USA-based PGAT fans and media constantly use Nielson ratings to gauge if you are “successful” or not. The number one-use stat against LIV isn’t even about the way the players compete… it’s about a rating system developed in the 1950s. Viewership wars have become a weekly Tuesday/Wednesday event as many Twitter accounts and golf fans wait to see if their side “won” the fight. The problem is the old rating system doesn’t encompass every form of viewing sports these days and more importantly it doesn’t cover the globe.
The Evolution of Viewership
Roughly ten years ago The Masters introduced a huge development in how we as fans can consume the golf tournament. They put more cameras on a golf course than ever before, they created a website full of feeds and custom capabilities that allowed the fans to watch 5/10/15 players on different screens all at the same time. This, however, was via the internet. Like everything in life today the internet is constantly changing how we live our lives and how we consume everything we enjoy. The Master’s like normal, was way ahead of the pack in this realm.
Before the split in golf, their website was lauded for the amazing delivery of golf viewing and to add to the offering… limited commercials. Following a long history of bad press with women opposing the very existence of Augusta National Golf Club and its “unwritten” policies of no women allowed. They eased the pressure of corporate America and their involvement with The Masters by saying “We don’t need commercials” and by reducing the sponsorship to almost nothing it greatly improved the product. So, we have two major important experiences born from The Masters. Now, limited commercial golf viewing, and fans can see every golf shot. Critical in understanding how golf fans consume the product.
Who is Watching What?
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So, who is really watching? And what are they watching? And more importantly, between the two feuding golf leagues is… HOW are they watching it? Here in the USA the biggest biased delivery of “ratings” is based on cable, Nielsen Ratings, the traditional form of turning on your local national broadcast network (still viewable via free antennas put out by the government) and seeing that last hour on Sunday wherever the PGAT is that week. This, however, doesn’t even come close to indicating who is and who is not watching.
Mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and computers exist on a much more massive level than the classic living room television. At this stage, we can connect with the PGAT in at least two or three different ways via apps and websites. LIV as well as connected with Google and other partners to deliver online viewership as its main feed. They took what The Masters developed and adopted it and more. They are continuing every week to find new ways to add to their delivery as well. However, this viewership is not counted each week and this viewership is still yet to be figured out how to be measured properly as well.
Streaming and Advertisement Effect on Viewership
LIV also has partnered with groups like Movistar and Caffeine and other global companies that bring multiple types of viewership capabilities to people in countries all around the world. LIV also has its own LIV Plus app, YouTube, and CW and CW+. Most of the eyes watching LIV can’t even be accounted for in a way that tells us anything both good and bad. But what we do know is there are many ways to watch if you want to.
So, this week the API returned a 38% decrease in viewership, or so it’s stated online by Sports Media Watch among other sources using Neilson ratings or what seems to be that classic system of USA, cable, TV living room viewing measures. So again, the question is who is watching what? Critics of LIV will say “subs” to a YouTube feed defines the LIV tour viewership and that it is way down for a start-up league in year 2… meanwhile a tour that has monopolized the sport for nearly 100 years has a consistent decrease in viewership for yet another week with the API… I don’t think any of these specific measures accurately reflect who is watching what.
What about the on-demand recorders? What about the replay people online? How about the VPNs protecting streamers? Unless we get a global system in place that also somehow measures streaming viewership then we don’t know who is watching what.