The first World Cup I watched was Italy 1990. I was a kid in India. The matches kicked off after midnight, India time, and ran past 3am. I stayed up. I missed school. The day after the final on July 8, 1990 — Andreas Brehme, weaker foot, 85th minute — I did not show up for the first day at my new middle school. I have written about this before, so I will not belabor the personal part. The relevant fact for this essay is the next one.
I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since.
That is nine tournaments. Italy 1990. United States 1994. France 1998. Korea-Japan 2002. Germany 2006. South Africa 2010. Brazil 2014. Russia 2018. Qatar 2022. Somewhere on the order of five hundred and fifty matches (1990 and 1994 each ran 52 matches across 24 teams; 1998 onwards 64 matches across 32). All of them, live, in the middle of someone’s night.
Through those nine tournaments, the constant has been the magicians — and the moments that nine tournaments later I still cannot un-remember.
This essay is about both.
I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since.
The Maradona of 1990 was not the Maradona of 1986. The 1986 Maradona — the Hand of God, the Goal of the Century, all in the same quarter-final against England — was the most famous footballer who had ever lived, at the absolute height of his powers. The 1990 Maradona was already breaking down. Ankle-injured, surrounded by a poor Argentina side that lost its opening match to Cameroon 1-0 at the San Siro and scraped through the group in third place.
I will tell you what I remember. The round of 16, Argentina against Brazil, in Turin. A 1-0 game built on a Brazilian side that hit the post repeatedly and could not put the ball away. In the 80th minute, Maradona — being man-marked, with two more defenders nearby — picked up the ball at the halfway line, slalomed past four players, and slid it to Claudio Caniggia for the only goal of the match. It was a four-second sequence that held three men’s worth of work and one man’s worth of magic. Argentina won. Brazil went home.
That was the Maradona moment of 1990. He produced one. It got Argentina through to the next round. He was running on willpower. There were no others.
In the final at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, West Germany’s defender Guido Buchwald man-marked Maradona for ninety minutes. Brehme converted a late penalty with his theoretically weaker foot. West Germany 1, Argentina 0. At the final whistle, Maradona burst into tears. He blamed the referee. The cameras lingered. The whole stadium watched the magician cry.
That tournament holds the record for the lowest goals-per-game average in World Cup history — 2.21 across 52 matches — and is remembered by historians of the game as the most defensive, most negative World Cup that has been played. It is also, for me, the World Cup that recruited me to football for life. Some of that is a function of being twelve. Most of it is a function of Maradona, even past his peak, being a man who could turn a defensive 1-0 into a moment that survived its tournament.
Maradona died on November 25, 2020, at the age of 60, of cardiac arrest, while recovering from brain surgery for a blood clot. He was between two World Cups when he went — Russia 2018 was already in the books, Qatar 2022 was still two years away. I do not know how I was supposed to feel. I am still not sure I am over it.
The other side of the Stadio Olimpico that night was a German team that was, on paper, the best Germany had fielded in two decades. The captain was Lothar Matthäus, that year’s Ballon d’Or winner. The forwards were Rudi Völler and Jürgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann was 25, lean, two-footed, almost unfair in the air. He scored three goals in the tournament and was, alongside Matthäus, the structural spine of a team that dropped only two points in seven games.
The Klinsmann magic was different from the Maradona magic. Where Maradona’s was personal — the four-defender slalom, the ankle holding together by force of will — Klinsmann’s was structural. He did not run past four men. He arrived at exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and the ball arrived too. He was the kind of magician who made the magic look like the system, and made the system look like something inevitable. Germany, that summer, was inevitable.
There was also the joy of him. The diving celebration he made his signature in the years after — head-first, arms forward, sliding ten meters across the grass on his stomach — was a self-aware reference to the European reputation that German strikers dove. He turned the joke on himself, and on the system, and made it part of the iconography of ’90s football. The country that produced him is not, as a national stereotype, a joyful one. He was the joyful German. That, too, was a kind of magic.
I want to be careful here, because to say “Ronaldo” without qualification in 2026 is to invite an entirely different argument about an entirely different player. The Ronaldo I am talking about is Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, the original, the Fenômeno, the Brazilian who scored eight goals in the 2002 tournament and won the Golden Boot. There is a generation now that did not see him play, and I am sorry for them.
The 1998 Ronaldo was 21 years old and the best forward in the world by a margin so large the question was uninteresting. He carried Brazil to the final in Paris. And then, on the morning of the final against France, something went badly wrong in his hotel room. He convulsed. His body shook uncontrollably. He foamed at the mouth. His teammate Roberto Carlos was the one who first found him. He was taken to a hospital, given a clean bill of health, returned to the squad, and inserted into the starting lineup at the very last moment, against medical advice and against common sense. He was, on the pitch that night, a ghost of himself. France won 3-0. Zidane scored twice. We will get to Zidane.
The 2002 Ronaldo was a different man. He had spent four years rebuilding two destroyed knees. He had been written off, multiple times, by people whose job was to write off footballers. He came back. He scored eight goals — a tally that earned him the Golden Boot and tied him for the most goals in a World Cup since the 1970s. He scored both goals in the final against Germany. The first one was a poacher’s strike off a Rivaldo shot that Oliver Kahn parried straight at his feet. The second one was vintage — Ronaldo collecting a pass at the top of the box, taking one touch to set himself, and lashing the ball into the corner with the inside of his right foot. Brazil 2, Germany 0. Brazil won its fifth World Cup.
The 2002 final is the only World Cup final I have watched in which the winner was, transparently and unmistakably, the answer to a question the universe had owed someone for four years. It is also, as a matter of pure footballing skill, the cleanest performance by an out-and-out striker that I have ever seen in a final. Both things were true at once. That is rare. That is what I mean by magic.
Zinedine Zidane never quite fit the template of the magician. He was not fast. He did not score a lot. He did not slalom past four defenders. What he did was control the geometry of a football match for ninety minutes at a time, in a way that the people defending against him could feel but could not stop.
The 1998 final was the apotheosis. France against Brazil at the Stade de France. The Brazil that, twenty-four hours earlier, had received the first version of the Ronaldo news. Zidane scored two goals — both headers, both from corners — in the first half. France 2-0 at the break. Petit added a third in stoppage time. France 3, Brazil 0. A team that had never won a World Cup beat the team that was supposed to win every World Cup. Zidane scored two of the three goals with his head. He was historically not known for heading the ball, which made the moment funnier and stranger and more permanent.
The 2006 final was the other apotheosis, and the inverse of the first. France against Italy in Berlin. Zidane scored an audacious chipped penalty in the seventh minute. It hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced behind the line, and bounced out. He was thirty-four years old. He had announced before the tournament that this would be his last competitive match, win or lose. He played the entire game like a man who knew exactly how much was left. And then, in the 110th minute of the final — the second period of extra time, with the score 1-1 — Marco Materazzi said something to him about his sister, and Zidane turned around, and headbutted Materazzi in the chest, and was sent off, and walked past the World Cup trophy on his way to the tunnel without looking at it. Italy won on penalties.
It is one of the most studied moments in the history of the sport. There are essays about what Materazzi said. There are essays about whether Zidane regrets it. He has said he does and does not. The thing I keep coming back to is that the same player produced both finals — the one in 1998 in which he was the entire reason a country won a World Cup it had never won, and the one in 2006 in which he was the entire reason a country lost a World Cup it deserved to win. The same head. Eight years apart.
That, too, is the magic. The magic is not always good. The magic is a refusal to be a system.
The magicians produced moments. So did people who were not magicians. The most-remembered goals of the World Cup are a list that runs deeper than any list of players, because the World Cup is about the moment more than it is about the man — and the World Cup is the rare arena where a player who is otherwise a footnote can manufacture a moment that survives him.
Dennis Bergkamp, France 1998, 90th minute, against Argentina in Marseille. Frank de Boer hit a long, looping ball from inside his own half. Bergkamp ran underneath it, took it down with the outside of his right foot in a single touch that defied physics, took a second touch to push the ball past Roberto Ayala, and a third touch to lash it past the Argentine goalkeeper Carlos Roa. Three touches. Three different functions. One goal. Argentina out. The Dutch announcer, Jack van Gelder, screamed Bergkamp’s name three times in succession on a frequency that has not been heard since on Dutch television. There is no debate among football people about the technical content of that goal. It is the single best argument I know that a footballer can produce, in three seconds, a sequence that thirty years later still has not been bettered.
