One fundamental way the internet has changed the world is to make abundance normal.
A brand can reach scale – of audience, video views and app downloads – for low marginal cost, and an end user can access all the media in existence. Scarcity in the digital world barely exists.
Abundance means all sports clubs and leagues can cite numbers around their content or their fan services which feel big. Fan passion generates impressions, views and engagements which quickly aggregate into eight-, nine- or even ten-digit figures.
In this context we must question the value and real-world meaning of such big numbers and work to pair them with metrics which represent true community engagement, and indeed place faith in marketing activity that we can’t easily measure at all.
Since the earliest websites ran ‘hit counters’ in their footer it’s been accepted that the more we can measure in digital, the better. No more wastage, reach only the right people at the right time. SMART objectives. Being data-driven. All coming to a LinkedIn post near you.
This has created two particular problems in sports organizations, as they compete for D2C and partnership attention and revenue.
Firstly the more emphasis placed on numeric reach, engagement, view and impression targets, the more that platforms, publishers and agencies are incentivized to give you the biggest figures.
In 2022 Elon Musk made ‘views’ the primary public metric for posts on X. We estimate the ratio of views to real people on X (or any social channel) as 10:1, but media regularly cite the number as if it were 1:1.
As soon as one platform switches its focus to a new bigger number for creators, advertisers and investors, the others fall in. Meta followed on Threads in May 2024 and Instagram in August 2024. It’s a 20-year regression akin to considering ‘hits’ on webservers to be a primary currency.
Secondly, this lust for big numbers – particularly anything percentage-based like ROAS (return on ad spend) or engagement rate – has put blinkers on the way sports organizations commonly approach marketing and content.
The incentive is only ever to narrow your focus; target the people who are most likely to convert or react, avoid ‘wasting’ reach on people who might not interact and thus drive those rates down.
The inevitable outcome is a neglect of activity which isn’t easily measurable: brand-building, fan affinity and positive sentiment. The trend we observe regularly at sports clubs and leagues is one where short-term conversion needs (eg selling tickets for a game that takes place in 10 days’ time) take precedence over long-term community-building.
An unvirtuous cycle of filling the stands by any means possible, at the expense of communicating why new audiences should enjoy the event. In 2025 we see that behavior starting to turn, with this focus on short-term numbers being disrupted by greater emphasis on building sustainable communities.
The classic marketing funnel – from awareness to consideration to conversion to advocacy – has been on shaky ground since the advent of the internet and near-unlimited consumer choice of product. Digital purchase flows are messy, with users flitting between discovery and research and price-checking and reviews.
A fascinating piece of research into Gen Z online behaviors shows the process getting messier still, where people can reach the advocacy stage without ever having spent any money with a brand. Those users might make zero measurable contribution to return on investment (ROI), but the impact they have on word of mouth and peer influence is still of high value.
Instead, the report’s author Archrival describe “an infinite loop of inspiration, exploration, community and loyalty”. You cannot win without addressing each of those areas.
There will never not be a place for big numbers; we may have all spent years predicting that “sponsors will get smarter about data” but that has not been widely realized yet in sports. Even if everyone in the room knows the big number has little real meaning, that number probably still played a big role in getting into the room in the first place.
Seen through the lens of this infinite loop, the real value of content is less in the view count and more in meeting inspiration and exploration needs. Communicate the experience, show why it’s good and create demand.
Number disruption means acknowledging the value of small; work that perhaps only directly engages dozens or hundreds of people at a time but has a massively outsized impact on sustainable brand growth. Community is a mix of online spaces – Reddit, Discord and owned forums – and offline events. Convincing (say) 1,000 people to take part in any of those is a laudable feat.
The reason there’s an outsized impact is that these numbers merely appear small because only the tip of the iceberg is visibly measured. The 1% rule holds that 99% of online community users only view (‘lurk) and don’t post content, so rather than a 10:1 impressions-to-people ratio, we have a 1:99 creator-to-viewer scale.
The primary implication here is clear: sports organizations have to break the week-to-week cycle of only looking to the next game. By all means keep that work going, but invest in staff or agency capacity that can work on mid- and long-term projects. Alternatively, reduce the pressure on hitting short-term targets.
Good revenue and profit numbers – the actual important ones – will come from having a great core product proposition and communicating that effectively. That means placing more emphasis on impacts that you cannot immediately track, and we believe the trend moving forwards for the successful sports organizations will be an increased investment in brand and community, to give substance to the reach they already enjoy.