Co-founder, Golf Space Collective. Sharing thoughts on Golf Marketing + Building a Startup. Former @pgatour brand marketer and content guy.
Jacksonville Beach, FL
Joined April 2009
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More people did not watch the Internet Invitational than the Masters.
The two numbers going around are measuring completely different things.
The 16 million is YouTube views for two episodes.
The 14 million is the average CBS audience on Masters Sunday. Putting them side by side doesn't tell you much.
Here's how silly it gets.
If I watch the Invitational on YouTube, my view counts. If I watch every shot of Rory's final round on the Masters' YouTube channel, I don't show up in that comparison at all.
Barstool Sports reported 16 million combined YouTube views for the first two episodes.
YouTube counts a public view as soon as a long-form video starts playing. Autoplay included.
Say I watch five minutes of each episode over lunch, and you watch both start to finish. We each put two views on the board, even though you gave it hours more of your time.
The nearly 14 million viewers CBS reported for Masters Sunday is a different kind of number. That's the average minute of a roughly five-hour broadcast. More than 20 million were watching when Rory won.
And that doesn't count the rest of Masters week. For example: we tracked roughly 25 million Instagram plays on Justin Thomas' Par 3 Contest ace and another 21 million on the reel of every shot of Rory's final round: just two videos!
Keep counting and you’re looking at billions of views across Masters owned channels. That's not 46 million unique people, but it shows how much you leave out when you stop counting at CBS.
The Invitational has numbers that are impressive on their own too. Last year, the organizers reported an average view duration of more than 43 minutes. That's a lot of people sticking around. I’d focus on that vs the 16 million number.
Both of these are big. They just measure completely different things.
Views, average audience, plays, watch time. Each one tells you something real. None of them translate one-for-one into another.
So when someone puts 16 million next to 14 million and tells you they're the same thing, they're missing the whole point.
And I wouldn't trust them to explain reach or audience to you anytime soon.
Barstool and Bob Does Sports built something golf fans spend serious time watching. That's a hell of a story without the comparison.
I see that @instagram decided to turn the story ads dial up to 10.
2-3 organic stories followed by at least two story ads right now.
What a fantastic user experience. 🙄
Do we have more economic freedom/opportunities/ways to make money?
Yes.
Too bad inflation has wiped out those gains for the vast majority of people under ~45-50.
Eternally grateful for @RazorbackFB hiring Silverfield so that @MemphisFB could get a real coach.
The difference this year is wild under Huff. So fun to watch a well coached team
Team golf does a great job exposing the reality of professional golf:
EVERYONE, literally every pro (especially anyone remotely close to qualifying for these events), is insanely good.
The difference between the 250th player in the world and the 10th is wildly small.
Over 72 holes, the better ranked golfer usually wins.
Hell, even in a 36 hole match play setting like USGA Championships, the better ranked golfer wins overwhelmingly.
18 holes in a team setting on a course that neither side has any experience on?
It’s far more wide open than people think.
Curious what people think.
Would you rather have a tour player with 2M followers who mentions your brand twice a year, or 200k who genuinely plays your product and says so unprompted?
I know my answer. I am more interested in whether the brand side agrees.
Most golf sponsorships are priced on exposure and renewed on relationships.
Neither of those is value.
Built a six month social review for a tour player broken out by sponsor. Per-partner, not aggregate.
It made some partnerships look worse. That was the point.
Naming the underperforming one is what makes the strong numbers believable.
If a partnership cannot fail, it also cannot succeed. It can only continue.
Write the failure condition into the deal. Most uncomfortable slide in the deck and the most valuable.
We launched a top player's account from zero and the hardest part was not the content.
It was convincing everyone that the account should sound like her and not like a brand safety document.
Personality is not a risk to manage. It is the asset you are paying for.
Athlete social gets sanded down by committee.
Agent wants one thing. Sponsors want another. The tour has guidelines. What comes out is technically compliant and completely forgettable.
Sponsors keep buying golfers by follower count and keep being disappointed. The two facts are related.
Follower count tells you how many people could see something. It tells you nothing about whether they will do anything, and in golf the gap between those numbers is enormous.
A player with 200,000 engaged followers who genuinely uses your product will out-convert a player with two million who mentions you in a swipe-up twice a year. Every time. It is not close.
This keeps happening because follower count is easy to put in a deck and relevance is not.
So build the harder deck. Engagement by post type. Audience overlap with your actual buyer. How the athlete talks when nobody is paying them to talk.
The partnerships that work are the ones you could have guessed before they were announced.
Golf properties are storytelling machines that have never been asked a question.
We spent a full day at a private club just walking the grounds with the people who work there. Every usable idea in the final cut came from that day. None were in the brief.
The best thing about golf's shoulder season is that players will actually talk to you.
Same person, same question, October versus May. Completely different answer.
Access is not a credential. It is a calendar.
Tournament week and the best content on my timeline is a caddie's phone video from a range session.
Zero production value. More engagement than anything the broadcast put out today.
Access beats budget. It is not close.