Roberto Baggio, USA 1994 final, penalty shootout against Brazil. Il Divin Codino — the Divine Ponytail — had carried Italy to the final almost single-handedly, scoring five goals on his way through the knockouts on legs that were visibly failing. Italy and Brazil drew 0-0 through 120 minutes. Penalties. Baresi missed. Massaro missed. With Italy needing Baggio to convert to keep the tournament alive, Il Divin Codino put the ball on the spot, ran up, and ballooned the kick over the bar. Brazil won its fourth World Cup. Baggio stood with his hands on his hips, head down, in the most-replayed image of footballing devastation that exists. He told an interviewer many years later, in a quote that is not embellished: “I failed that time, and it affected me for years.”
Saudi Arabia 2, Argentina 1, Qatar 2022. Group stage opener. Argentina entered the tournament on a 36-match unbeaten run dating back to 2019. The team had Lionel Messi at the height of his late career. Saudi Arabia’s lineup featured exactly zero players from a top-five European league. Argentina led 1-0 after a Messi penalty. In the second half, in the space of five minutes, Saleh Al-Shehri and Salem Al-Dawsari scored two of the most outrageous goals the tournament would produce. The Al-Dawsari goal in particular — a curled finish into the top corner from outside the box, off a touch he had no right to — would have been a Goal of the Tournament candidate even if the team scoring it had been Brazil. Argentina lost. The 36-match streak ended in 90 minutes. Gracenote later called it the most surprising result in World Cup history. Three weeks later, Argentina won the tournament.
Lionel Messi, Qatar 2022 final, against France. Messi scored. Di María scored. Argentina led 2-0 with ten minutes to go. Then Mbappé scored. Then Mbappé scored again, ninety seconds later, and the game went to extra time. Then Messi scored, in the 108th minute, and Argentina led 3-2. Then Mbappé scored a third, in the 118th minute, the second hat trick in a World Cup final in history. Penalty shootout. Argentina won. Messi, at thirty-five, on his fifth World Cup, lifted the trophy he had been chasing for almost two decades. The image of Messi being carried around the pitch on his teammates’ shoulders, holding a trophy he had spent his entire career being told he could not win, is the closest thing to an unmixed happy ending that the modern World Cup has produced.
These are five moments. There are fifty more I could list. The point is that the World Cup is the only sporting event that consistently produces moments at this density, with this much history attached to each one, in front of an audience this large. There is no equivalent in any other sport. That is why I have not missed a game.
The structural thing the World Cup does, that nothing else does, is that it lets a single moment in a single match become a permanent fixture of a billion people’s mental furniture. The Maradona slalom, the Bergkamp touch, Zidane’s headbutt, Baggio’s miss, the Al-Dawsari curler, the Messi lift — these are not local events. They are global ones, simultaneous ones, watched in real time by audiences that no other event on earth assembles. The 2022 final was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people across all platforms, which is roughly one in five humans alive.
The thing nine tournaments has taught me is that the moments are the asset. Not the matches, not the standings, not even the trophies — the moments. Most of the World Cup matches are bad. The 1990 tournament I just spent six paragraphs writing about was 2.21 goals per game. Most of those goals were ugly. I have sat through hundreds of bad World Cup matches in the middle of my night, and I have stayed because the math of the moment is asymmetric: most matches will not produce one, but the ones that do will sit in your memory for thirty-six years.
The other thing I want to say is that the magicians are not interchangeable with the system. The system can produce a tournament. The magicians produce the moments. Brazil 2002 had Ronaldo. France 1998 had Zidane. Argentina 1990 had Maradona, on one ankle, dragging a mediocre team to a final he should have won. Argentina 2022 had Messi. None of these tournaments would be remembered the way they are remembered without the man at the center.
The system needs the magician. The magician does not need the system. That is the asymmetry that makes football, as a global sport, work.
In six days the next tournament begins. I do not know who its magicians will be. I have guesses — there is a French phenomenon, an English midfielder, a 17-year-old Spaniard, a Brazilian winger who has been the best in the world for some part of every season since 2023 — but the guesses are not the point. The point is that the magicians of 2026 are not yet known. The names are still incomplete. The list is being written across the next six weeks, in 104 matches, in 16 cities across three countries, ending at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.
There’s a kid, in Lagos and Mumbai and Tokyo and Manila, watching a midnight match on whatever screen he or she can find, is the kid I was. And the math of the moment will work for that kid too. Most of the matches will be ordinary. One or two of them will produce something he or she will carry for the next thirty-six years.
]]>By April, the docket had drawn nearly 9,000 comments. Ninety-eight percent of them expressed frustration with the migration of sports to streaming, and hoped that broadcast would remain the primary surface for watching their teams.
I want to be careful about how I read that number. Regulatory comment dockets are self-selected and skew loud. The 9,000 do not represent a national poll. What they represent is the slice of the country that took the time to file a public comment with a federal agency on a topic most people do not know is being studied. That slice is, by definition, the most frustrated, the most articulate, and — politically — the most useful.
This is the moment when a market problem starts to become a political one.
For the past five years, “sports going to streaming” has been a market story. League negotiates with platform. Platform pays. Fan adapts. Fan pays. The fan’s options were, in order, accept-and-pay, accept-and-pirate, or accept-and-quit. The frustration was real but it was a consumer frustration, measurable in churn, in social-media venting, and in subscription fatigue numbers that fed straight into the bundle-collapse story I wrote about a few weeks ago.
The FCC docket adds a fourth option to that list. Accept, pay, and complain to your senator.
That fourth option does not have to win to matter. It only has to exist. A live regulatory thread, with public comments stacking up at 98% one-direction frustration, becomes a political input. It becomes something a member of Congress can hold up at a hearing. It becomes a paragraph in a senator’s letter to a league commissioner. It becomes a question at the next antitrust hearing about the NFL or the NBA or the cable bundle that is dying without ever quite collapsing.
I do not know whether the FCC will issue rules. I doubt the agency has the appetite or the legal scaffolding to seriously regulate sports rights distribution. But that is not how political layers work. Political layers do not need to win to alter the math.
FCC Commissioner Trusty has already cited the comment count by name in public statements. That is not a regulatory action. It is a sign that the next league negotiation, the next exclusive-streaming announcement, the next paywalled playoff round, will be priced against a constituency that did not exist three years ago.
The market problem just acquired a political layer. That layer does not negotiate the way buyers and sellers do.
That changes the next deal.
]]>Sportico reported that Prime Video’s first season of NBA coverage delivered an audience with a median age of 46.9. The same league, on linear partners, ran 56. A nine-year split between the same teams playing the same games on the same nights, distributed by different pipes.
Most coverage of that number has filed it as color. A footnote inside a recap of “broadcast still leads, streaming is closing.” That framing misses the asset.
The 9-year spread is not a fact about the audience. It is a fact about the buyer.
A 46-year-old fan is monetized differently than a 56-year-old fan. They buy different alcohol, different cars, different financial products, different travel packages, different jerseys, different sneakers, different sportsbook positions. They take different risks. They convert at different rates on different creative. They get reached on different surfaces. The CPM curves are not the same. The lifetime-value curves are not the same. The downstream commerce attached to the eyeball is not the same.
Two networks selling the same game pull two different audiences with two different commercial profiles. The ad load is not interchangeable. The sponsorship inventory is not interchangeable. The data layer underneath the broadcast — who tuned in, for how long, what they did next — is not interchangeable.
At Victory+, our median age is 36.
That number sits ten years younger than Prime Video and twenty years younger than linear. It is not because we are doing something clever with content. It is because the 36-year-old who wants to watch hockey or soccer or basketball already knows how to find a free streaming app on their phone and is not going to dig out a coaxial cable to do it.
The 56-year-old NBA fan still pays for a linear subscription. The 46-year-old NBA fan is willing to download Prime Video and authenticate. The 36-year-old fan opens an app, which already has a video session running by the time the masthead loads.
Each of these is a real audience. None of them is the future. The whole thing is the future, distributed across three different commercial profiles that cannot be aggregated into one.
