clay Travis is the sports equivalent of Ann Coulter where I'm pretty sure he's not dumb enough to actually believe the stuff he's peddling but I'm increasingly unsure about this as time moves along.
Ace is right though, this stuff falls under General Clickbait, which is a clearly viable model. The sheer number of outfits competing in the realm is evidence enough. PROS: the content sucks so you can get anyone to do it for cheap and when they decide to stop being clickmonkeys there's always another starry-eyed youth to put in the machine. CONS: nobody cares if you live or die.
Ace: The format is depressingly compatible with people getting their news through occasional glances at their smartphone.
Brian: Yes, and by this point it includes major newspapers. Except they're bad at clickbait. But they're clickbaiters nontheless. This is why the attempts at Gannett paywalls were such miserable failures. Rule of thumb: if the reaction to you putting up a paywall is a derisive snort, you are clickbait.
Ace: I’ve found it interesting, especially in light of today’s layoffs, that ESPN.com’s front page is increasingly moving towards short videos and the ESPN Now updates that are essentially longer tweets.
Brian: Yeah, it's all mobile all the time.
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Seth: I'm very intrigued by the interplay between sports broadcasts and the dying cable industry. I'm waiting for the day that a major league of something--MLS, maybe even the NHL, gets angry in the middle of a cable negotiation and takes a meeting with Netflix to stream everything. Live sports are just about the last thing other than political theater that will guarantee a ton of people will turn to your station and watch your ads. When Comcast balked at making every general cable subscriber pay more for BTN, it gave Ann Arbor Torch & Pitchfork their best quarter in a century. The leagues have a sweet deal now where they can charge everyone's grandma to carry their games, but when that collapses the first thing to go will be the niche sports.
Brian: Please read the following in your best David Attenborough internal monologue.
Ah, broadcasts, the lions that roam the money savannahs and create the carcasses we extract a few morsels from. In a sense we are all scavengers, we of the sports media.
Or possibly Werner Herzog.
Ace: The NFL had a couple games live-streamed on Twitter last season.
Brian: The broadcasts will continue and be largely unchanged. The format and the amount of money they throw off will change. I don't think it's going to have much impact on any of the peripherals.
Seth: They've all got livestream options for their cable customers now. There's no numbers on this but how many people don't have cable and log on with their parent's accounts to stream their games? Long term this isn't sustainable. In 30 years, 20 years who's going to pay for the cable accounts that everybody else is stealing?
Brian: ESPN will continue to be the heart of the thing in some format or another because they're the gorilla at the heart of the jungle. The Big Ten probably could have gotten even more money in its recent negotiations but didn't want to leave ESPN entirely.
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| United States of Cable |
Ace: To Seth’s point, once cable companies can no longer force you to take dozens, if not hundreds, of unnecessary channels in order to get the few you actually watch, people will pay a reasonable amount of money to watch live sports. The problem isn’t paying for cable at all, it’s paying $200/month for a bunch of stuff you don’t need.
Streaming music sites show that millennials like me are quite willing to pay little bit every month to get access to content I actually want.
Also: Netflix, which almost literally everyone I know subscribes to.
Seth: Yes, yes. But you're not really paying that much for NatGeo. Those cable contracts are bloated to cover the massive payouts to live sports because they will die without live sports. I don't think the market, if allowed to function, would support half of what sports makes right now from TV contracts.
They’re also bloated because they need 10 stations to air live sports when they’re on, and then they need to pay people to fill those stations with something for the 90% of the week when live sports aren’t on. That all goes into our cable bills too. We’re paying Steven A. Smith’s contract, and we’re paying for every Arkansas to build a palace a year on their athletic campus.
Absolutely our generations will be happy to pay something for our live sports. But if ESPN is $35/month would you pay that? Because that's about the cheapest any bundle was paying to ESPN last time I looked.
Ace: I think that number comes down if/when ESPN realizes it’s a really damn bad idea to pay Stephen A. Smith $3.5 million a year. ESPN’s a tough one to figure out because they’ve basically tried to be all of these different media types in one. But, no, I wouldn’t pay $35/month for one channel if anything resembling piracy still exists.
Brian: It will be priced at a point where a lot of people will subscribe. It's going to be super tough to sell people on 35 dollar ESPN when HBO and Netflix are 10.
Ace: And $10 for the ESPN networks is a no-brainer buy for me.
Adam: Me too. If I'm paying $35/month it'll be through Playstation Vue, where I can get a few other channels I'll actually watch.
