Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah I am not sure about the NFL being the biggest in the world, but I got a bit of a laugh out of eSports being more relevant. People forget eSports is decades old now at this point, and the pinnacle of the eSports world is Korea where it has just now caught up to even challenge traditional sports such as Soccer. In America, there is still a way's to go.

"Activate (www.activate.com) projects that in the United States eSports will have more viewers than every professional sports league but the NFL by 2021" and will need to more than double viewership to topple the NFL.

And if you consider "traditional sports" holistically like they are treating "eSports" it is more fair to consider NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS viewership together, of which have large non-overlapping segments, then the gap becomes more of a chasm.

Riot released viewership total for the Worlds finals a couple months ago, and viewership in NA was significantly down than the previous year. In fact in almost every eSport viewership figure, if you discount Chinese and Korean viewership, the rest is almost insignificant -- an MLB playoff game attracts more viewers. I will say we are in the twilight years of the NFL, but what is more likely is that another physical sport topples the NFL throne rather than an eSport.

Unannotated numbers and trends don't tell you much when you're talking about this sort of demographic. I'd have to see a cumulative flow diagram showing breakdown by age range over time to have a shot at having an intelligent conversation about this.

Products that are associated with a certain age group by dint of biology (eg, bifocals) will constantly see an influx of new customers, so you just have to project population distributions.

I don't think people 'find football' when they get older. It was a thing when they were a kid, maybe they have watched the whole time, or maybe in a fit of nostalgia they're back. If the latter is a phenomenon, then high school and college football are your gateway to keeping the numbers up (and haven't they, or at least colleges, imposed tougher concussion guidelines?), otherwise the fanbase may be shrinking even though the graph says things are looking up.

> I'd have to see a cumulative flow diagram showing breakdown by age range over time to have a shot at having an intelligent conversation about this

You have a very high standard for having intelligent conversations, then. Sometimes the data you ask is not easily obtainable, behind paywalls, or just not presented uniformly. How about some good old fashioned "good faith"? Let's assume that both parties in this argument are indifferent to being right, but trying to sort out to find the truth of the matter, and they aren't pulling numbers out of their ass, how does that sound?

> I don't think people 'find football' when they get older.

I admit this is probably not the best metric, but a frequent viewer of /r/nfl and the various team based subreddits at least hints that the opposite is true: many people are finding football later in life.

Another thing left out of this conversation all together is the NFL's focus on expanding internationally -- particularly the UK and Mexico. Viewership in London especially continues to rise Y.O.Y, and the NFL has been floating the serious idea of a London based team for a few years now, and I fully expect that to happen within the next couple of years.

What's better: 15 million viewers 17 days a year or 300k viewers 365 days a year?

1 viewer who gets the channel anyway and has social pressure to watch, or 1 viewer who goes out of his way to pay to watch something on his own?

I think there is far more nuance to trendiness than the story told by a Nielson Rating System calculated decades ago.

What eSport gets 300k viewers 365 days a year?

Maybe apples and oranges. Only 2 football teams get 15 million viewers one Sunday a year and it's a good bet it won't be the same two next year. As a national advertiser that's a big deal but if you've been supporting that team all year it's not as big of a benefit to you, and if you've been supporting a team that didn't go then it's less than useless.

For football, you have English Premier League games, La Liga games, Italian Premier League games, etc, etc...

And at least EPL is watched all across the Europe, from Spain to Russia. For multinational advertisers, football is a boon, esports is not in a same league (pun intended).

Does a youtube channel count? Eyeballs mean very little if youtube payrates are to be believed.

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