Remember when the SEC started the SEC Championship game in the early 90s? Their were attendance problems, and critics of the game. Now it’s arguably the biggest college football event played outside of the BCS group of games. Some might say it’s bigger than some of the BCS games as it plays to huge ratings and a sold out Georgia Dome each year. Remember when the Big 10 started the Big 10 network? There were critics questioning the startup costs, and the distribution potential of such a network. Now it’s college athletics biggest cash cow.
There’s always risk to think outside the box, but if you are right the pay off is tremendous, even if the results aren’t apparent for a few years. The ACC may be on to such an idea of their own. It’s the ACC Digital network. I’ve written before how the ACC’s Digital Network may eventually may play a pivotal role in the ACC’s abilty to start a new Television network, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. We are strictly talking about online content.
About 6 weeks ago a report released with little fanfare detailed how the ACC’s Digital Network would expand to reach 300 Million Devices. Not long ago I got a BlueRay player for my birthday, and on it I have the ACC’s Digital Network, right there for viewing on my television. So what does this all mean? Is anybody watching? Fortunately for us gathering online statistics on site visits and views is much easier to obtain than television ratings.
For a basis of comparison let’s use the student population of each of the major conferences, the ACC, SEC, Pac 12, Big 10, and Big 12 as they exist in their current form. This isn’t a perfect analysis of these conferences fanbases as we understand that several SEC schools for example have tremendous walk fan support, but that is what we’ll go with for now. We’ll also only go with current members, so schools like Pitt and Syracuse aren’t yet included for the ACC.
Big 10 ~434,000
SEC ~425,000
Pac 12 ~414,000
ACC ~289,000
Big 12 ~230,000
Here the ACC ranks 4th in school populations just ahead of the 10 team Big 12. The reason we haven’t included Pitt, Syracuse, and Notre Dame yet is because we want to look at online viewership up to this point.
By just going to YouTube, you can check each conference online viewership by page views on their respective Online Digital Networks.
ACC Digital Network – 4,238,061 views 5,024 Subscribers
Big 10 Network – 3,645,477 views 2,763 Subscribers
SEC Digital Network – 3,320,081 views 4,549 Subscribers
Big 12 Digital Network – 714,060 views 836 Subscribers
Pac 12 Network – 496,870 views 1,673 Subscribers
Interesting, now the ACC does have the most videos to view, but isn’t that kind of the point? Content to view? Let’s use another metric for the ACC’s online viewership.
Alexa.com is regarded as one of the top traffic ranking websites out there. How do they rank the conferences official sites by traffic on March 30th 2013?
SECDigitalnetwork.com – 121,115
So the conference with the 2nd smallest student population has by at least 2 significant metrics the highest online viewership? When it comes down to it, most people are wondering ok great numbers but how much money does it generate? The ACC’s digital network has only been around since the Fall of 2011, but take a look at this article from 2011 from sports business daily with the ACC Digital Network announcement.
From that article…
“Initial distribution of the network will be focused on TheACC.com, but the long-term plan calls for its content to go to Internet TV outlets, such as Roku or Netflix, and syndication into other websites, such as newspaper sites that could embed an ACC Digital Network player in its ACC stories”
It seems the ACC is right on schedule as we saw with the recent 300 Million device announcement.
I have not seen any hard revenue projections, but there are already corporate sponsorship in place from the likes Ruby Tuesday for example. I won’t speculate on revenue projections, because well I hate baseless guesses. There’s been far too much of that in the last year, but unless you’ve lived under a rock in the internet age you know primarily online content sites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook are worth billions. I’m not predicting that in anyway. Obviously sites like those reach an audience far greater than just college sports fans, but you get the picture.
There’s is some potential there and the ACC appears to be leading the way with online and mobile device content.
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