200 million fewer viewers for F1
Bernie Ecclestone has publicly acknowledged that F1 has lost almost a third of its worldwide television audience in seven years, or 200 million viewers.
The economic model of F1 for decades was based on broadcasting races to a very large global audience, which allowed for attracting companies eager to expose themselves to the largest possible audience.
Nevertheless, for several years now, the FOM and its pension fund shareholders have decided to change this model by gradually abandoning free-to-air channels in favor of paid channels. The reason is that the latter are the only ones able to meet ever-increasing financial demands, as they rely on this exclusive content to justify the subscription price charged to their customers. This is how Sky obtained the broadcasting exclusivity in the United Kingdom starting in 2019.
Today, during a speech at the European Advertising Conference, Bernie Ecclestone acknowledged that the shift to pay-per-view channels had a significant impact on the sport’s television ratings: while the global audience was 600 million viewers in 2008, it dropped to 400 million last season.
We must not forget that the FOM only counts legal broadcasts in its official data and does not account for all illegal streaming on the Internet, which has multiplied in recent years in countries where F1 is no longer free.
On the other hand, the F1’s chief financial officer acknowledged his mistake regarding social media, to which he was long opposed because he didn’t see the benefit for sponsors involved in F1: “I couldn’t understand. People were telling me, ‘That’s what kids do,’ and I replied, ‘Kids don’t buy the products our sponsors sell. It doesn’t help us.’ That’s what I thought, but I was educated. I realize how important it is. I didn’t see at the time how what I was being told could help Formula One.”
The numbers now put forward by the FOM seem to have made him change his mind. Thus, the organization claims that F1 generated over a billion impressions and reached 21.5 million people on Facebook while getting 10.5 million views for its videos.
However, even though he claims to now want to support social media as much as possible, he has not recently reprimanded Lewis Hamilton regarding his content sharing on his Snapchat profile.
With the participation of www.racingbusiness.fr
