How NASCAR’s $7.7 billion media rights deal aims to modernize sport
11/16/2024 19:18
NASCAR signed a historic media rights extension last year worth $7.7 billion over seven years. The deal provides inventory to four broadcasters who will split 38 races across their channels each year starting with the 2025 season.
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Joey Logano lifted the trophy in Phoenix this past weekend, winning his third NASCAR Championship in the last six years after beating his teammate Ryan Blaney by just 0.330 seconds.
And while many fans plead with NASCAR to change the playoff format that allowed a driver with just one win in the regular season to take home a championship, America’s most popular and profitable racing series has its sights set on the future.
NASCAR signed a historic media rights extension last year worth $7.7 billion over seven years. The deal provides inventory to four broadcasters — Fox (FOX), NBC (CMCSA), Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), and Amazon (AMZN) — who will split 38 races across their channels each year starting with the 2025 season.
”When we were having discussions about the deal itself, we made a big deal about promotion, and [Amazon] told us that they were going to treat us at the level of the NFL,” NASCAR president Steve Phelps said on Yahoo Finance Sports Report. “And that’s saying something. I think they’ve had tremendous success, and the growth that they’ve had with Thursday Night Football has been extraordinary.”
The deal kicks in after a somewhat tumultuous year for the sport.
The 2024 NASCAR season was a slog, both on and off the track. Rain at the season-opening Daytona 500 pushed NASCAR’s most popular race from Sunday to Monday, resulting in a 27% drop in viewership right out of the gate. Things got worse when a handful of NASCAR’s other most popular races — Coca-Cola 600, Clash at the Coliseum, Chicago Street Race — saw double-digit viewership declines due to rain.
Add in a lawsuit from the sport’s most popular owner, Michael Jordan of 23XI Racing, and it would be fair to assume that NASCAR’s leadership lost some sleep this year.
But while there undoubtedly were some challenging moments, NASCAR fought back throughout its 36-race schedule to quietly put up a very good season.
NASCAR races averaged 2.892 million viewers this year. That’s a respectable 1% increase year over year, considering how things started in Daytona, and it means NASCAR is still roughly 2.5 times bigger than Formula 1 in the United States.
NASCAR also continued to attract blue-chip sponsors, bringing in $362 million in sponsorship revenue this year through deals with a host of publicly traded companies, including Goodyear (GT), Xfinity (CMCSA), Chevrolet (GM), Toyota (TM), Coca-Cola (KO), Ford (F), and GEICO.
NASCAR has only four sponsorship deals with companies based outside the US right now, but the company will look to change that as it hosts the first-ever Cup Series race in Mexico City next year.
And NASCAR’s new TV deal will likely help — as long as more viewers can follow along.
There are some concerns that fans may struggle with discoverability, as NASCAR races will now be broadcast across five different platforms — including a mix of broadcast, cable, and streaming. Nevertheless, NASCAR felt comfortable with the deal because it secured the company a near-35% increase in media rights, and it also convinced the new media companies to cross-promote races that appear on other channels.
“We believe that our fanbase will migrate to Amazon Prime,” NASCAR’s Phelps said. “We’ve got well into the 70s the percentage of NASCAR fans who have Amazon Prime. So that, to me, bodes well, and I think we’re going to prove that streaming will be an important element for NASCAR racing well into the future.”
The $7.7 billion media rights deal is part of NASCAR’s overall push to modernize the sport. NASCAR recently renewed its Netflix series, "NASCAR: Full Speed," for a second season after data revealed it was bringing in a younger, more female audience, and the sport’s leadership team invested $53 million to open a new production facility.
These investments have already paid dividends for NASCAR, both domestically and internationally. The sport held races in 12 countries on three different continents in 2024. NASCAR is now broadcast in 185 countries and territories worldwide, reaching over 500 million households, and a mix of more innovative formats (Chicago Street Race) and host cities (Mexico City) should continue to push the sport to new heights.
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