The next bid table will be priced on this. The buyer who can do something specific with a 36-year-old that linear cannot do with a 56-year-old wins the cohort that compounds. The buyer who treats the age spread as background noise pays cable money for cable demographics.
The number is not a footnote. It is the chart.
]]>Twelve days later, CNBC published its 2026 WNBA franchise valuations. The headline was that the league finally had its first billion-dollar team. The Golden State Valkyries — an expansion franchise that did not exist three years ago, a team that has played one season — were worth $1B. The league average came in at $460M.
Both numbers are larger than the entire WNBA was estimated to be worth five years ago.
I want to write about why those two announcements belong in the same essay. They are not the same kind of news. One is a local-rights deal in a mid-size DMA. The other is an investor-press valuation event in the most expensive city in the country. But the same shift moves them both. The WNBA is entering its second media-rights cycle from a position of cultural relevance rather than historical inertia. That is rarer than it sounds. And the math underneath the league is starting to look different.
The Golden State Valkyries paid a $50M expansion fee in 2023 and started play in May 2025. After exactly one season, CNBC’s 2026 list put the franchise at $1 billion; Sportico’s separate methodology landed at $850M. Different numbers, different math, same direction. Both are extraordinary returns on a $50M ticket.
A valuation is not a transaction price. No one has actually paid $1B for the Valkyries, and no one is going to. But valuations get tested in two places — at sale, and at expansion. The expansion test is already running. The WNBA’s three most recent expansion teams paid $50M (Toronto Tempo), $50M (Valkyries), and $75M (Portland Fire). The next cohort — Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, debuting by 2030 — are paying $250M apiece.
That is the league pricing the next entrants against the asset class that the Valkyries just demonstrated. From $50M to $250M in three years. The league does not need a transaction to ratify the valuation; it has already been ratified by the next round of buyers.
Sportico’s methodology marks the league’s average value up 59% year-over-year. The Valkyries themselves are up roughly $350M from Sportico’s number a year ago — more than the entire expansion fee the franchise paid to enter the league. The 2025 ownership group that wrote the $50M check has, on paper, made back somewhere between 16x and 20x in eighteen months.
These are the kind of multiples you see at the inflection point of an asset class, not in the steady state of one. The interesting question is which they are.
In July 2024, alongside the NBA’s $76 billion announcement, the WNBA announced its own 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal. $200M per year. Three partners — Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon Prime Video — a cohort the league did not have at the table during the previous round. USA Network signed a separate 11-year extension in 2025, expanding the package further. The first season under the deal is the season tipping off next week.
For most of the league’s history, national rights ran through ESPN at a reported $60M per year — a sum that, by 2024, was small enough to be invisible inside the parent NBA-ESPN structure. The new deal is more than three times that, structurally separated, and distributed across partners whose interests in the league are not all the same. ESPN is buying the legacy audience. NBC is buying inventory for Peacock. Amazon is buying the cohort that has decided streaming is where sports live.
The 2026 schedule reflects all three buyers. A record 216 nationally televised games, spread across ABC, ESPN, NBC, Peacock, NBCSN, Prime Video, CBS, Paramount+, ION, USA Network, and NBA TV. Every single Indiana Fever game will be nationally televised — the first time any WNBA team has had its full 44-game schedule go national. The CBS package alone runs 20 games on broadcast TV, reaching the kind of free-over-the-air audience the league has not had in decades.
The number to sit with is not the $2.2B. It is the cohort.
A media-rights deal is a price the partners pay against an audience they expect to find — and the audience the WNBA's partners are paying for is one that did not exist three years ago.
Most professional leagues hit their second media-rights deal carrying the inertia of the first. The first deal was almost always done at a moment when the league was selling potential — small audiences, modest production, a partner betting that the line will go up. The second deal then gets priced against whatever the league has actually delivered between the two — which historically has meant either modest growth or modest decline relative to the partner’s original underwriting. Either way, the shape of the audience tends to be continuous between cycles.
The WNBA’s second cycle is structurally different. The league is being repriced not against its own steady-state arc, but against a categorical reset that happened in years three through five of the first deal. Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, Angel Reese, and the broader cohort of 2024–25 stars did not just grow the audience — they shifted the audience demographically and culturally. Average WNBA attendance hit 11,148 in 2025, breaking a 23-year-old record, and total league attendance crossed 3 million for the first time. ESPN networks averaged 1.2 million viewers across the regular season — the most-watched ever. Both numbers held even through Caitlin Clark’s months-long groin injury.
That last detail matters more than the headline numbers. A growth story that holds when the headline name is on the bench is a different category of growth story than one that does not.
That is rarer than it sounds.
The NBA’s second media cycle, in 2002, was bigger than its first but built on a similar structural premise — the league had been on a slow, steady cultural climb for fifteen years. The NHL’s was a step down. MLB’s, even at its peak, was a regional patchwork. Most American professional sports leagues, when they price their second cycle, are pricing against a continuation. The WNBA in 2026 is pricing against a reset.
The 2024 deal was negotiated near the top of a wave. The first season under the deal is now testing whether the wave was a wave or a step change.
So far, the answer reads like a step change.
The harder question is what happens to the local rights stack. National deals get the headlines. Local deals fund the steady-state economics of franchises — the practice facility, the player development staff, the operations team, the unsexy parts of the P&L that show up in year three rather than year one. For the NBA and the NHL, regional sports networks were the cable bundle’s gift to franchise economics, and the cable bundle is in public, accelerating collapse.
For the WNBA, the regional layer has historically been thin. Many teams have not had an RSN deal at all. Some have had local cable arrangements that look more like courtesy than commerce. When Diamond / FanDuel Sports Network filed for Chapter 7 protection earlier this year and started shedding teams, the affected WNBA franchises were not facing a renegotiation. They were facing a vacuum.
That vacuum is the thing that matters.
The Lynx were the first WNBA team to hand local rights to a streaming platform. Twenty-six regular-season games and three preseason games on Victory+, free, no sign-up wall, fully produced. The logic is straightforward and worth saying out loud — in a league where local rights have historically not been a meaningful revenue line, swapping them for distribution upstream of monetization is not a sacrifice. It is a category trade. We are trading “the small cash that local cable used to send” for “the larger audience that free streaming can build.”
Two weeks later, the Atlanta Dream became the second. Every locally broadcast Dream game, free, on Victory+ — same model, same financial logic, in a much larger DMA. The deal sits alongside the Dream’s existing linear partnership with Gray Media’s Peachtree TV — a multi-rail local stack rather than a streaming-or-linear binary. Tom Friend laid the deal out in SBJ on the day it broke.
It is also a data trade. Free streaming distribution generates first-party engagement data that no linear local deal could generate. The Lynx now know which games their viewers tuned in for, how long they stayed, whether they came back. They know which markets within the broader Twin Cities region are converting and which aren’t. None of that information was available to a team that lived inside an RSN bundle. Most of it is still not available to teams that do.
Local rights as a data play is not the same business as local rights as a cash play.
I want to be careful here. I work at Victory+. Both deals are ones I am proud of. I do not want to overclaim. Two teams do not solve the WNBA’s local-rights problem on their own. Most franchises do not yet have a streaming-first local partner ready to take rights at scale. Many do not yet have a local partner of any kind. What the Lynx and Dream deals do together is put a marker down — two publicly-announced, multi-year, free-to-fan deals between competitive WNBA franchises and a streaming platform that the league can point to in conversations with every other team that asks “what does the post-RSN model look like?”
The answer to that question is no longer hypothetical. The second call has been made.
I do not want to write the part of this essay that ignores the skeptic’s reading.
Here it is, in full force.
The WNBA’s audience growth has been unusually concentrated around a small number of stars, primarily one team, primarily one network’s coverage of one part of the season. When Clark was injured for much of the second half of 2025, the league’s average viewership did hold — but it held with caveats. The skeptic notes the caveats. The skeptic also notes that the new collective bargaining agreement, reached in tentative form in March 2026, pulls the league’s revenue share toward roughly 20% of basketball-related income — which means a meaningful portion of the higher rights fees gets absorbed by a labor side that has been underpaid for two decades. The skeptic reads the $2.2B and the $1B and asks whether the unit economics actually flow through to the operating P&L.