Seth: Exactly my point. They're on a major bubble versus what the market will bear right now. Eventually this system will crash under its own weight or some helpful politicians of the future will jump in. I'm betting by that point the MAC has its own streaming service, and when the Big Ten goes back to the table, maybe they don't need a middle man.
Brian: That degradation will be slow for the same reason the NYT is still a big deal. The top thing in any market benefits from network effects.
Seth: I think it's hard to guess how slow, because a good chunk of that iceberg is already under the boat, if you take the metaphor.
Ace: I mean, we’re seeing a big part of the “collapse” of ESPN right now and it’s had zero effect on them broadcasting games.
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BiSB: There is another model out there: the MGoBlog Model of a hyper-focus on a niche market with the cultivation of a distinct readership/viewership/listenership. But who the hell would try that.
Ace: Ahem, Very Professional MGoBlog Model.
Brian: I thought there would be more of us by now. Like, there's no Notre Dame version of us.
Ace: My assumption is the lack of other us-es is in large part due to the sheer amount of work it takes up front. Making something out of nothing is a hell of a thing.
Seth: By now they'd have congregated on the SBNation site then. The best I can gather is that's a very segmented fanbase, with pockets of different types of fans all over the place who all want a different thing. NDNation, One Foot Down, readers of the Chicago Tribune, etc. are all large and extremely different communities who would not play well together. The Red Wings’ blogosphere is a lot like this too—the 19 people at A2Y are a different breed from WIIMT.
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| professionalism means having your own media badge |
BiSB: I thought SBNation would help to foster it, but I don't think that's happened to a great extent.
Ace: They almost have to be independent because SBNation-type networks inevitably gravitate towards General Clickbait.
BiSB: Look no further than the Iowa scene, where the personalities of Black Heart Gold Pants left.
Seth: They left because Eleven Warriors started sister sites for Iowa and Penn State fans on their platform. But 11W is already far down the clickbait road themselves—I stopped following their Twitter when it was taken over by 5-year-olds, and there’s so much content posted per day that I either have someone else tell me when their good stuff hits or I miss it altogether.
Brian: SBNation has some versions of MGoBlog in their fold. Their MMA site, for one, and I think their Celtics blog is big enough that the guys working on it think of it as their job.
Ace: NBA coverage in general is way out ahead of a lot of other sports in terms of depth and quality. Same with MLB. I’d bet it has a lot to do with the amount of advanced stats that are freely available and widely understood.
Seth: I think the point is the MGoBlog model only exists wherever there’s a personality on the top who’ll stick to his vision when it’s not economically viable and then stick to his vision when easy content for easy clicks is more economically viable. It’s a lifestyle business.
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Brian: And there's what I think the last model is: paywall-worthy information purveyor.
BiSB: The land of the 'crootin
Brian: That can be a recruiting site like The Michigan Insider or Michigan 247 or it can be a stats-plus organization like PFF, Krossover, or Synergy. But the key thing for them is "is there a population of people who will pay for your stuff." Kenpom is now in this category as well.
Ace: In the era of Patreon, there are also a select few writers who’ve generated enough of a following to making a living (or something like it) for stuff that would’ve been freelance work before. Joe Sheehan’s newsletter comes to mind.
Brian: Or that dude who did the Peppers video.
Seth: Yeah just as the free sites are gravitationally drawn to the lowest standards, paywall stuff has to hit a super high one. To use the cable analogy, there's HBO, then there's every other premium network.
BiSB: It's almost a subset of the prestige model in some cases.
Ace: Agreed.
Brian: I mean, we're kind of in that category as well except the great depth and breadth of the Michigan fanbase has allowed us to forgo the paywall. It is great to be a Michigan Wolverine blogger.
BiSB: How broad is the demand for X's and O's coverage? I know the people who have read this far (hi, both of you) are probably interested, but beyond them?
Brian: The X and Os numbers are not large but their interest is deep. We are consumers of X and Os and stats and lay out hard cash for it on a subscription basis.
Seth: The thing about Xs and Os is those articles take a lot of time to make sure you saw everything and got it right. And I think my last one got 1 comment.
Ace: It depends. Zach Lowe ended up being ESPN’s most prominent hoops writer through a lot of really in-depth play breakdown posts. It’s a tough topic to keep interesting, but if you can make the content accessible it can work.
Brian: UFRs do get a lot of comments, though fewer after Al Borges left.
BiSB: Does anyone want to talk about Barstool and the Ass&Tittification of sports media, or just let that sit?
Ace: That’s kinda always been a thing, right?
