YouTube Sports Channels

Consumers of sports programming are seeking out online video for a number of reasons. Whether they’re looking for Web gems, using videos to find a community, or sharing tastes, these consumers are more likely to visit YouTube than any other online video-sharing site, as shown by the graph below. (YouTube accounts for more than 96% of all videos shown by Google.)

Among sports properties, there is no clear winner in the battle for online video supremacy. Last month, I wrote about Nike and adidas in the online video world, but these aren’t the major sports properties on YouTube. On the contrary, while the Nike Soccer channel boasts 286,000 views and adidas “It Takes 5ive” channel can claim 413,000 views, the NBA channel on YouTube leads the pack with 2.7 million views.

I’ve created a chart with a sampling of sports properties and their respective rankings on YouTube. Some sports properties have no official presence on YouTube, such as Major League Baseball and NASCAR, while some (like the NFL) have made a disappointing effort.

A YouTube channel is a centralized location where other users can see a user’s videos, favorites, bulletins, comments, subscribers and video log. In the case of these sports properties, a YouTube channel is similar to a Web site or a social networking profile page. The sports properties use these landing pages to direct viewers back to their official homepages (“Visit NBA.com for over 15,000 videos”) and to help promote a campaign (“Help decide which NFL player story should be made into a Super Bowl commercial”).

And while the skeptic might point out that none of the 2008 Super Bowl ads pointed to their social media presences on YouTube, the number of Americans viewing online video is encouraging (research indicates that 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com in January). In a market where grabbing a consumer’s attention seems ever more difficult, these numbers are worth a second look.

Facebook Applications

Sports marketers use the popular networking site, Facebook, to promote events, market leagues, advertise media outlets, and generate excitement about sports properties. And while not all sports entities have created a presence on Facebook, those that have can claim real results for a minimal investment.

CBSSports.com has recently created the Official Tournament Brackets application. Roughly 500,000 users have uploaded this app, and most days nearly 5,000 of those users open the application to play around with it. This particular application lets users create a NCAA basketball tournament bracket, register themselves as fans of particular teams, and compare brackets against friends and other users for a chance to win $10,000.

Sports Illustrated has created a more modest application with roughly 10% as many users as the CBS sports app, which allows the user to choose favorite teams from the “Big Four” leagues plus NCAA basketball and football. It then spits out customized SI headlines for those teams.

A third, less-known company, Citizen Sports Network, has created dozens (possibly hundreds) of Facebook applications targeted uniquely to fans. Each page is a forum for fans of a team to congregate, discuss, and cheer with fellow supporters. Citizen Sports Network has highly-downloaded and viewed applications, with names like “Red Sox Nation” and “England Football.”

Many sports properties, such as Nike, haven’t necessarily created their own Facebook applications, yet still maintain a Facebook presence. A search for Nike applications, for example, yields a “Nike+ Running Monitor” app that lets users share Nike+ running progress with friends, and a few other applications designed independently from the company. Searches for “adidas” and “nfl” yield similar results.

Other sports properties have reserved the use of their name in the same way that someone might buy a domain name for future use. The difference with Facebook is that application names are free and must be at least 7 characters (thus “nike” would be unacceptable, but “niketennis” would work). Callaway Golf has reserved their name without actually creating an application, as have EA Sports and adidas. However, some companies have clearly failed to reserve the use of their names, as “IMGWorld” and “Daktronics” are still available for anyone to snatch up.

I reserved the use of some excellent application names that might someday have value just as domain names in the early 21st century came to be valuable. Perhaps years from now “icehockey,” “softball,” and “wrestling” will all be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if these names aren’t worth anything, it seems prudent for any corporation to grab up their own name. I just registered “NorthFace” and it didn’t cost me a penny.