These are real questions. I do not think they invalidate the structural argument. The unit economics flowing through is exactly what the higher labor share is supposed to enable — players who can build careers stateside instead of taking offseason contracts overseas, retention of the top of the cohort, marketing inventory at the player level that the league owns. The CBA is the labor side of the same flywheel that the rights deal is the media side of.
But the skeptic is not wrong about how thin the top of the cohort is.
The WNBA in 2026 is a league where the top six teams generate a disproportionate share of the attention, the top eight or nine players a disproportionate share of the highlights, and the top one or two markets a disproportionate share of the ticket revenue. The deal — the rights deal, the valuations, the local-rights aisle — was priced against that cohort. If the cohort thins faster than the league can backfill, the structural argument frays. That is the bear case, and it deserves to be on the page.
The bull case is that the league has demonstrated it can backfill. A’ja Wilson is not a marketing project; she is a generational center who has now won the MVP four times. Paige Bueckers, the 2025 first overall pick, led all rookies in scoring and assists in her debut season and won Rookie of the Year for Dallas. Angel Reese has moved to Atlanta and is a first-team All-WNBA candidate. The Valkyries, the Tempo, and the Fire are all entering 2026 with rosters built to compete, not just to occupy a slot. The headline name will not always be Caitlin Clark. The reset is broader than one player, even if the chart-toppers are still concentrated.
The first $1B WNBA team is not the last. Sportico already values the Liberty and the Fever in striking range. By the time CNBC publishes its 2027 valuations next May, the league will likely have two or three franchises across the line and an average comfortably north of $600M.
What I will be watching is which teams in the second cohort get there.
If the next teams to cross $1B are the legacy franchises — the Liberty, the Aces, the Fever — the story is “the league lifts everyone.” That is the predictable version. If it is one of the new expansion teams — the Tempo, the Fire, or one of the 2028–30 entrants — the story is something different. It is “the WNBA is now an asset class where the new entrants compound faster than the incumbents.” That is the version where the league becomes a repeatable expansion story rather than a one-time growth story.
I think we are closer to the second version than the first. The Valkyries are the proof of concept.
The other thing I will be watching is the local-rights aisle. After the Lynx and the Dream, if even two or three more teams follow into streaming-first local in the next two seasons — and I suspect they will, because the math is the math — the WNBA will have done in two years what the NHL has not done in twenty: built a coherent local-rights stack outside the cable bundle, with first-party data flowing back to the team and the league. That stack did not exist a month ago. It has two nodes now.
The 2026 season tips off next week. 216 national broadcasts, three new partners reaching audiences the league did not used to have, two expansion franchises, and a billion-dollar ceiling that no one in this league had seen before.
The first billion-dollar team is the headline. The shape of the second one is the story.
]]>The math, at the time, was compelling. Affiliated minor league baseball ran on player-development subsidies from the parent clubs, thin gate revenue, limited sponsorship, and almost no meaningful broadcast revenue. For most of its history, a AAA club’s television deal — if it had one — was a token agreement with a regional cable affiliate that produced a handful of games a year at barely-above-cost production. The AA and A-ball clubs had even less. The revenue line was tiny, the cost line was stubborn, and the parent MLB clubs, doing their own post-2020 math on developmental cost per prospect, decided that forty of these teams were not worth the carry.
It is worth stating the decision in its own terms. It was not cynical. It was, at that moment, defensible.
Here is what I want to argue: by the time that decision was made, the unit economics of minor league broadcasting had already flipped. The broadcast layer had quietly become something it had never been before — a plausible path to real audience and real local revenue, at near-zero incremental cost. The teams that got cut were the teams whose economic case had already changed, and the people making the decision did not know it. Because the measurement layer to know it did not exist yet.
Most of the minor league teams we cut were not dying. They were about to be reborn. Nobody was watching closely enough to notice.
To see what has changed, it helps to remember what a minor league broadcast used to be.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, if a AAA team produced a television broadcast at all, it was typically a deal with a local cable affiliate that carried a handful of home games a season. The production was modest — a couple of cameras, a local broadcaster, a small crew — and the economics were brutal. Production cost ran into the tens of thousands of dollars per game. Ad inventory was sold locally at rates that, on a typical Tuesday night game drawing a few thousand in-venue attendees and a few thousand more on television, could not remotely cover the production cost. The math only worked when the cable carrier paid a rights fee — which meant the team was effectively subsidized by the cable bundle, the same way every small piece of local sports programming has historically been subsidized by the cable bundle.
When the bundle started collapsing — which I have written about at length — the rights-fee subsidy collapsed with it. Regional sports networks started filing for bankruptcy; Diamond Sports Group, operator of the Bally Sports RSN portfolio, filed for Chapter 11 in March 2023 carrying roughly $8 billion in debt. The small line items on RSN rights cards — the AAA club’s ten-game package, the AHL team’s Sunday afternoon slot, the USL team’s highlight show — were the first things cut. By 2019, most minor league teams outside of the largest markets had no functional broadcast revenue at all. Their games were either not televised or streamed on obscure platforms with production that, to put it charitably, looked like what you could produce with a laptop and a single fixed camera in center field.
That was the reality going into 2020. A minor league broadcast was a cost center. A small cost center, often a zero-revenue cost center, but a cost center. The case for keeping an affiliated team alive had to be made on player development, on civic value, on stadium economics, on anything except the broadcast.
And then three things happened in parallel that nobody in the room during the 2020 contraction was tracking.
The first thing that happened is that the distribution layer changed completely.
Free ad-supported television — FAST, in the jargon — went from a curiosity to an infrastructure. The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Amazon’s Freevee (now Prime Video with ads), Pluto TV, Tubi, and a long tail of platform-specific FAST offerings collectively built out a connected-TV distribution network that reaches a large and still-growing fraction of American households. Parks Associates measured FAST usage at roughly 45% of U.S. internet households in Q1 2025, with Nielsen’s Gauge reporting the Roku Channel alone pulling nearly 3% of all TV-viewing time by mid-2025. The usage curve has flattened from its early explosion but the installed base is now structural.
The important thing about FAST is not the reach — although the reach is enormous. The important thing is the economics.
A FAST channel, once produced, costs almost nothing to distribute. The platforms do the distribution in exchange for a share of the ad inventory. The channel operator produces or aggregates the content and sells the ad impressions, typically through a combination of direct sales and programmatic. A sports channel on a FAST platform does not pay carriage fees. It does not negotiate with cable MSOs. It does not print subscriber circulars. It does not need a national sales force. It uploads a playlist, runs an ad server, and waits to see if people watch.
For most content categories, the FAST economics are marginal. The CPMs are lower than premium streaming, the audience is diffuse, and the competition for the same eyeballs is fierce. FAST has historically worked best for library content — old sitcoms, classic Westerns, reality show reruns — where the content is already produced and the incremental distribution cost is literally zero.
Sports is different. Sports is live. Sports delivers synchronous audience. Sports attracts a specific kind of advertiser — local, regional, national — who will pay a premium to reach viewers at the moment of peak engagement. On a FAST channel, a live sports event performs like nothing else in the category. It is, in platform terms, the most valuable inventory on the grid.
The unit economics of a minor league broadcast on a FAST channel, properly understood, look radically different from the unit economics on cable. Production cost is still a real line item — though connected-TV-native production has itself gotten cheaper, as the tools have matured and the expectations around broadcast polish have evolved away from the traditional-TV standard. Distribution cost is effectively zero. Ad inventory is sold against a live audience in real time. And the audience, once the channel is discoverable, can scale to numbers that would have been unthinkable for the same content on cable.
This is not theoretical. Victory+’s Sunday Night Soccer product — which I have written about at length — is the clearest instantiation I know of this model at work in American sports. Victory+’s NWSL Sunday Night Soccer franchise launched in March 2026 with 25 primetime matches on a free ad-supported platform, with no carriage friction between the fan and the game, building a primetime audience for a sport that on cable could never have justified the slot. If the model works for the NWSL, which operates at a revenue tier far below the big four American leagues, it works a fortiori for a minor league broadcast at a tier below that. The economics are more permissive, not less, the further down the pyramid you go — because the incremental cost to produce and distribute is the same, and the competition for your specific local audience is lower.
