The Rise of Micro-Sports
One more wacky jetlagged-induced idea and then back to your regularly scheduled stream of programmer consciousness. I was thinking about capital efficiency (as discussed in the Flight of the Startup, which I can’t link to because I haven’t typed it in yet–coming real soon) and bull riding.
My mid-teen daughter has become, um…, interested in professional bull riding (PBR). She’s a big fan. Suddenly. A big fan. Did I mention big?
What enables professional bull riding, for decades a tiny sport (on the US scale), to suddenly reach out to a potential fan in rural southern Oregon? Capital efficiency. The same capital efficiency that lets a bazillion web startups bloom.
Sport
Sports work through projection. I watch “my” team and “my” player and safely feel a range of emotions. That experience is worth money to me, either actively in the form of tickets and t-shirts of passively in the form of my woozy attention to beer ads. For sport to work, though, fans have to “get to know” the athletes enough to begin projecting.
Ten years ago, if you were in Boston and you wanted to feel connected to a Red Sox player, the newspapers delivered that service. There was an inverse square law of fandom at work, though, that made the likelihood of your being interested in the Sox drop off dramatically with distance (with the exception of childhood infection by parents, which ought to be a matter for international law). Once you’d crossed the local newspaper event horizon, you just weren’t likely to be a fan. Because there are a lot of people in Boston, there were enough fans to pay enough salaries to attract enough more athletes and so the cycle went.
Back in the day bull riding was strictly local. You’d go to your local rodeo once a year, spend a few dollars, and that was it. The pool of capital available wasn’t large enough to expand the sport further. Along came the capital efficiency of social networking and the decapitalization of video. Social networking lets my daughter “get to know” the top bull riders, to care about their injuries (holy cow, if you don’t mind me saying so, there are some gruesome injuries), and follow their seasons and careers. The decapitalization of video (by which I mean bull riding can get some video of various qualities out to fans for much, much less than we previously possible) enhances this experience.
Virality amplifies these effects. She tells her friends about the cool rides she’s seen. Suddenly they are watching too, and (here’s the magic capital efficiency part) PBR didn’t have to spend one dime for that spread. Think about the all the money the NBA spends on their ads to try to whip fans into a higher frenzy. PBR doesn’t need to do that. Capital efficiency.
Micro-Sports
Sports are a classic rich-get-richer world. The big sports make the most money, money attracts the best athletes, athletes create spectacle, spectacle draws fans, fans spend money. Internationally this means we have football (soccer for us ‘Mericans) and everything else. The size of sports worldwide must follow a power law distribution (can someone confirm this?).
What the new era of capital efficiency means is that the sports in the long tail now have a business model. Yes football (the internationally accepted kind) will grow bigger, but a bunch of hitherto fringe sports, interesting only in local areas, will also have a sustainable professional model. It’ll be the sports that capitalize (sorry about that) on capital efficiency that will move up the league table (again, sorry).
Big sports will be put at risk by this shift. Some of the fringe sports will gather enough momentum to begin taking capital away from the large sports. No matter how big you are, you can’t outspend an exponent. Not forever. Big sports that cling to the old capital intensive models (broadcast advertising and exclusive broadcast TV), won’t be able to compete with a little sport that knows how to use 10 fans to gather 100 fans at little additional cost. In the classic way of the world, though, the dinosaur sports won’t know what hit them until the pieces of asteroid start bonking them on the head.
P.S.
The video that introduces this piece is a beautiful ride, but no viewing of PBR would be complete without an absolute train wreck, the kind that says, “No, I really couldn’t ever ever do that. Ouch. But cool!” Here you go:
So, simply put, the long tail applies to sports too?
The long tail has always existed for sports. There is a step function for a sport when it has a sustainable professional model. Capital efficiency means that many more sports can take that step. They can overcome geography or the size of the fan base to become businesses and finance further growth.
Kent your post is interesting. Capital efficiency…I had not thought of that.
Here are a few thoughts on PBR itself from what I know.
The PBR is not really all that old (~15yrs) and was started with just what it is doing in mind. There is still the PRCA bull riding at your rodeos but PBR is an event in itself. My daughter got hooked watching it on TV in around
2001. Even then PBR had events all across the country … in almost every state. We took her to three events here in New Mexico but then she grew tired of it. I do miss the event myself. She knew the bulls and riders by name and her favorite at the time was Tater Porter. She still has a Dillinger stuff animal from one event.
They targeted Bull Riding only and took it to a new level. The bulls and riders are generally better than at the PRCA and that was by design. They are the best of the best. They advertise it to a wider audience than the PRCA too. Their intent was to take it to a higher level and spread it all over the country and make it nationally known. Plus there are now riders from Australia and South America that are regulars on the PBR including several who are PBR world champs. In many ways it is not a big surprise since they are doing what they set out to do.
Bull riding, to me, is the most exciting part of rodeo and I guess Tuff Hederman and others thought so too. Thus the PBR.
“That guy right there, he’s built Ford tough.” Awesome. I think I might be hooked too!