Seth: As long as the sports-consuming demographic looks like ours:
…the T&A will continue because that demographic largely shares a certain brain chemistry. But it also reinforces the demographic. I think female sports interaction numbers are soft; anecdotally I know so many women who’d engage more if the culture wasn’t such a turnoff.
Brian: General clickbait has a wing of its hall of fame dedicated to T&A.
Ace: My football preview magazines always had stuff like Cheerleaders Of The Big Ten.
Seth: With X's and O's it’s like consulting: Level of expertise is a big deal—there's a massive gap between what I can come up with and like, Chris Brown, and it’s going to take me hours of extra work and running stuff by people just to match what he can spot live.
Again, this goes back to the math of effort/reward. A diagram of a Michigan play that Harbaugh borrowed from Bo and a picture of a woman in a Michigan bikini probably get the same click-rate.
Ace: Clearly the market inefficiency here is diagramming the women in bikinis.
Brian: i... might read that
Ace: I’m a media visionary.
Seth: Alright guys, good talk. I'll let HUEL know that's the new direction we'd like to go.
Basically what the other guys said. I think there were 10 comments about adjusting scrotums out of the 12 replies to my thread posting sack-adjusted stats for 2016. I don't want to sound high and mighty because I talk that way with friends too. On the other hand my best Michigan buddy is my female cousin who doesn't read MGoBlog because she thinks it's a bunch of men talking about their ballsacks, which is literally correct.
BTW I didn't comment on your last Xs and Os post but I certainly read and enjoyed it. Not much to add or ask, but it was good.
Thanks man. I'm honestly loving all the outflow of support for those that my little aside generated but I probably shouldn't have made it seem like I was getting disenchanted with the enterprise because of lack of feedback, or that I didn't understand the long term value of those articles.
The point is that they don't work in a model that isn't emphasizing long-term and non-liquid goals. What Is works for MGoBlog because it builds our knowledge base, and builds our credibility for discussing these topics later, and provides the readers the kind of content that we want them to think of when they think of MGoBlog. However none of those are "measureables" which isn't a word but is a word that drives most free media market decisions. Less discussion looks like less engagement, and fewer comments means fewer page refreshes/ad revenue opportunities.
Then you have to take into account how much time it takes to produce that content, and how much foreknowledge the author needs to have it, and you're talking about a massive investment in content for very little in "deliverables" (another non-word). So it's no wonder that this content is rarely produced in the vast majority of media outlets. Note however that Grantland was willing to pay a living wage to Chris Brown, and Brian will tolerate me, and 11W has an excellent guy on their staff, and Ben Jones doesn't lack for work. Ross Fulton goes behind a paywall, but he's not driving Buckeyegrove's traffic--he's there to give them crediblity, and it works really well.
April 26th, 2017 at 11:20 PM ^
But will add some more, and apologize in advance for sounding like DB. Seth, it sounds like you're doubting the ROI of an X's and O's post. But the examples you point out - of gaining credibility - may not be measurable in terms of pageclicks or whatever but in the long term you have a dedicated group of users who continually click on the sight to see what's up. I look at your long analysis posts as an R&D project - a heavy investment of time and resources, and you may not see the payoff for a while. But without it, you become a site of just more talking heads and links to other more interesting sites. And with it, it becomes easier for your other content to get viewed, like how the lacrosse team or the water polo team is doing.
I hope this didn't turn into a ramble, basically I love the way this site is run and while some of the metrics may make it hard to see, I do believe there is value in the way you guys have run it.
^ Those are the things that are a turn-off to me about "sports culture". Which is part of why I appreciate this site and umhoops so much (including most, but not all, of the message board posts/posters). And contributes to why I'm far less likely to visit Touch the Banner unless someone here points out content there.
I know a pretty good number of men who are stunned (in our first such conversation) by my depth and breadth of sports knowledge, particularly as a football fan who can discuss plays/formations/penalties (even moreso thanks to this site than ever before) etc., not just which players are superstars or good looking. I have many female friends who are interested in sports and express being turned off of digging deeper because enough men have replied with "oh, sure, you just think he's hot because he's on TV" or "c'mon you don't really care about [football, baseball], you just like looking at guys in uniforms" type comments that the women just don't think it's worth the backlash to ask more questions or become more informed.
I read here for years before I ever posted anything, and I still delete far more comments than I actually post, because of that same sense of stiffled expression - and as I've stated above, I don't think this site is an unwelcoming environment for female fans.