The second thing that happened is that the cost of producing a competent broadcast collapsed.
I want to be careful here, because there is a meaningful distinction between a competent broadcast and a premium broadcast. A nationally-televised NBA game is a multi-million-dollar production. It involves dozens of cameras, a production truck, a full broadcast crew, graphics engines, replay systems, commentator booths, and every piece of equipment a major network can throw at the event. That kind of production is not getting cheaper in a linear way.
What has gotten dramatically cheaper is the mid-tier. The broadcast that used to require a regional-sports-network production budget — a handful of cameras, a produced feed, graphics, replays, a play-by-play team — can now be produced at a fraction of historical cost, using a combination of fixed-camera systems, software-based graphics, remote production, and automated switching. I do not have a widely-disclosed per-game cost comparison I can cite here; operators guard those numbers tightly, and the setups vary enough from venue to venue that a single benchmark would be misleading anyway. What is not in dispute is the direction of the curve.
The cost curve has not just dropped. It has shifted in structure. Historically, a broadcast production was heavy on variable cost — a crew, a truck, a rights-holder fee, per-game expenses. Today, an increasing share of the stack is fixed — software licenses, installed cameras, amortized equipment — with variable costs trending toward negligible. Once the system is in place, the marginal cost of producing one more game is small enough that a team can credibly broadcast every home game it plays, from its AA-level Tuesday night affair to its Saturday promotional giveaway night, without the production economics forcing a choice about which games to carry.
This is the ballgame, to borrow the obvious metaphor. The historical constraint on minor league broadcasting was not demand. It was supply. Teams could not afford to produce enough games for broadcast to matter as a business line. Fans wanted to watch their team, the team could not afford to give them the product, and the distribution layer did not exist to monetize the product anyway.
Remove the production-cost constraint. Remove the distribution-cost constraint. Now what is the shape of the business?
The shape of the business is this: a minor league team, in 2026, can produce every game of its schedule on connected-TV-ready infrastructure, distribute those games through FAST and direct-to-consumer apps at near-zero marginal cost, sell ad inventory against a demonstrably engaged local audience, and generate a broadcast revenue line that, for the first time in the sport’s history, is a real fraction of total team revenue rather than a rounding error.
The team that could have existed in 2026, in other words, is not the team that the 2020 contraction decision was based on.
The third thing that happened is more subtle, and I think more important than the first two.
Local ad CPMs — cost per thousand impressions for a local audience — have held up dramatically better than national CPMs in the connected-TV transition. There is a reason for this. Local advertisers are specific. A local car dealer, a regional bank, a chain of local restaurants, a state-level political campaign — these advertisers do not need a national audience. They need a local audience. And a local audience is exactly what a minor league broadcast delivers, by definition, at high density.
National sports broadcasts have been grappling with a CPM compression problem for most of the past decade. As audiences fragment, national reach gets more expensive per viewer to achieve, and advertisers have plenty of substitutes in digital and social. The CPM a national broadcaster can command for inventory is trending in one direction, and it is not up.
Local CPMs tell a different story. A minor league team in a mid-sized market — pick any city with a AAA club that lost affiliation in 2020 — has an audience that is substantially concentrated in a specific DMA. The fan base is local. The advertisers who want to reach that fan base are local. The match between inventory and buyer is essentially one-to-one, with none of the leakage that national inventory suffers when half the audience is outside the advertiser’s geographic target.
I do not have proprietary numbers I can share here, and I will not invent any. The major programmatic platforms have begun publishing directional data on CTV CPMs for live-sports inventory, but the local-versus-national split on FAST-distributed regional sports is not something any operator has disclosed cleanly. The absence is itself the tell — a market this clearly bifurcated and this commercially consequential would, in a more transparent category, be a published benchmark. What I can say, directionally and structurally, is that the local-CPM advantage is the single most underpriced factor in the current sports-media economy. It is the thing that makes minor league broadcasting an economically live proposition rather than a charitable one. It is the thing that, if you had been tracking it in 2019, would have changed your answer on which MiLB teams were economically viable going into 2020.
Nobody was tracking it in 2019. The measurement layer did not exist.
The MiLB 2020 contraction was made on the basis of a conventional accounting of minor league economics. Gate revenue, sponsorship, concessions, merchandise, rights fees. The conventional accounting produced a conventional answer: these teams were marginal, the player-development subsidy from MLB did not cover the gap for all of them, and the total system cost could be reduced by cutting the bottom third.
The unconventional question — which nobody at the negotiating table could answer, because the tools did not exist — was: if we held everything else constant and layered in a modern connected-TV distribution strategy, what would these teams’ economics look like in 2026?
I think the honest answer is that a meaningful fraction of the cut teams would have been economically viable under the FAST-era distribution stack. Not all of them. Some of the cuts were genuinely correct on the merits — markets without sufficient population, stadiums without sufficient capital maintenance, ownership without sufficient commitment. But some of the cuts were based on a snapshot of broadcast economics that was already obsolete at the moment the snapshot was taken.
The teams that are now operating in the independent leagues — the Atlantic League, the American Association, the Pioneer League, the Frontier League — are running, in several cases, exactly the playbook I am describing. They are producing FAST-ready broadcasts of every home game. They are distributing through a mix of team-owned apps, FAST channel partnerships, and regional connected-TV agreements. They are selling local ad inventory at local-CPM rates against an audience that shows up, in real numbers, on a Tuesday night in a mid-sized city because the team is their team and there is no longer a paywall between them and the broadcast. Team-level independent-league viewership and local ad revenue figures are not consistently disclosed; where individual clubs have published numbers, they are directional rather than comparable.
Whether those teams are thriving on these economics alone — I would not go that far. Independent baseball remains a thin-margin business. But the broadcast line is no longer zero. It is a real, growing, material contributor to the P&L, and it is growing at a pace that the 2020 decision-makers would not have predicted because they did not have the data to predict it.
I want to widen the aperture, because this is not just a baseball story.
The United Soccer League — USL — has been building out its broadcast infrastructure on essentially the model I am describing. The league’s 2025 national package pairs three CBS network matches and twenty-two CBS Sports Network windows with the ongoing ESPN relationship, while team-level streaming apps and the USL Television Network fill in the long-tail local distribution. USL has also cited an upward trendline in CBS-broadcast match viewership through the 2025 season as evidence that the model is working.
Whether the USL’s current audience is large in absolute terms is not the right question. The right question is whether the audience is large relative to the cost to produce it, and on that metric, the USL is doing something that was not possible under the prior distribution stack. A professional soccer league at the second or third tier of the American soccer pyramid, broadcasting every match of every team on distribution rails that reach the overwhelming majority of connected homes, is a thing that simply did not exist in 2019.
The NWSL’s proposed second-division reserve league, now targeted for a 2027 launch after its original 2026 plan slipped, is another proof point in motion. The infrastructure investment required to broadcast reserve-league matches is, under the old model, prohibitive. Under the FAST model, it is a marginal addition to an existing production stack — and the reserve audience is a highly engaged subset of the main audience, with local-CPM characteristics that ought to behave similarly to or better than the parent league in certain markets. Reserve-league viewership and local-ad-revenue figures will not be reportable until after launch; the thesis is structural, not backtested.
The same pattern shows up in minor hockey (AHL, ECHL), in lower-tier basketball (G League, independent regional leagues), in college sports at the tier below the power-conference media deals, in high school sports at the state-championship level. Victory+’s five-year deal to broadcast the Texas high school football championships globally for free, beginning with the 2025 season, is exactly the kind of distribution that would have been inconceivable on cable, because cable had no economic mechanism to deliver state-championship-level content to a national audience at a production cost the property could support. FAST has that mechanism. The audience followed.
If I could go back to 2019 and put one thing in front of the people making the MiLB contraction decision, it would be this:
The broadcast layer is about to invert. The distribution cost is going to zero. The production cost is going to a fraction of its current level. The local-CPM market is going to survive the cord-cutting transition in a way that the national CPM market is not. The audience for your team’s games — actual viewable broadcasts of actual games, produced at competent quality — is going to be larger, not smaller, five years from now than it is today. Price the decision against that reality, not against the reality of the current RSN-era book.
