Major League Baseball is making some decent money online these days thanks to MLBAM, a digital business it started a few years back. (Most people just call it “BAM”).
Newsweek published a good piece recently about this business. Read it here.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Growing at a rate of roughly 30 percent a year, BAM now takes in about $400 million in revenue. Going by its logs, it entertains more than 50 million visitors a month, putting it close to the top 100 sites of any kind. By the end of the season, more than a million subscribers will pay for its media offerings, including video content of all out-of-market games at $99 to $120 a season and audio broadcasts for $20 a season. More than a billion minutes of baseball will flow from its servers. It sells more than $80 million in merchandise, ranging from hats and jerseys to authenticated relics like signed baseballs and bases. (In the 24 hours after Boston became champs in 2004, the site sold $5 million worth of Red Sox gear.) BAM processes a third of the 75 million tickets sold for major-league parks, and resells at premium prices the ducats that season-ticket holders want to offload. It also employs a team of journalists who cover each team—”we had to make sure our reporters were independent,” says BAM’s content czar Dinn Mann—and hosts hundreds of blogs written by players, celebrities and fans. One of the fastest-growing revenue streams is advertising, now bringing in 15 percent of the total. And more than a million wireless subscribers get mobile updates, ringtones and cell-phone wallpaper.
Thanks to PaidContent for the tip.
It’s ironic that the NFL is just now considering similar centralization of the league / team Web assets given the fact that MLBAM initiative started over 5 years ago, and has all along cited the NFL revenue sharing strategy as its inspiration. It will be interesting to see how the new NFL.COM team in LA positions itself with the 32 owners as it looks to grow the league’s digital business.
Even more ironic, the MLBAM model is much like NFL’s historic 1961 pact to distribute national TV revenue.
When will the Colts and NFL start making some serious money on the web?
Paul - If you roll up all of the NFL digital media revenue it might be more. By the way what is “serious money” money to you?
Serious money, to me, would be annual revenues somewhere between MySpace’s $3.95 per unique user and Google’s $40 per unique user, See Morgan Stanley research: http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/Webtwopto2006.pdf