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Size Doesn’t Matter: A Sports Streaming Morality Tale

Yesterday’s fine-tuned sports streaming-versus-broadcast math is rapidly becoming obsolete, with Amazon poised to take in billions more in ad revenue this year, Netflix targeting more than $3 billion, and streamers leaning into younger—albeit much smaller—audiences.

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NFL fans
ESPN’s audience also represents a group of viewers whose average incomes are 15 percent higher than ABC viewers. They’re also about 13 percent younger. Photo: Jeff Dean/Getty Images
Julia Alexander
June 3, 2025

Measuring sports viewership in the post-TV era has become, in the words of Media Rating Council’s George Ivie, “more chaotic than it’s ever been.” Amid this chaos, and the fact that some audience segments are more valuable than others, league executives are being forced to rethink how they cut media deals, and advertisers are trying to figure out how to deploy their budgets while the ground is shifting beneath them. One thing’s for sure: Traditional television ratings have never mattered as little as they do today.

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