Dave Finocchio isn’t buying some of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments from last month’s Facebook Q1 earnings call. Zuckerberg commented that securing sports rights wasn’t a “long-term goal,” but the Bleacher Report Founder and Chief Executive Officer said on the SportTechie Podcast that he took the remarks “at kind of face value.”
“Oh, I think that all of the players in that space, regardless of what they say publicly, are interested in live sports and recognize the value of live sports,” said Finocchio when asked by host Bram Weinstein about Zuckerberg’s statements, which included the Facebook executive saying that the company is more interested in a revenue share model around video.
“At the same time, if you look at an Amazon for example and if they buy live sports rights and they’re exclusive and you have to become an Amazon Prime subscriber in order to consume those rights, they’re pretty good at converting people from that stage to ordering toilet paper from them until the end of time. Amazon is super interesting because they can justify paying higher costs. Their lifetime value of a consumer is very, very high, and I think higher than anyone else in the space. They’re a really, really interesting company to watch as they’re kind of dipping their toe into sports a little bit with the Thursday Night Football package that they’ve acquired.”
It was reported in April that Amazon paid $50 million for a 10-game Thursday Night Football live streaming package this fall while during the 2016 campaign, Twitter spent just $10 million for the same number of regular season games.
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Finocchio added that when current sports rights deals expire in the 2021 to 2025 window — with NBC, ABC/ESPN, FOX, Turner/TNT and CBS all vying for the same content — that’s when fans will “see some things really play out” on the digital front as sports properties continue to parcel out their rights.
“Anything between now and then, you’ll hear a lot people deny deny deny, but we’ll find out what everyone’s real intentions are kind of in that type of time frame,” he said.
During the podcast, Weinstein also asked Finocchio who outside of Bleacher Report impressed him from a new content creation standpoint. His answer? Digital media company and still a new player to the sports industry as a whole, Barstool Sports.
“I don’t mean their content specifically but just in general, those guys have built an audience, and it’s not a huge audience, but they’ve still built an audience of incredibly engaged people who will really follow them anywhere,” Finocchio said. “I think one of the cool things about brand building in social and digital is you’re getting to the point where now you can do various things as extensions of your brand that are experiential…and you can get people to buy tickets or you can get them to show up here or there.
“I have a great deal of admiration for what that team has created from just a loyalty and stickiness standpoint.”