Whether you're surprised or not, I read the whole thing, and I'm sure a great many others do too. Just because something you guys post doesn't get comments doesn't mean it hasn't been read and appreciated. It just may not be comment worthy (unless your lone comment is IBD, in which case all bets are off). I'm pretty sure most of you were former Daily writers, and that's a great training ground for what you're doing today -- screw mass media; this is way better.
If you write something interesting and/or intelligent, it has value, and while some may choose to agree to disagree with the viewpoint you espouse, readers have to respect the depth of thought that you guys collectively put into your posts (except Draftgeddon -- OMG, I just can't). It helps that it's smart and that your audience is (generally) smart, passionate and plentiful, which may explain why it's tough for most other schools to rinse and repeat what you do here. For example, Iowa just doesn't have the quantity of bodies to read, nor the history of persistent success across multiple sports (not to throw Iowa under the bus, but you get the point). ND is a bit of a mystery, but their issue is probably more tied to the weirdness of a significant portion of their fan base that has never visited South Bend, much less even attended college anywhere. It's a Catholic thing -- I wouldn't understand.
All of that said, keep up the good work, stick to your principles, and you'll continue to be rewarded, whether readers actually like you or not. Go Blue!
In some ways there has never been a better time to consume sports. You can buy packages to watch every game every team plays if you like a sport enough, and you can do so on a number of platforms. Additionally, access to good media content is easy and for the most part free.
But while the pie is growing, the slices of it aren't. The providers are disintegrating into smaller and smaller components. The big boy on the street, ESPN, can't hang onto subscribers, so it is shrinking in uncomfortable ways and the worst may be yet to come.
So what we wind up with is a lot more niche content. And that's great if you're cool being a niche. MGoBlog is tremendously successful as a niche provider, with great content, a large and loyal userbase, and real credibility in the college football universe. And since all Brian wants to do is produce content about Michigan sports, that's totally fine. The site has maybe three full-time employees plus some other guys making money for producing some content, the site is free, and thousands of us are happy.
But Brian would run into serious trouble if he tried to expand into, say, a site that covered all sports in the Metro Detroit area, or all teams in the B1G. Then he'd have to hire guys that covered those sports, and he would depend upon a much larger customer base to drive traffic. And if the guys he hires did not bring traffic with them, the whole thing collapses.
Niche is the way to go.
And I think that's the way a lot of things are going. Frankly ESPN's move to carve up its Baseball Tonight franchise (Jayson Stark gone, Karl Ravech reduced, etc) suggests that it thinks that its hardcore baseball fans are watching MLB network instead. They've defenestrated their hockey guys, which makes sense because hockey is a niche and people who want to know about it have already changed the channel.
So ESPN is narrowing its focus to what it perceives to be larger market items. Football, in particular.
Ace: I mean, we’re seeing a big part of the “collapse” of ESPN right now and it’s had zero effect on them broadcasting games.
Not sure what the 'effects' you are referencing but they've cut loose some of the announcers. Mike Tirico comes to mind first. I actually think this isn't that big of a collapse right now for espn - it's not good, but we're still in the very early stages. Often times laying off employees is one of the first things companies do to try and save money. Right now ESPN is tied into their current tv contracts. When it comes time to re-bid on broadcasting NFL, college football, NBA, etc, is when we'll see just how much of a hit ESPN has taken.
Ace: To Seth’s point, once cable companies can no longer force you to take dozens, if not hundreds, of unnecessary channels in order to get the few you actually watch, people will pay a reasonable amount of money to watch live sports. The problem isn’t paying for cable at all, it’s paying $200/month for a bunch of stuff you don’t need.
This works both ways. There's a sizable portion of the population who have little to no interest in ESPN but with a lot of the satellite and cable companies espn is currently part of the basic package. When full on 'a la carte' channels and such start to exist, ESPN will probably have a lot less subscribers than they do now.
I don't mind to nit pick just your comments Ace, but those two stuck out to me.
If you're interested in how the tech industry perceives the eventual fall of cable and big sports media, Ben Thompson over at Stratechery is required reading.
Bundling economics often make a lot of sense, at least when the content pool is diverse (you're paying for Grandma's soaps too, after all, and you both pay less than what you would otherwise).
