Score! How the NFL-YouTube Romance is Moving into Overtime
Forget Tayvis: The league + creators have hot chemistry as the fight for younger audiences, WAGS and football-as-lifestyle brand become a big $ win-win
I write about content creators, digital platforms and the $250B global industry they power. I earlier covered the intersection of entertainment and tech at Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter and Business Insider. Email me tips, story ideas and memes you can’t keep to yourself at natalie@theankler.com
On the Saturday night before the Super Bowl, a crowd gathered at New Orleans’ Ernest N. Morial Convention Center for a contest with way lower stakes than the Big Game, but no shortage of intrigue. The Super Bowl LIX Flag Football Game pitted teams of creators, professional athletes and musicians against each other in a battle that was mostly about bragging rights (and the opportunity to donate $200,000 to some worthy causes).
I attended the game and the energy was high, from fans eager for face time with their favorite creators to the roster of celebrities in attendance, both on and off the field. But the game wasn’t really designed for us spectators — because there was no announcer explaining the action on the field, it took a minute for me to even realize that Team Speed, which was captained by iShowSpeed and quarterbacked by former NFLer Cam Newton, had won. It was more about the millions of people watching at home on YouTube.
The NFL and YouTube haven’t announced official viewership numbers yet, but the live stream on Speed’s channel notched more than 2.6 million total views. (The game also streamed live from the NFL’s YouTube channel, which has 14.1 million subscribers.)
These aren’t Super Bowl numbers — 127.7 million viewers watched Sunday’s game even though the Philadelphia Eagles dominated the Kansas City Chiefs — but they represent an opportunity to capture a younger demo that’s priceless to sports leagues like the NFL. Take Speed: 80 percent of his audience (he has 36 million YouTube subscribers) is under the age of 25, his communications strategist Rico Ripoly tells me.
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In recent years a handful of studies suggested that Gen Z doesn’t care that much about the NFL. But the league told CNBC ahead of the Super Bowl that viewership and engagement among Gens Z and Alpha have steadily grown over the last three years and are now at a record high. No wonder creators were front and center this weekend, from Alex Cooper’s Unwell party in New Orleans to Alix Earle’s Carl’s Jr. commercial (that’s in addition to her Poppi spot I wrote about last week) to Snapchat’s partnership with the NFL to bring Katie Austin, Ross Smith, Jack Mancuso and Treasure Wilson to the game.
“The NFL has done as good of a job as any league in the world at widening the tent and signaling to their next generation of fans that they are welcome,” Ripoly says. The flag football showdown — featuring Olympian Jordan Chiles, rappers Quavo and Sexxy Red and singer Tayana Taylor alongside Speed and opposing team captain Kai Cenat — “shows how they really have their finger on the pulse of culture.”
Today I’ll share more of what I learned about YouTube’s tightening ties with the NFL and its growing hold on the culture thanks to young subscribers. You’ll learn:
How the NFL-YouTube relationship began and is deepening
What the partnership is doing to help players build creator careers
What YouTube wants to do with WAGs (wives and girlfriends) beyond Kylie Kelce
Which top creators from realms outside of sports headed to New Orleans and why
More ways the NFL and YouTube plan to grow the reach of football
What the Sunday Ticket package has to do with all of it
I also have a bonus section on the top rising TikTokers with the strongest ties to Hollywood.
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