That conversation did not happen. The tools to have it did not exist in a usable form. The industry trade press of 2019 was still covering cord-cutting as a narrative rather than as a structural reset, and the measurement firms were still producing reports built around the old bundle-era assumptions. The minor league teams making the case for their own survival were doing so on the basis of gate revenue and civic value, not on the basis of a broadcast economic model that had not yet been invented.
The measurement layer has caught up, mostly. Connected-TV measurement is real. Device-level attribution is real. Programmatic reporting on live-sports inventory is real. In 2026, a minor league team making the case for its own broadcast economics has tools available that its 2019 counterpart did not.
The question is whether the system will use them.
I want to end on something that I think is more important than the regret-cast about 2020.
The structural shift I have described is not hypothetical. It is happening right now, in leagues that had the flexibility to adapt, on platforms that had the distribution to carry it, in markets that had the local demand to sustain it. The USL is doing it. The NWSL and its reserve infrastructure are doing it. The independent baseball leagues are doing it. College sports at multiple tiers below the power conferences are doing it. High school championships are doing it.
The leagues and teams that are doing it are, in aggregate, building the most interesting thing in American sports media right now — a second layer of broadcast infrastructure, below the national rights deals, that is growing at a pace that the existing trade coverage is not fully capturing because the trade coverage is still oriented toward the national-rights megadeals.
The economics of that second layer work. They did not work five years ago. They work now.
The MiLB contraction is a historical event and I am not going to relitigate it game by game. But the pattern it represents — the pattern of making strategic decisions about the survival of small-market sports properties on the basis of a broadcast-economics snapshot that is already obsolete — is a pattern that could repeat. College football is making versions of this decision right now, as conferences realign and tier-two and tier-three programs try to figure out their media futures. High school athletic associations are making versions of this decision as they decide whether to participate in the FAST-era distribution stack or hold out for a cable-era deal that is never coming back. Independent leagues in every sport are making versions of this decision as they decide how much to invest in broadcast infrastructure today against a return that takes time to materialize.
The decision should be made with the right model. The old model — broadcast is a cost center, the audience does not exist, the distribution layer cannot carry small-market content economically — is wrong. It has been wrong for several years. It is getting more wrong every year.
The new model is that a minor league broadcast, properly produced and distributed, is an audience engine operating at costs that make the math work at scale far smaller than anyone assumed was viable under the old stack.
The doors are open. Somebody is going to build in this space, at tier after tier below the national deals, and build something significantly larger than the current coverage suggests is possible. The teams and leagues that figure this out first will look, in retrospect, like they saw something that was hiding in plain sight.
It was. It still is.
]]>In that version, you produce a certain number of hours of content at a certain cost per hour, you distribute those hours across a certain number of subscribers, and you optimize the ratio. Content cost over engaged households. Cost per minute delivered. Cost per minute watched, if you are being rigorous about it. The variables are legible. The finance team can model them. The board can argue about them. Whole decks — entire strategy offsites — are organized around the denominator in that ratio.
And that ratio is, I have come to believe, describing the wrong business.
The scarce input in streaming is not minutes produced. Minutes produced is extraordinarily cheap and getting cheaper. The scarce input is minutes earned — and by earned I mean attention that is arousal-weighted, in the sense that Daniel Kahneman used the word in his 1973 book Attention and Effort. Attention with the pupils a little dilated. Attention that expands the pool rather than draining it. The kind of attention that, when the credits roll, leaves a person wanting to come back tomorrow instead of wanting to cancel before the next billing cycle.
The services that win the next decade will not be the ones that get the cheapest per-hour cost of content. They will be the ones that learn to put a price on mild disappointment — the half-watched episode, the trailer that did not land, the Tuesday night where the user opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, and closed it again. That Tuesday night is where the business is actually being won or lost. And almost no P&L I have ever seen has a line for it.
Every streaming finance team I have worked with or alongside treats content cost as a numerator problem. How much did we spend to produce the hour. How much did we license it for. How does that amortize over the window. Those are real questions and I do not mean to dismiss them.
But the denominator is where the business actually lives, and the denominator is almost always wrong.
The typical denominator is some version of minutes consumed. Total viewing hours. Average daily active minutes. Minutes per paid member. The dashboard metrics that sit in every streaming executive’s Monday morning email. And each of those metrics silently assumes that a minute is a minute is a minute — that the forty-fifth minute of a half-watched procedural carries the same weight as the final minute of a championship game, or the closing minute of a show that made someone text three friends immediately after.
They do not carry the same weight. They do not even carry weights in the same order of magnitude.
I wrote about this in the attention essay — the thing Kahneman observed, more than fifty years ago, was that attention is not a fixed budget. It is a pool whose size fluctuates with arousal. Ten minutes of genuinely riveted attention recruits more cognitive capacity than ten minutes of half-awake scrolling, and it lays down more memory, and it is worth more to an advertiser, and it earns more loyalty from the viewer, and it makes the next subscription decision easier instead of harder.
A minute of riveted attention is not 1.5x a minute of distracted attention. It is something more like 5x or 10x, depending on what you are measuring. And nobody’s P&L knows that.
Consider two shows. Both cost the same to produce. Both land the same raw minutes-watched number in the first month. The finance team looks at them and concludes they are equivalent investments.
Show A is the one people put on while folding laundry. They hear dialogue. They catch the beats. They do not remember, a week later, a single line of it. They will renew their subscription, probably, but nothing about this show is the reason.
Show B is the one that made someone turn their phone over on the coffee table. That held them still for forty-two minutes. That they then talked about at work the next morning. That they mentioned to a friend at dinner that weekend. That, six weeks later, they remembered to check if a new season was coming.
The denominators are equal. The businesses are not equal. One of them is producing attention that compounds. The other is producing the television equivalent of ambient lighting — which has its uses, but should not be priced as if it is the thing carrying the service.
I do not think the industry has a vocabulary for this gap yet. Or rather, it has one — engagement, retention cohorts, the various loyalty scores — but the vocabulary lives in the marketing organization, and the content-investment decisions live in the finance organization, and they are looking at different spreadsheets.
The unit economics of boredom is the cost of that disconnect. Every show greenlit on the assumption that a minute is a minute is a show that slightly drains the pool. Every show greenlit on the assumption that arousal-weighted attention is the real input is a show that grows it.
Here is the claim I have been circling toward: the most expensive thing on a streaming P&L is not the content line. It is not the marketing line. It is not the technology line.
It is the user who, on a given Tuesday, opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, did not find something they wanted, and closed it without watching anything.
The most expensive thing on a streaming P&L is the user who opened the app, scrolled for three minutes, did not find something they wanted, and closed it without watching anything.— the thesis
That user has not churned. Not yet. They have not generated a support ticket. They have not triggered any threshold on any dashboard. In most reporting frameworks, that Tuesday does not exist. The minutes consumed is zero, which means it does not show up in the denominator, which means it does not move the cost-per-minute number, which means the finance team does not have a reason to care.
But that Tuesday is the beginning of the churn. That Tuesday is where the mental accounting starts to shift — from “I use this service” to “I pay for this service and I do not really use it that much.” That Tuesday is the one that shows up, six months later, as a cancellation that the retention team will spend a quarter trying to model and will mostly fail to model, because the actual cause is buried in a behavior that was never measured in the first place.
Mild disappointment is expensive. It is the single most expensive thing in the business. And the reason it does not appear on any P&L is that it does not produce an immediate transaction. It produces a slow, invisible draining of the reservoir of goodwill that every subscription product runs on.
The services that win the next decade will be the ones that learn to put a number on that Tuesday. Not a precise number — nobody will ever have a perfect model of mild disappointment — but a directional number. A number that changes the order of the items on the product roadmap. A number that makes the content team and the UX team and the pricing team have a different conversation than they are currently having.
I do not think the fix is complicated, at the level of concept. It is just unfashionable.
A correct denominator would weight minutes by arousal. It would distinguish between the show that someone watched while half-asleep and the show that someone watched with their phone face-down. It would distinguish between the trailer that played because autoplay fired and the trailer that played because someone clicked on it. It would have a way of saying: this hour of content produced engaged attention, and that hour of content produced ambient attention, and those two hours are not the same input.