Under assumptions that apply to most information-based businesses, bundling benefits buyers and sellers. Consider the following simple model for the willingness-to-pay of two cable buyers, the “sports lover” and the “history lover”:
What price should the cable companies charge to maximize revenues? Note that optimal prices are always somewhere below the buyers’ willingness-to-pay. Otherwise the buyer wouldn’t benefit from the purchase. For simplicity, assume prices are set 10% lower than willingness-to-pay. If ESPN and the History Channel were sold individually, the revenue maximizing price would be $9 ($10 with a 10% discount). Sports lovers would buy ESPN and history lovers would buy the History Channel. The cable company would get $18 in revenue.By bundling channels, the cable company can charge each customer $11.70 ($13 discounted 10%) for the bundle, yielding combined revenue of $23.40. The consumer surplus would be $2 in the non-bundle and $2.60 in the bundle. Thus both buyers and sellers benefit from bundling.
Bundling economics fall apart as soon as the relationship becomes too one-sided, though. Pretty much everyone agrees sports will be the last domino to fall.
The truth, though, is that in the long run ESPN remains the most stable part of the cable bundle: it is the only TV “job” that, thanks to its investment in long-term rights deals, is not going anywhere. Indeed, what may ultimately happen is not that ESPN leaves the bundle to go over-the-top, but that a cable subscription becomes a de facto sports subscription, with ESPN at the center garnering massive carriage fees from a significantly reduced cable base. And, frankly, that may not be too bad of an outcome.
Bundling economics fall apart as soon as the relationship becomes too one-sided, though.
This is true, as I would pay $9 for ESPN instead of $9.01 for ESPN and History channel bundle.
Interesting thoughts, though I admit I tripped over the presupposition that a "history lover" would pay anything for the History channel as it is currently programmed.
Other than the Michigan content of course, this is why I love this site. This was a thought provoking, discussion enticing write up that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Thanks guys!
April 26th, 2017 at 11:09 PM ^
There are two related topics here - content providers, and analysis writers. As far as analysis goes, there has to be a market for the Grantland/MGoBlog content. I'm not sure why every other large fanbase doesn't have their own MGoBlog - I find it hard to believe there aren't other Brian's at a place like UTexas or UWashington. While The Ringer isn't as good as Grantland, there's still a hunger for that well written sports analysis. It pops up on FiveThirtyEight every now and then. It may not proliferate as much as Bleacher Report, but it does exist. And just because I don't have time to dive into every UFR and X's and O's post doesn't mean I don't love them and find them valuable.
For content providers, I'm guessing a lot of leagues will follow the MLB.tv model. There are still a few games a week on Fox and ESPN to reach the wider audience, but I bet a plethora of games will cut out the middle man and leagues will provide you with content for a subscription. But that still leaves room for some sort of catch-all sports network - whether it be ESPN or Netflix or someone we haven't heard of yet - a one-stop shop for sports that heavily leans on content. And they necessarily WILL rely on heavy hitters like College Football, the NFL, and fill it out with a lot of niche sports.
That may be wishful thinking on my part, but I believe it is in the interest of every sports league for an ESPN to exist - a way to get casual viewers watching their biggest games. That may rely on sticking with broadcast cable, or ESPN, but it should continue to exist. One of my favorite phenomenon of this streaming era is how my FOB parents can watch cricket on WatchESPN, my FOB bro-in-law watches soccer and F1 on the NBCSports app, and I learn about games like Aussie Rules Footy and Hurley because I'm sports-mad and watch anything if there's no football. Now hard-core racing fans may have to subscribe to see who wins the 24 hours of Daytona, but a one-stop-shop would allow a casual fan to watch Indy and Monaco and feel checked in.
You guys kept it mostly to the immediate here-and-now or immediate future. Things will keep changing ever more quickly. We've already gone past the information age and into the attention age. Clickbait and its siblings will dominate much more over the next 10 years, and will evolve to become even more invasive and attractive to humans. The average person's time is more crowded than ever with all media competing for attention. (Think about how many books you're reading now vs just five years ago...)
I think that MGoBlog is a true exception that is in part a lucky confluence:
- Brian's talent, passion, and conviction.
- As noted, the uniqueness of the Michigan fan base money-cannon and ability/desire to read with critical thought
- The "moment" when blogging basically went extinct and Brian taking this endeavor forward at the right time. Maybe less important, but my point is that it was built from something naturally, not a New Coke kind of launch.
- Primary focus being on a sport that attracts a certain type of fanatic, one that prefers stories and information over clickbait. (Have there ever been any good NFL team blogs?)
- The benefit of the wider Michigan universe, principally the other sports, but the University and Ann Arbor culture provides a ready-made community based on shared experience
I don't expect that other sites can repeat this roadmap unless they have the same kinds of conditions.
I am grateful for this site every day. Having moved out of the country in 2008, it has been a true lifeblood for me in connecting back to the football team and university in general throughout that time. Thanks guys!
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