YouTube has made a significant investment in the NFL to enhance its subscriber base, with content creators playing a crucial role in this strategy.
Following YouTube’s commitment of $2 billion annually to secure the rights for NFL Sunday Ticket, YouTube TV saw its subscriber count increase from 5 million in 2022 to over 8 million this year.
The involvement of prominent YouTube creators in promoting NFL Sunday Ticket has driven substantial engagement among millions of users, according to the NFL.
Christian Oestlien, YouTube TV’s vice president of product management, stated, “We can bring together people’s favorite creators with a lot of what you might traditionally associate with TV around professional sports and the NFL.
Bringing those two worlds together is letting us really open up the NFL to a whole new generation of fans.”
A subscription to YouTube TV costs $73 per month, with an additional annual fee of $349 for NFL Sunday Ticket access.
YouTube TV has engaged well-known YouTube personalities, including lifestyle creators, vloggers, and sports content creators, to attract new audiences to the NFL.
These creators attended NFL games during the first season of the partnership and produced content and collaborated with advertisers to boost engagement.
In response, the NFL has introduced various YouTube shows, such as “Creator of the Week,” to highlight creators on the sidelines
. These YouTube Shorts have featured personalities like Sean Evans, host of the Hot Ones interview show, and Ninja, a prominent professional Battle Royale player and streamer.
This approach, termed a “helmets off strategy,” aims to broaden the content related to the football season.
Ian Trombetta, NFL senior vice president of social, influencer, and content marketing, remarked, “It’s another way for us to extend our messaging and, more, the lifestyle around football. So many new fans are coming in, not just in the U.S., but globally.”
According to Nielsen, YouTube accounted for 8.5% of total TV watch time in December, surpassing other major streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+.
Despite a decline in viewership on YouTube last year, media expert Tom Rogers, executive chairman of gaming content sharing platform Oorbit, noted that a significant portion of live TV streaming growth in the last quarter was attributed to YouTube TV.
Rogers highlighted that the offering of Sunday Ticket was a key advantage during that period.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of YouTube’s parent company Alphabet, commented during an interview on Thursday,
“NFL Sunday Ticket gives us a great way to work with a very good partner with very valuable content and see how it works. So far it has been great, but we will have a disciplined ROI [return on investment] framework.”
Attracting new, younger fans has been a major focus. One of the NFL’s prominent creator partnerships is with Donald De La Haye, known as Deestroying, a sports creator with over 12 million followers across platforms.
De La Haye has recently signed with the United Football League to play for the San Antonio Brahmas.
“It’s bringing new audiences to the game that’s so amazing that I love so much,” said De La Haye. “It’s just helping build that audience and making everybody a fan of the game.”
Lifestyle creator Pierson Wodzynski, who has 24 million followers but had not previously engaged with sports content, became part of YouTube’s NFL strategy by documenting her journey using various forms of transportation to attend a San Francisco 49ers game. The video garnered 1.4 million views.
De La Haye, Wodzynski, and Sean Evans will feature in a YouTube TV ad set to air during the Super Bowl. The partnerships with creators have been effective in capturing a younger demographic.
“I don’t think the NFL could have created the ratings surge they achieved this season without younger audiences showing up,” said Rogers.
“We know it is very hard to reach younger audiences through TV marketing because they watch comparatively less, so I suspect the league’s use of influencers was very important to ratings.”
These collaborations have also increased NFL content beyond the field.
Influencers like Alix Earle and Kristin Juszczyk, who are romantically linked to NFL players, went viral this season by sharing their game-day experiences.
Juszczyk gained further attention for creating custom game-day outfits, which were worn by pop icon Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes, wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Swift also made a significant impact on social media this season with posts about her relationship with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Travis Kelce and his brother Jason, a center for the Philadelphia Eagles, host a podcast called New Heights on YouTube, which has accumulated over 670 million views.
Angela Courtin, YouTube’s global head of brand marketing, highlighted that the strategy with content creators this season aimed to involve a wide range of audiences in every aspect of the NFL experience.
“I have to say these creators are equal if not better than any other channel that I would use in my immediate plan,” Courtin said. “They exceeded our ROI benchmarks so much that we’ll be supercharging them next season.”
