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Did you know that…
…IndyCar gets better ratings than Formula 1 in the US?
…Formula 1’s global viewership is flat over the last three years?
…Three basketball games in the last ten days combined for better ratings than all of Formula 1 last year?
…Netflix sports docu-series have really low global ratings?
My guess is you didn’t know those things, because the narrative around Formula 1 remains exceedingly simple: Drive to Survive (not ESPN) made F1 wildly popular, in America and around the globe. You constantly read people writing this, including at least one ESPN reporter just two days ago!
So yes, today, I’m revisiting Formula 1 and Drive to Survive again, even though I’ve written about it before—most notably for the first time here—for a few reasons:
- It’s been a bit since we looked at F1, and we have a lot more ratings data to chew on, plus I’ve found even more data.
- Since I last wrote about this topic, Formula 1 ratings are flat or down. (And way lower and less popular than most people think.)
- One athlete in particular may be more popular than Formula 1 by herself (her name rhymes with Scaitlin Slark).
- And I have a bunch of strategy thoughts and takeaways.
But the main theme of this article is “overrated”. From Formula 1’s actual ratings to social media, so many things are over-hyped, over-stated, or over-attributed. As usual, moderation and nuance are key.
I decided to make today’s article free, so please share it far and wide. Seriously. If you read an uncritically positive Formula 1 article or read someone crediting Netflix and not ESPN/Liberty Media’s acquisition for Formula 1’s boost in popularity, feel free to pass this article along.
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Drive To Survive’s Impact on Formula 1’s Ratings is Really Overrated
To start, let’s clarify my thesis: I’m not saying that Drive to Survive had no impact on Formula 1’s popularity; I think its impact is over-stated and overrated.
Researching today’s post, I kept finding examples of people uncritically and credulously touting Drive to Survive’s impact again and again and again. And I mean a lot of people, like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And all of these links are from the last year! (I normally don’t like calling people out if I think they get something wrong, but I just needed to convey the scope of the problem today.) I could find dozen more honestly; these are just what I stumbled across researching today’s article.
Can you blame people for overrating the impact for Drive to Survive on Formula 1’s ratings?
A lot of these articles also come across as “strategic advice”. You know what’s really dangerous? Reading a simplified version of history and applying it to your company, without understanding the entire picture. When I wrote up my take on Marvel Studios struggles, I included a “blame pie” of all the factors causing the MCU’s slump. Well, let’s show the inverse, a “credit” pie for what factors deserve the credit for Formula 1’s recent viewership uptick, starting with the mainstream media/common wisdom version:
As I wrote for the Ankler a few years ago, multiple factors played into this rise. To show this, here’s the rise of Formula 1’s ratings, with multiple different factors highlighted on the timeline:
Again, the news coverage often only credits Drive to Survive, and almost no one credits or even mentions Formula 1’s move from NBC sports to ESPN. (Which obviously matters! It’s ESPN! It’s huge!) Or Liberty Media’s renewed push both in publicity and into America (including social media). Or Nielsen adding out-of-home viewership to their calculations.
Just look at that timeline! Drive to Survive came out two years before the F1 boom started. How can you say an event that started two years before had almost all the impact, but an event three years before (moving to ESPN) had none?
If I were to make a “credit pie”, it would look like this:
Strategic Takeaway: Distribution matters.
If you’re a sports league (or any media property), you have to choose where you spend your time, energy and money. My advice is to focus on finding the biggest, best distribution channel, then worry about social media or ancillary storytelling properties.
But What About That Morning Consult Poll? Or…Does Formula 1 Actually Have Over 70 Million Fans in America?
I’m going to do something few pundits/analysts do and share the best argument against me. If you read the above links or my Twitter replies, you’ll notice that many of them cite a Morning Consult poll that 30% of Formula 1 fans said that Drive to Survive was a “major reason” they became a fan. (That number dropped to 22% last year.)
What about that, EntStrategyGuy? Well, to start, look at my blame pie above. I give Drive to Survive about 25% of the credit! So yeah that sounds right! (According to that same poll, IndyCar is more popular than Formula 1 by one percentage point.)
