By David Dembowski

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the StreamTV Conference in Denver about a shift that’s reshaping not only sports, but the entire media industry: the rise of the Audience Economy. It’s a framework that changes how organizations think about growth, monetization, and long-term fan engagement. But what exactly is the Audience Economy, and why does it matter?

To answer that, let’s start at the beginning. Sports organizations already possess something most businesses would kill for: highly engaged audiences that return week after week, season after season. But the rules have changed for how value is created from that audience. It’s no longer about rights. It’s about monetizing the relationship around an audience economy.

The Rules Have Changed

For decades, the sports ecosystem ran on a simple arrangement. Teams and leagues created the content, broadcasters distributed it and sold the advertising, and fans watched. The rights fee sitting in the middle was the entire business model, and broadcasters, not teams, owned the relationship with the fan.

That model started to crack as cord cutting accelerated, regional sports networks came under financial pressure, and viewing fragmented across linear television, streaming apps, social platforms, FAST channels, and mobile devices.

Sports did not lose value. More than 90 million Americans now stream sports monthly, up from 57 million in 2021. What changed is the mechanism for turning that demand into revenue, and streaming platforms changed it from two directions at once. Teams and leagues moved games onto platforms they own instead of routing them through a broadcast partner. At the same time, streaming gave sports media companies the same opening: the ability to build a direct-to-consumer product instead of just licensing and reselling broadcast rights. Either path gave an organization something a broadcast relationship rarely provided: the ability to see directly who is watching, how often, and how that engagement turns into revenue. That visibility is what makes the audience economy possible.

Own the Relationship, Not Just the Rights

The audience economy is a business model built on owning the fan relationship directly, rather than selling access to content and handing that relationship to a broadcaster or platform in the middle.

A direct relationship works differently. Every stream, registration, ticket purchase, and merchandise order adds to what an organization knows about a fan, and that knowledge is worth more the longer the relationship lasts. Success is measured by how much value an organization creates from each of those viewers, not necessarily by how many people watched.

The audience economy is unfolding one organization at a time. ESPN’s direct-to-consumer launch is an early proof point. The service added roughly 3 million subscribers in its first ten weeks, built around an app where fans can bet, shop, manage fantasy lineups, and watch multiple games at once without leaving ESPN’s platform. Fans who use those interactive features during a live game watch roughly twice as long as fans who do not, and every one of those interactions produces first-party data ESPN can use to improve targeting and sponsorship performance over time.

The organizations that succeed will do more than create great content. They will have the best monetization strategy that turns engagement into subscriptions, subscriptions into advertising opportunities, and advertising opportunities into sponsorship value.

The Indiana Fever and Pacers Sports & Entertainment embraced the audience economy with the Fieldhouse Media Network, launched in March 2026. The network extends sponsor reach across more than 500 premium digital publishers, connected TV, email, and SMS, targeting fans based on real-time behavior across the open web rather than the team’s own app or arena. A Caitlin Clark fan who clicks a story about her on ESPN or Sports Illustrated can see an ad from Lexus, a PS&E sponsor, without ever visiting the Pacers app. The model turns a first-party fan relationship into a commercially addressable audience that follows fans wherever they consume content.

Who Wins in the Audience Economy

Sports IP owners, meaning leagues, teams, federations, and tournament organizers, generated an estimated $174 billion in aggregate revenue in 2025. Growth from here comes from extracting more revenue out of the audience an organization already has, not from capturing a bigger one.

Most sports organizations and media companies are sitting on valuable audiences and first-party data, but they are still monetizing that audience through the same campaign-and-inventory systems built for the old rights model. Platforms like YouTube and Meta operate differently. They extract value from nearly every interaction a user has, whether that user realizes it or not. That is the mindset shift the sports media business needs, and it requires Audience, Intelligence, and Monetization working together as one system.

• Audience means unifying fan data across every platform so that an organization actually knows the value of its audience.
• Intelligence means putting AI inside the decisions that set pricing, allocate inventory, and target sponsorships, not just displaying data on a dashboard.
• Monetization means executing across every revenue channel at once, from subscriptions to advertising to sponsorship to commerce.

Most organizations have built one or two of these pieces. Very few have connected all three into a single system.

Monetization Is the Deciding Factor

For years, success in sports media came down to creating great content. Do that, and a bigger audience and more valuable rights would follow. But sports rights costs have grown more than five times faster than television revenue over the past decade, and content and customer acquisition costs keep rising alongside them. Creating attention is only half the job now.

The organizations that succeed will do more than create great content. They will have the best monetization strategy that turns engagement into subscriptions, subscriptions into advertising opportunities, and advertising opportunities into sponsorship value. Content still wins fans. Monetization is what turns that attention into a sustainable business, and that is what wins in the audience economy.

For a closer look at the audience economy framework and how sports organizations are putting it into practice, download our eBook, From Rights Fees to Revenue Engines.