Billythekid
First Grade
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- 6,828
It's a bit of a myth that crowds aren't important for the NRL or clubs in terms of revenue. Let's do a quick comparison with our direct rival.
The AFL season attendance was around 6.7 million. The NRL's around 2.9 million. A difference of 3.8 million. Let's say the average ticket price was $20 per ticket. That would equate to 76 million dollars worth of revenue per year. Just ticket sales, that's ignoring any other potential benefits from bigger crowds.
Over a 5 year period that's 380 million dollars. Hardly chump change when you consider the total TV deal is worth 2 billion dollars.
Obviously that's incredibly simplified but my point is crowd revenue is hardly irrelevant.
I'm sure if you compare the average revenue of an AFL club vs an NRL club you'd see just how much difference crowd revenue makes.
A few things here. Firstly you're comparing sports of different scales. Fact is there is a limit to how much money you can make from crowds because realistically stadiums only reach a certain size. So whether you're a sport with a market of 1 billion people or a sport with a market of 1 million people you can still really only average an absolute maximum of around 100K (depends how big your stadium is).
TV revenue on the other hand isn't capped like that because you can have as many people that are interested watching. So basically the bigger the sport the bigger the gap is going to be between how much they make from crowds and TV.
Basically percentage wise smaller comps have more to gain from crowd revenue.
Let's do some quick googling and numbers. The NFL averages around 15 million TV viewers per game and around 70K spectators per game.
Let's be generous and say the average NRL game averages 500K on TV. That's 1/30th of the NFL. Our crowds on the other hand are between 1/5th or 1/4 of their crowds. There is only so much you can make up for this by increasing ticket prices.
The NRL has more to gain from big crowds than the NFL simply because of the difference in scale.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Our direct competitor seems to be able to rate just as well as us without having to sacrifice crowds. If anything I'd argue that bigger crowds would only lead to bigger ratings due to it improving the product on TV.
The AFL season attendance was around 6.7 million. The NRL's around 2.9 million. A difference of 3.8 million. Let's say the average ticket price was $20 per ticket. That would equate to 76 million dollars worth of revenue per year. Just ticket sales, that's ignoring any other potential benefits from bigger crowds.
Over a 5 year period that's 380 million dollars. Hardly chump change when you consider the total TV deal is worth 2 billion dollars.
Obviously that's incredibly simplified but my point is crowd revenue is hardly irrelevant.
I'm sure if you compare the average revenue of an AFL club vs an NRL club you'd see just how much difference crowd revenue makes.
A few things here. Firstly you're comparing sports of different scales. Fact is there is a limit to how much money you can make from crowds because realistically stadiums only reach a certain size. So whether you're a sport with a market of 1 billion people or a sport with a market of 1 million people you can still really only average an absolute maximum of around 100K (depends how big your stadium is).
TV revenue on the other hand isn't capped like that because you can have as many people that are interested watching. So basically the bigger the sport the bigger the gap is going to be between how much they make from crowds and TV.
Basically percentage wise smaller comps have more to gain from crowd revenue.
Let's do some quick googling and numbers. The NFL averages around 15 million TV viewers per game and around 70K spectators per game.
Let's be generous and say the average NRL game averages 500K on TV. That's 1/30th of the NFL. Our crowds on the other hand are between 1/5th or 1/4 of their crowds. There is only so much you can make up for this by increasing ticket prices.
The NRL has more to gain from big crowds than the NFL simply because of the difference in scale.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Our direct competitor seems to be able to rate just as well as us without having to sacrifice crowds. If anything I'd argue that bigger crowds would only lead to bigger ratings due to it improving the product on TV.