Dig a bit deeper, though, and you remember this is also a poll. Polls can, you know, sometimes be misleading. Since they say that 29% of American adults are fans of Formula 1) and there’s over 250 million adult Americans, then there’s 72 million adult Formula 1 fans in America.
There aren’t 72 million adult F1 fans in America. Obviously.
If there were, honestly, we should be talking about how Formula 1 can’t get any of its fans to watch its races (which average 1.1 million weekly viewers and peaked at just under two million last year) and Netflix can’t get them to watch its TV show. Netflix’s PR folks told me that the latest season of Drive to Survive had 2.4 million views in America in the first month. Why are only 1/50th of their fans watching their product?
According to Nielsen, in 2021, Drive to Survive activated about 300K people to watch Formula 1 races the next year. And compared to the actual number of fans, that number seems right to me.
Strategic takeaway: Always check the details of polling. Beware of misleading statistics.
The Data: Formula 1 Isn’t Nearly as Popular in the US as You Think, Plus the Global Numbers Have Flatlined
Two factoids made me want to write about Formula 1 again. First, I’m just gobsmacked that IndyCar racing is actually more popular than Formula 1 in the US. Even though it’s on NBC. Even though its reality show was on the CW. (Fun fact: 100 Days to Indy’s first season just arrived on Netflix last week…) No one talks about IndyCar! I spend so much of time each week reading news articles/newsletters and doing research and tabulating ratings, but I don’t think I read a single article on IndyCar last year. And yet IndyCar literally has 300K more weekly viewers than Formula 1.
Now, some of this is due to better race times, since Formula 1 races take place all over the globe, which often means early Sunday mornings in America. Still, in terms of viewership, IndyCar outpaces Formula 1 despite airing on a much weaker distribution channel (NBC).
In fact, US motor sports ratings in 2023 look like this:
NASCAR does even better, averaging 2.8 million viewers per race. So far this year, NASCAR ratings are up 11% this year in 4 of its 5 races this year, while Formula 1’s first race of the year was down 40%. (To be fair, that race switched days due to Ramadan.) But the Australian Grand Prix was also down 3%. (In my blame pie above, I credit Nielsen’s recent measurement change for 10% of the ratings rise, which I wrote about more here. Almost all sports ratings are up since then.)
Here was the other fascinating factoid:
Formula 1’s global ratings are flat.
Back in 2021, Liberty Media proudly boasted that they averaged 70 million viewers per race, or 1.55 billion for the season. They repeated virtually the same stats in 2022. Then last year, they only mentioned 1.5 billion total viewers, a slight drop globally. And they didn’t mention the average viewership per race.
What about Drive to Survive? Same story: it’s not nearly as popular as you think, as I covered on Monday. But looking globally, the story is even worse: ratings are down 30% year-over-year. According to Netflix’s December data drop (which covered all Netflix viewership in the first half of 2023), the fifth season of Drive to Survive garnered a paltry 90 million hours globally, 114th overall, and only about 13.4 million “views”, or a fifth of regular Formula 1’s weekly global viewers. Other sports docu-series actually did much worse; this genre is really overrated on a global viewing basis.
Also, Hulu released its own Formula 1 documentary last year, Brawn: The Impossible Story and it never made any ratings charts I track.
What about races? By all accounts, the races in Miami and Austin have done well in terms of ticket sales, but Liberty Media has placed a big bet on Las Vegas. As I wrote before:
“This matters. Liberty Media reportedly spent a half billion dollars on the race on the Las Vegas strip. And how were local business owners rewarded for this? With half-empty hotels, during a week that’s normally really busy, and the tickets for the event got marked down by 60%.”
We’ll see if things turn around, but if the Las Vegas Grand Prix (which sounds like a huge pain to construct) doesn’t result in lucrative hotel room sales, this race isn’t going to last very long.
Despite the relentless hype and media coverage, Formula 1 is still a niche sport in the US right now.
Strategic Takeaway: Know your customers and serve them.
Liberty Media is an American company, and I think they’re focused on America; the US now has three races, when most countries only have one. Has that American push come at the expense of global viewership? Liberty Media’s push into the US hasn’t made it more popular globally, as ratings are flat (or may be down!).
