NFL Games' Ratings Have Crashed. Now the Media Has to Pay Out Money to Advertisers to Make Up for Not Delivering the Promised Ratings.

When you buy ads on TV, the tv station quotes you a price with a certain guaranteed minimum of a rating. If the show the station sold advertising for fails to make that guaranteed minimum rating, the station has to make the ad-buyer whole through "make-goods." Usually just giving the advertiser free ads on other shows to make good for the promised, but undelivered, ratings.

Usually. The networks don't want to actually return the filthy money they've collected.

But this year, they have to do just that.

Because NFL ratings are garbage.

Networks are "scrambling" to make up for NFL games failing to deliver the contractual minimum ratings.

TV networks are feeling the strains of disappointing NFL ratings, as they are forced to restructure deals with advertisers to make up for the smaller audience, and their opportunity to make money off remaining games during the lucrative holiday season narrows.

...

Some networks also have considered letting advertisers pay less for commercials during NFL games and other programming than they originally pledged.

Meanwhile, a large amount of the remaining commercial time available in games is being given to marketers as compensation for the underperformance so far, leaving little ad time that can be sold in the final quarter of the season. Such so-called make-good commercials are given if a network underdelivers on the audience it promised an advertiser.

...

Adding to the challenge is that while sports ratings are down, entertainment programming is experiencing far greater declines, which means networks often can't make up for the sports shortfalls by putting advertisers into their prime-time schedules

LOL. Die media, die.

This is a hopeful sign, I think: People are trapped in their homes more than ever, but they're tuning out not just woke sports but TV in general.

They must be doing something with their time.

And pretty much anything they do with their time besides consuming Literal Programming is an improvement.

Maybe it's possible that we'll get a two-fer -- both the death of the media, and (coincidentally enough!) a rebirth of the human spirit.

The article blames the NFL's woes on everything they can think of, from the 2020 election supposedly stealing viewers from the NFL, to games being rescheduled at viewer-unfriendly times due to covid.

Only once does it mention the "backlash" of yet another megacorporation turning itself into a leftist political agitation frontgroup.

"Even as surefire as the NFL has been--and the last couple years, NFL ratings stood up much better than network prime-time ratings--we are now in a situation where the NFL is declining," said Gibbs Haljun, investment lead at WPP PLC ad-buying firm Mindshare.

Beautiful.

Get woke, go broke.

Republicans buy sneakers too.

But we don't have to.

Death to the media. Death to #Woke corporations.

posted by Ace at 03:21 PM

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