The industry has fragments of this. Completion rate is a fragment. Rewatch rate is a fragment. Share rate is a fragment. Whether somebody searched the title by name, versus arrived at it through a recommendation row, is a fragment. The time between sessions is a fragment.
Stitched together, those fragments would make a weighted-minutes metric that actually matched what the business is trying to do. But I have not seen anybody stitch them together publicly. No major streamer has disclosed a weighted-attention metric that goes beyond variations on completion rate, watch time, and the standard engagement scores that anchor every earnings-call talking point. The fragments sit in separate dashboards owned by separate teams who each have local incentives that do not compose.
The companies that stitch it together first — and then actually re-organize their greenlight decisions around the stitched number — will have an advantage that is hard to describe in a deck but will show up, eventually, as lower churn, higher ARPU, and a library that compounds in value instead of eroding.
I want to use Netflix as an example here, and I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.
Netflix launched its ad-supported tier on November 3, 2022. It has adjusted pricing in October 2023, again in January 2025, and again in early 2026 — with the Basic plan quietly phased out for existing subscribers through 2024 in between. It has, along the way, become — on public reporting — the most profitable subscription streamer by a significant margin, with the best combination of engagement, retention, and unit economics in the category.
The standard story about Netflix’s advantage is that it had a head start. That it has the deepest library. That its recommendation system is better. All of that is true, and none of it, I think, is the main thing.
The main thing is that Netflix has spent a decade treating content as if the denominator is arousal-weighted attention and not raw minutes. They do not disclose the internal machinery. They do not publish a weighted-engagement score. But the decisions they make — the shows they cancel that were hitting raw-minute targets but not share-and-talk-about-it targets, the originals they re-up on evidence that goes beyond completion rate, the willingness to let library content carry the low-intensity side of the business while originals carry the high-intensity side — read like the decisions of a company that has quietly built a better denominator.
Other services are reading the same raw-minute numbers and drawing different conclusions, because the numbers are not actually the same numbers. A Netflix minute and a Peacock minute and a Paramount+ minute all get called “a minute” in the trade press. They are not the same unit. They carry different densities of earned attention, which means different retention impact, which means different unit economics, even at identical content spend.
Consider the ongoing narrative around Paramount, which was folded into the Skydance structure when that merger closed on August 7, 2025. The public story has been a DTC turnaround — some good quarters, some harder quarters, an ongoing question about whether the combined company has the scale to be a standalone streamer or whether it ends up as a content supplier into somebody else’s bundle.
The framework question underneath the turnaround narrative is the one this essay is about. You can get a DTC P&L to look better in the short term by two very different routes. You can optimize the numerator — cheaper content, less content, more library mix, fewer originals, tighter marketing — or you can optimize the denominator, which means producing fewer but more arousal-weighted hours and measuring them correctly.
Route one looks good for two quarters and then the churn math catches up, because the library is slowly draining the reservoir of earned attention. Route two looks worse for two quarters and then starts to compound, because the content is laying down the kind of memory and loyalty that reduces the cost of the next renewal decision.
Almost every DTC turnaround I have watched from the outside has been built on route one. And almost every one that has actually worked over a multi-year horizon has, under the hood, been built on route two. The first is visible on the P&L immediately. The second becomes visible on the P&L eventually, but it starts on a spreadsheet nobody is looking at yet.
There is one place where the industry is, almost by accident, being forced to price attention correctly. The ad tier.
When a service sells ad inventory, the advertiser does not care about minutes consumed in the abstract. They care about impressions that are actually impressions — that land on attention that is actually there, that produce brand recall that is actually measurable, that convert at rates that are actually defensible. Advertisers have been doing this kind of math, in television and print and digital, for fifty years. They are not perfect at it. But they are far ahead of the streaming P&L at it.
When a streaming service goes down the ad-tier road — as most of the category has, since 2022 — it imports, whether it realizes it or not, the advertiser’s weighted view of a minute. Live sports minutes are worth more than library drama minutes. Finale minutes are worth more than premiere minutes, sometimes. Morning minutes are worth less than evening minutes. Minutes on a television set in a living room are worth more than minutes on a phone on a commute. The CPMs are not uniform, and the non-uniformity is not a pricing quirk — it is an admission, by a market, that a minute is not a minute.
That admission is the most interesting thing happening in streaming finance right now. It is the beginning of an attention-weighted P&L, and it is arriving through the ad organization rather than the subscription organization, which is why most strategy conversations have not absorbed it yet.
There is a wrinkle to the Tuesday-night thesis that depends on which side of the streaming business you sit on.
For an SVOD service, the Tuesday-night user — opened the app, scrolled, closed without watching — is a churn warning. The user paid a flat fee, did the mental work of opening the app, and walked away with nothing in the pocket. The next renewal decision just got harder. The reservoir of goodwill drained slightly. That Tuesday, on an SVOD sheet, is cost.
For an AVOD service, the same Tuesday reads almost the opposite way. The user opened the app. They scrolled. They were looking for something to watch. They did not find it tonight, and the platform ought to be unhappy about that. But they showed up — which means they are exactly the kind of user the AVOD model exists to monetize over time. They demonstrated intent. They self-identified as engaged audience.
That Tuesday, on an AVOD sheet, is not the beginning of churn. It is signal. A flag against a known user that says here is someone who wanted to be entertained — give them better next time. The platform now knows something it did not know yesterday: this is the kind of person who opens the app on a Tuesday looking for something to spend time with. That is the input the AVOD business is built around. SVOD has to earn the renewal; AVOD has to earn the next session, and the next session is already half-earned the moment the user shows up.
The same behavioral data — opened, scrolled, did not watch — is cost on one P&L and signal on the other. Most strategy conversations elide this. They use “streaming” as a single category and assume the unit economics travel. They do not. The Tuesday inverts the moment the revenue model does.
It is also why AVOD economics survive at content tiers that would obliterate an SVOD library. If every session produces signal regardless of completion, a library of low-arousal content is not a tax — it is inventory that earns its keep on the showing-up itself, while a smaller arousal-weighted layer carries the moments advertisers will pay the most for. The SVOD platform has no equivalent. Every session has to contribute to the renewal decision, because the renewal decision is the entire revenue event.
If the framework I am describing is right — and I think it is, and I think the next decade will prove it — then several things that currently look like mysteries will stop looking like mysteries.
Why does a service that has ten times the raw library of a competitor lose subscribers at a higher rate? Because the library is mostly ambient-attention content, and the competitor’s smaller library is mostly arousal-weighted content, and the attention-weighted denominator favors the competitor even though the minutes-watched dashboard favors the incumbent.
Why does a live-sports package that costs a fortune still pay back, when the per-minute cost looks indefensible on a spreadsheet? Because a minute of live sports is not a minute of library drama. Live is the highest-arousal content in the television ecosystem, which means it is the densest earned-attention inventory available, which means the real per-unit cost — properly weighted — is a fraction of what the naive math suggests.
Why do streaming services keep rediscovering that their biggest retention lever is a small number of shows that people actually love, and not a large number of shows that people will technically watch? Because earned attention compounds and ambient attention does not. The math has been telling them this for a decade. They have been looking at the wrong math.
Why does the “value” tier — the cheapest, most library-heavy tier — churn so much harder than the premium, originals-heavy tier, even after accounting for price sensitivity? Because the cheap tier is almost entirely a low-arousal product. It is optimized for the denominator the P&L measures and not for the denominator the user is actually experiencing. It wins on the spreadsheet and loses in the brain.
I will not pretend this reframe is simple to operationalize. It requires content teams and data teams and product teams and finance teams to all agree that they have been looking at the wrong number, and then to agree on what the new number should be, and then to stay agreed on it for long enough for the first wave of contrary-looking quarterly results to come in and not cause a panic.
That is a lot of agreement in an industry that is not, historically, famous for it.
But the economics are going to force the reframe regardless. The services that continue to optimize for cheap minutes will keep producing cheap minutes, and their denominators will keep looking good, and their churn will keep being inexplicable, and their content libraries will keep failing to compound. The services that figure out how to price the cost of mild disappointment — the Tuesday night when the user opened the app and found nothing — will keep building libraries that get more valuable over time, not less.