Maybe it makes sense financially to focus on America, since the US is richer than many other countries, but it’s a risky game, especially if it angers the core audience. And I fear that that’s exactly what’s happening with Liberty Media and Formula 1 right now.
Does Storytelling Matter…or Stars?
Do you want to know what an actual sports rating phenomenon looks like? It’s Caitlin Clark.
Literally, Caitlin Clark is more popular than Formula 1. Nielsen estimated over 44.4 million viewers watched her last three games this past week or so. 18 million people watched the NCAA final game midday Sunday. 14.2 million watched Iowa defeat UConn the Friday before that. And the previous Monday, Iowa-LSU had 12.2 million viewers.
That’s more than Formula 1 had all last year. (24 races that averaged 1.1 million viewers.)
After a certain point, I start feeling like “Entertainment Obvious Guy” pointing out obvious things like “In sports, stars matter”, but then you read really, really well-respected analysts/lifelong NBA fans (who should know what Magic/Bird, then MJ did for the NBA in terms of popularity) writing think pieces about what the NBA needs to learn from Formula 1.
But as Caitlin Clark shows, one lesson is pretty simple: you need stars. Like Caitlin Clark. She’s a star.
As Morning Consult hinted at (without sharing the actual data) no Formula 1 drivers have majority name recognition in the US in spite of a sports docu-series that most people in media think is really popular and a massive social media presence.
Strategic Takeaway: Stars matter (more than storytelling).
Are Formula 1 and Liberty Media Too Focused on Social Media?
Yes.
I know this because, year after year, the Formula 1 CEO Stefan Domenicali brags about their social media presence. Like in 2022, “F1 was once again the fastest-growing major sport league on the planet in 2022 in terms of social media followers. We had 60.6 million total followers, up 23% from 2021…” and 2023, they got up to 70 million. But looking at the actual TV ratings, those social media followers aren’t translating into more viewers.
As I always remind people, social media isn’t real life. Many Americans don’t use social media, or they use it much, much less than most knowledge workers (or people in the media) think they do. Or they use it differently. For example, Facebook is way more popular than Twitter, but what social media platform do most sports leagues and sports reporters care about?
More precisely, social media is really overrated in terms of either its reach or popularity. Many numbers on social media platforms are exaggerated, sometimes by ten times as many viewers or followers. And social media users are also really hard to convert into actual consumers. Also, I think people discount social media’s ability to celebrate, then ditch fads…did Formula 1 build a fanbase or did it create a fad?
Strategic Takeaway: Social media isn’t as important as you think.
This isn’t saying companies shouldn’t have a presence on social media, but when social media engagement becomes either the key metric or the sole strategic focus, entertainment companies can get in trouble. (Ironically, based on what article I read, Formula 1 should have learned this from the NBA.)
Why This Happens
Listen, I get why reporters repeat the “Drive to Survive/F1 success” narrative. If you’re a busy reporter, and you constantly read other people/experts/pundits saying Drive to Survive made Formula 1 popular, you’re going to believe them. And probably don’t have time to fact check it. And you don’t want to buck consensus. Or undercut the impact of your article. That’s exactly what happened here. Again and again.
Plus people love the idea that “storytelling” drives success. And reporters love big tech/new tech. Saying ESPN, a massive sports distribution channel, helped boost the ratings just isn’t sexy or fun or new. (And reporters sort of instinctively distrust them, since they’re powerful.)
Finally, it’s increasingly hard for people to separate out what their friends believe versus the rest of the country, especially for the very-online. (H/T Nate Silver who wrote something similar last week.) And this applies to journalists. There’s a social media to news story pipeline people don’t talk about enough, since so many reporters spend all day on social, the news coverage winds up offering a distorted view of the world. Like how many very-online reporters think Formula 1 is really popular—too many reporters spend all day on Twitter and I don’t doubt that Formula 1 is popular on Twitter—so they write articles about Formula 1 but don’t end up writing about IndyCar racing. In the end, the average news consumer gets a distorted view of the world.
Fun side note: Formula 1 TV rights are up again this year, and Formula 1 wants even more money this go around. Disney allegedly paid between $75 to $90 million for Formula 1 last time. Will Disney/ESPN pay more? For context, ESPN renewed all NCAA playoff rights, excluding football and men’s basketball, for $115 million a year.
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