With the calendar turning over to 2025, Barrett Media is sitting down with some of the best and brightest media researchers in the industry for a weeklong series, “Digging Through Data.” In the second installment of the series, we spoke with Katie Miller and Sean Bos of Harker Bos Group and Crowd React Media.
Crowd React Media shares a State of Sports Media study each year. And according to Bos, the founder of Crowd React Media and Vice President of Branding and Research for Harker Bos Group, the year was unprecedented in one aspect of the sports television world.
“Cord cutting, I think, reached a level that it hadn’t before in 2024,” said Bos. “Streaming became the preferred option for sports fans to watch their favorite sports, and I think that was a result of the carrier disputes between DISH and Charter, and people wanting to watch SEC games, essentially, meant more than any kind of loyalty to cable or anything like that.”
Katie Miller, the Vice President of Client Relations at Harker Bos Group, added that cable television saw an 11% decline in total viewing among sports fans during 2024.
That begs the question: Are television rights holders putting games on streaming services because that is where the audience now resides, or are the audiences now shifting to streaming because that is where their favorite teams and sports are being broadcast.
“I think it’s a mix of both,” said Bos. “You saw the major streamers hoover up these just incredibly expensive sports right packages in order to stay competitive in the streaming space, because a lot of people already have these subscriptions, to say, Amazon or Netflix. And I really do think that the carriage disputes between Charter, DISH, and Spectrum really contributed to moving over.
“I think (sports fans) already exist within that digital ecosystem. And I think that’s just where the audiences are now. To be honest with you, cable still exists, in my opinion, because they still have rights to certain leagues and games. And I think once you pull that cord, then it’s not a very rosy out outlook for cable in the long term.”
Additionally, there was another big shift in the podcasting realm in 2024, with users now accessing their favorite content on YouTube more than in audio-only forms.
“We saw that over half of podcast audiences are watching podcasts at least some of the time,” said Miller. “This idea that podcasts are an audio format is very, very untrue. More than half of people are at least watching them some of the time. At least a third prefer video podcasts as well.”
The high usage of YouTube, not just for podcasters, but in every sector of media was on display in the research shown by Harker Bos Group and Crowd React Media in 2024.
“In general, we see the dominance of YouTube everywhere. Every single media platform is being dwarfed by YouTube,” Miller shared, saying every single study the companies produce — from the State of Media, the State of Sports Media, and the State of Spanish Language Media, shows YouTube continues to be a digital media behemoth.
“And so the way that we kind of relate that back to our clients is that the algorithms of YouTube make it really easy for TV news stations or radio stations to be found by new audiences,” she continued. “YouTube has this really great algorithm. That’s what keeps driving people back there. So we would recommend some sort of YouTube presence to help new audience members find you and direct people back to the main platform. If you are a TV news or radio station, always have a YouTube presence … Everyone is there.”
Sean Bos added that the format utilized by many YouTube content creators became “mainstream” in recent years.
“You see that in shows like Pat McAfee, where you have this YouTube atmosphere in regards to production, the rapport between the various guests and whatnot,” he said of the ESPN program. “And, basically, legacy media ported that over into their own from the YouTube sphere into their own productions.”
When asked what Harker Bos Group and Crowd React Media will investigate more in 2025, Bos said there were two answers. One, is what the profitability for music sources like Spotify and Apple Music looks like.
“Everyone and their mom has a Spotify or Apple Music account,” Bos said with a chuckle. “Where are the growth strategies? Are they price hikes? Are people going to pay for that? I just don’t know where that industry is going, to be honest with you.”
The other involves a changing landscape in the video space.
“Measurement currencies. What’s going to happen to those? Will Nielsen remain the default measurement currency?” Bos questioned. “You see, increasingly, that these streamers aren’t really willing to give out their numbers initially, and when they do, it’s often different than what Nielsen is reporting. That became apparent last year and I think it’ll become even more apparent this year.”
Katie Miller added that a change is likely on the horizon for streaming platforms like Netflix, who will shift away from releasing its quarterly subscriber counts and will be more interested in releasing just how much revenue the company generated from its ad-supported tier.
“You don’t need to release your quarterly subscriber numbers when advertising revenue matters most,” she concluded.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
