No, I Don't Care That NBA Viewership is Down. Neither Should You.

Vol. #002

"Is the NBA overvalued right now?"

I get this question constantly and it’s a a fair concern. Every day brings news about franchise sales, complaints about load management, or statistics about declining basketball viewership.

This is noise. When you're investing on a 10+ year timeline, signals matter more than noise.

As an investor, my signals are trends that promise growth, engagement, and value. NBA viewership data isn't a warning sign—it's an invitation to reconsider what fan engagement looks like in 2025.

With the 2024-25 season officially behind us, lets take a deep dive into what’s going on with the National Basketball Association.

Linear Viewership has Found its Floor

Traditional TV viewership has collapsed everywhere. NBA, MLB, and college football ratings have dropped 40%+ since 2011. Even the NFL declined. Why? Total TV users fell by half in the past decade.

Recent data suggests that NBA viewership remains stable: Since 2022, the league has maintained a ~2.5% audience share of primetime TV. As seen on the chart below, the 2011-12 NBA season averaged 2.5M nightly viewers from a 112M primetime audience (2.2% share), which is lower than today's percentage! The NBA hasn't lost popularity—it's found its core linear TV audience.

Putting context behind declining NBA viewership

Those "lost" fans didn't disappear. They found a new home, digital.

Digital Engagement Is Exploding

The numbers are staggering:

• NBA social media views: 83.5 billion this season (up 161% since 2022)

• One Ja Morant highlight: 161 million views in 24 hours

• Audience demographics: 50%+ under 25, 70% international

To frame how massive the league's reach is: MrBeast, YouTube's biggest individual creator, has ~87 billion total views across his entire Youtube career. The NBA nearly matched that in one season.

That's not decline. That's transformation.

The Parity Revolution

Digital engagement isn't the only way the NBA is positioning itself for global dominance. Oklahoma City's championship makes seven different winners in seven consecutive years, officially the longest parity streak in NBA history.

Photo creds to Boardroom

This matters because parity was the NFL's secret weapon. While the NBA and MLB have seen multiple decades dominated by large market clubs, the NFL's "any given Sunday" competitive balance kept every fanbase engaged. Now the NBA has achieved that same parity while growing something the NFL lacks: global digital appeal.

The NFL dominates domestically but struggles internationally. The NBA has cracked the code on both competitive balance and global reach. Young international fans can watch highlights instantly, follow multiple competitive teams, and engage with a sport where a small local market doesn’t leave a franchise forsaken to lose for decades.

Even the league's individual stars reflect this global shift: not only have the past 7 years crowned a different championship winner, but the league MVP for each of those years was born outside of the US. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada) joins a recent run of international MVPs that the NFL will never replicate.

Photo creds to KirkGoldsberry

This evolution of the NBA is crucial because it's taking the best parts of American sports and positioning them for a global audience that consumes content completely differently than previous generations.

The 11-Year Window

The NBA is now locked into its media rights deal through 2036 at $6.9B annually. This is far more than a revenue bump, it's an 11-year runway to solve the hardest problem in modern media.

Previously, media rights represented 24% of NBA revenue at $2.6B annually. The new deal fundamentally changes the league's revenue structure to look much more like the crown jewel of professional sports, the NFL. This creates both an attractive floor and ceiling:

Data Provided by Sportico

The Floor: Even if no other revenue grows, the NBA now has NFL-quality revenue stability with guaranteed, long-term broadcast income forming the foundation.

The Ceiling: If the NBA successfully grows other revenue categories over these 11 years, media rights become a smaller percentage of a much larger total revenue pie.

The challenge is execution. Right now, platforms like TikTok and Instagram capture most of the value from those 83.5 billion NBA views. The league gets brand exposure but limited direct revenue. That's a real challenge and a massive opportunity.

With broadcast revenue secured for over a decade, the NBA has unprecedented time and financial stability to experiment, fail, learn, and ultimately crack the code on digital monetization. No other major sports league has this combination of massive digital engagement and long-term revenue security.

Why This Matters Now

Smart money recognizes transitions before they're obvious. The NBA's digital transformation follows a pattern we've seen across industries:

1. Traditional metrics decline

2. Market panics about "death of the industry"

3. Digital engagement explodes

4. New monetization models emerge (← We are here)

5. Investors capture outsized returns

The question isn't whether digital engagement can be monetized—Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok proved that. The question is whether the NBA can build the infrastructure to capture value from their massive digital audience while maintaining the stability that comes from locked-in broadcast deals.

The Thesis

Three reasons the NBA is undervalued:

Scale: 83.5 billion social views represent the largest sports audience in history

Demographics: Young, digitally native fans who consume content differently than previous generations

Time: An 11-year media rights deal provides the runway to experiment and develop new revenue models without financial pressure

Bottom Line

Forget Nielsen ratings. The NBA sits on the largest, most engaged digital sports audience ever assembled. They have 11 years of guaranteed revenue to figure out how to monetize it directly.

Traditional TV viewership declining does not represent the demise of the NBA, it's the beginning of a bigger one where the league controls more of its own economic destiny.

The market is pricing the NBA like a declining traditional media property. It should be pricing it like a digital transformation story with a guaranteed revenue floor.

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This is Former Benchwarmer, where I break down the business side of sports from an investor's perspective. Views expressed are my own and do not represent those of 776 or its affiliates.