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Message: [QUOTE="kyleslamb, post: 1221834, member: 2505"] Eh, the math suggests it's actually very attainable with proper marketing and quality content. You're forgetting that currently there's a middle man on advertising dollars: the networks. If the leagues went to a direct-to-consumer model where they produced their own subscriber network, all those advertising dollars would go straight to them on top of the fractional portion of folks that are paying a monthly subscription to access the network. The major leagues are currently bringing in, what, $250 million in media revenue? Heck, that's a piece of cake. Let's just take your 10% of those watching sports at face value, as that is a pretty reasonable estimate; With 120 million households, that gives us roughly 12 million potential subscribers. Split that into five major leagues for simplicity, you're looking at about 2.4 million (though the Big Ten and SEC would obviously have more than the Big 12, for example). Also, though, we should assume some of those 12 million are hardcore fans that would subscribe to multiple channels. Let's round it off to an even 2.5 million, shall we? To reach $250 million a year, a network would only need to charge $8.33 a month. But that's without ANY advertising factored in. At $5 cpm, which is pretty small for sports programming, the league network could yield $5,000-10,000 apiece for some 90+ 30-second spots that happen in a college football game. That's about a half million in revenue or more per game (the actual networks are bringing in much, much more than that because of higher ratings, so I'm being conservative). For some 100 games in a year, plus all the other basketball, baseball, hockey, recruiting, etc. inventory, they could crack $100 million in ad revenue alone. That means a subscription model could supplement the cable-based model by charging about $5/mo. It wouldn't be easy, but the idea that leagues could supplement media revenue with a subscription model isn't pie in the sky, either. [/QUOTE]

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