Golf is having an incredible year. The PGA Tour is averaging about 3.1 million viewers on CBS and NBC; Justin Thomas’s win at the RBC Heritage averaged 4.4 million viewers (the most-watched final round in 23 years); and viewership at the Masters was up 33 percent year-over-year, making Rory McIlroy’s win the most-watched Augusta Sunday since 2018. Indeed, despite the sport’s well-chronicled interfamily feud—the Saudis’ LIV Golf, for what it’s worth, continues to be dwarfed by the Tour—there’s no denying that people, and especially young people, are once again interested.

These viewership numbers also dovetail with rising participation across the country. Nearly 3.5 million people golfed for the first time in 2023, per the National Golf Foundation, millions more than in recent years. Understandably, everyone in sports media is obsessed with the underpinnings of the sport’s resurgence. And the answer, as with most sports media questions these days, starts with YouTube. Jonny Keogh, who heads up YouTube’s U.K. sports division, has cited his platform’s ability to transform younger fans’ impressions of an ostensibly old and fusty sport. After all, teenagers and twentysomethings have come to know McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau not through Sunday afternoon PGA Tour coverage, which still caters to retirees in Kiawah, but through Dude Perfect.

And yet, witnessing golf’s success on YouTube makes me wonder whether there’s an untapped audience for traditional media players still producing old-school golf telecasts. Back when Mark Lazarus first spoke about his ambitions for Versant, Comcast’s spinco, golf was at the top of the list of sports to emphasize. Versant will oversee Golf Channel, but also GolfPass and GolfNow, both of which build on the flywheel for golf fans. GolfPass offers exclusive content from Golf Channel and ancillary videos, similar to those on YouTube, while GolfNow allows players to set their own tee times.

Lazarus and his team know that the key to Versant’s future isn’t in hoping that cord-cutting finally levels out. (Cable is now in less than 50 million homes, and may have yet to find its bottom.) Instead, it’s in developing niche audiences based in its owned-and-operated hodgepodge of cable properties. In a time when every streaming service, TV channel, music platform, and video game is competing for tinier shares of attention, obsession and exclusivity reign supreme. Close to 50 percent of Gen Z claims to consume content on topics that no one in their real life knows about or is interested in, per a YouTube Insights report conducted in 2024. Last year, more than 30 percent of all streamers were specialty platforms, according to Antenna.

Traditional media is often paralyzed when it comes to thinking about YouTube as anything but a competitor. But Lazarus can lean into Golf Channel, GolfPass, and GolfNow’s differentiating factors, and harness YouTube’s unbeatable distribution and discovery platform. Could, say, DeChambeau simulcast a tournament he’s not in, on his own channel, to encourage his 2 million subscribers to follow him on GolfPass and GolfNow? I’m just spitballing, but you get the idea.

With YouTube and Netflix as the dominant winners of the streaming wars, finding ways to lean into a small, but obsessive, fan base can be a more aggressive path forward. The spincos that Lazarus and WBD’s Gunnar Wiedenfels will oversee aren’t growth engines; they’re wind-down machines, designed to create the most value for brands that can be sold to private equity firms or larger conglomerates. If Lazarus can use golf’s new moment, and find a way to harness YouTube rather than run from it, he may set himself up for a stronger post-NBCU life than originally thought.

Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday.
John