Ben Gilbert

It's a percentage basis, yeah.

Right.

So in that respect, it's fair.

But it is quite clever to have gotten off the TikTok cycle of, you know, having the players have a bunch of leverage after seeing what the media deal looks like and doing it in this order.

The other thing that I've been sort of charting is the media deals go up dramatically in value, but the average viewers kind of stays the same.

Like in 2002, the kickoff game had about 20 million people watch and it rose and it was in the mid 20s and then it dipped back down below 20.

And last year, about 20 million people watched the kickoff game.

Yeah.

So why is it that the media rights are worth so much more when the number of audience impressions stays the same?

I'm curious where your head is on that.

I have some theories, but on a CPM basis, it seems like the advertisers are all just paying more money now, or at least the TV networks believe that they can make more money from something, and so they're willing to pay more for the rights.

Yep.

I think that's definitely part of it.

Another argument would be, well, they're finding a way to put more ad slots into the same amount of media.

But that's not true.

They've actually held flat or in some cases even decreased the number of commercials over the last 15 years in NFL broadcasts.

So you're thinking, okay, the audience size is about the same.

The number of ad slots is about the same.

So what else could be going on here?

I think part of it is you're right, is that the networks are quickly getting into a place where they're like, we don't really have any other content that people want to watch.