This is not a content-quality argument. It is a measurement argument. You cannot run a business on the wrong denominator for more than about a decade before the business starts to disagree with the spreadsheet, and in this business we are now about a decade in.
The unit economics of boredom is a line item that does not exist on any P&L I have ever seen. It is the most important line item in the category.
Put it on the sheet.
]]>Eleven years is a long time.
I keep coming back to that duration. Eleven years ago was 2015. Snapchat was what teenagers were on. TikTok did not exist in the United States — ByteDance did not merge Musical.ly into TikTok in the US until August 2018. Netflix had not yet made Stranger Things, which premiered in July 2016. Regional sports networks were still a functioning business. Amazon did not carry its first NFL streams until the 2017 Thursday Night Football sublicense — and did not own exclusive NFL rights until the eleven-year Thursday Night Football deal that began in 2022. The idea that a single streaming service — any streaming service — would pay a league in the NBA’s range for rights would have sounded like a category error.
Eleven years from now is 2036.
I do not know what media looks like in 2036. Neither does Adam Silver. Neither does Bob Iger, and neither does Andy Jassy. What everyone did at the negotiating table in 2024 — which is what you always do in a media rights negotiation — was extrapolate from what had just happened and add a premium for scarcity. That is the right move, given the tools available. The NBA, to its credit, got paid for the cultural weight it actually carries in 2024. The partners, to their credit, paid for live inventory that has held its value better than almost anything else in the television economy.
But here is the thing about extrapolation. It works until it doesn’t.
I think the second half of this contract will feel like a different sport than the first half. Not because basketball will change — basketball does not change — but because three tectonic shifts are already underway underneath the deal, and each of them will keep moving, regardless of what the contract says.
The deal is not wrong. The world underneath it is changing.
Before I get into what is shifting, it is worth being clear about what the deal was priced against. Not the number — the number is a function of competitive dynamics between three well-capitalized bidders — but the assumptions embedded in the number.
Assumption one: linear television, while shrinking, still has enough reach and advertising value to justify ESPN and NBC paying what they paid. The cable bundle is collapsing — I have written about this — but collapsing slowly enough that the tail is still lucrative.
Assumption two: the NBA remains the second-most-valuable American sports property, behind only the NFL, and there is no credible competitor for the audience it aggregates on a Tuesday night in February.
Assumption three: streaming — primarily through Amazon, but also through the digital tails of Disney and NBC — will pick up enough of the audience that does not watch linear to fill the gap. That the NBA can, essentially, migrate its audience from cable to streaming without losing the monetization layer that makes the rights worth what they are.
Each of these assumptions is defensible in 2024. I am not sure any of them survives 2030 without significant asterisks.
The deal was priced against a demographic, behavioral, and distribution reality that is already shifting.
There are three shifts I want to walk through. I have opinions about each. I do not have perfect data about any of them, because nobody does — the measurement infrastructure for the media economy in 2026 is still built for a world that ended around 2018. Where I have specific figures, I will cite them. Where I do not, I will say so and argue structurally. Structural arguments do not need false specificity to land.
There is a particular kind of NBA fan that I suspect the league is aware of but does not fully know how to price.
This fan can tell you, unprompted, about the Victor Wembanyama dunk from last week, the Luka Dončić step-back that went viral on Sunday, the LeBron-to-Bronny highlight that racked up tens of millions of plays in under an hour. This fan knows every player, knows every contract, knows every trade rumor, knows which rookie is about to pop and which veteran is on the decline.
This fan may not have watched a full NBA game in months. Maybe years.
I want to be careful here, because I do not have proprietary viewership data, and the public data is partial. What the public data does say, though, is that the audience on streaming is running much younger than the audience on linear. Sports Media Watch reported that NBA on Prime Video had a median age of 46.8 through the first weeks of the 2025-26 season — about eight years younger than the linear networks. Sportico put the NBA on Prime median age at 49.4 across the full season window against 56.2 for linear NBA. The direction is unmistakable: the split audience is the story, and the linear half is aging. What I can say, as someone who spends a lot of time inside the sports media business, is that the anecdotal pattern around clip-first fandom is unmistakable too. The NBA’s cultural center — the place where the league lives in the popular imagination — increasingly sits inside social clips, inside group chats, inside short-form vertical video, inside fantasy and betting apps that deliver the moment without the match.
This is not a clip versus game binary. Clips are generative of games — plenty of people watch the full broadcast because a clip hooked them. But there is a growing cohort for whom the clip is the product. The game is a dependency, not a destination.
If you are selling eleven years of linear and streaming rights against the assumption that the full-game audience converts at historical rates, this cohort is your problem. Because the monetization model for a sixteen-second vertical clip viewed on Instagram is not the same as the monetization model for two and a half hours of a Lakers-Celtics broadcast. Not close. Not even in the same order of magnitude on a per-minute basis.
The NBA understands this better than most leagues. The league office has been unusually willing to let clips proliferate, to work with creators, to accept that cultural reach is upstream of paid viewership. I think that instinct is correct. But the instinct does not solve the economics. Cultural reach at clip scale does not, on its own, pay for eleven-year rights deals priced against full-game viewership.
Somewhere in that gap is a generation of fans who love the NBA and will not, as a rule, sit down for a full game. The league’s partners bought inventory assuming this gap does not widen. I think it is almost certain to widen.
What happens when it does?
One answer is that the full-game audience gets older, denser, and more valuable per viewer — a smaller but more monetizable core, which is what has happened to every mature television franchise in history. That is a defensible outcome but a shrinking one. Another answer is that the NBA, alongside its partners, invents a product that sits between the clip and the game — a ten-minute curated watch, a fourth-quarter-only stream, an AI-generated highlight pass personalized to the fan. The partners have the engineering capacity to do this. The question is whether the league and the partners agree on who owns the rights to that intermediate surface, and whether the money follows.
I have argued before that the universal remote control — that physical object that defined how a household watched sports for forty years — is dead, and with it, the assumption that an entire family sits down in front of one screen at one time. The NBA fan of 2030 is not sitting in the living room at 8pm Eastern waiting for the opening tip. That fan is on a phone, on a commute, on a treadmill, watching whatever the algorithm served, which may or may not be the game their rights-holder paid to broadcast.
Extrapolate that for eleven years. Now ask yourself whether the NBA’s next decade looks like the last one.
For most of my adult life, the NBA’s international story has been a one-way street. Players from everywhere in the world come to the NBA, because the NBA is where the best basketball is played and where the money is. International fans watch the NBA because it is where their national hero plays. The league has marketed itself, correctly, as the global top of the pyramid.
That story is starting to have exceptions.
The EuroLeague is getting better. Not in some abstract aspirational sense — in a direct, measurable, year-over-year sense. The caliber of basketball in the EuroLeague, the depth of rosters, the coaching, the tactical sophistication — all of it has been on an upward trajectory, accelerated by the fact that a growing number of elite international players are choosing to stay in Europe longer, choosing to return to Europe at a point in their careers where a decade ago they would have stuck it out in the NBA, and in some cases choosing to go to Europe from the NBA.
The Australian NBL has become a credible development alternative for top American prospects — LaMelo Ball signed with the Illawarra Hawks in 2019 on his way to being drafted third overall, R. J. Hampton played for the New Zealand Breakers before going 24th in 2020, and others have used the NBL Next Stars program as a path to the NBA draft, giving the NBL a recurring American-interest storyline that it did not have a decade ago. The Basketball Africa League, founded in 2019 by the NBA and FIBA and tipping off in 2021, is building out a competitive infrastructure on a continent whose basketball talent pipeline is, by every credible estimate, underexploited by a factor of many. The Philippines, Japan, and parts of Latin America all have domestic leagues growing faster than most American commentators realize.
None of this is a threat to the NBA in the competitive sense. The NBA will remain the top league in the world for the foreseeable future. The talent will continue to flow toward it. I am not predicting the NBA gets dethroned. I do not think that is happening.
But the media rights math does not care about which league is the best league. The media rights math cares about where the attention goes.
If the share of elite basketball consumption watched outside the NBA rises — even modestly, even incrementally, even only in specific international markets where the NBA has historically sold a lot of League Pass — that is a direct hit on the growth assumption embedded in the $76 billion. The league has spent the last twenty years arguing, credibly, that it is a global growth story with an underpenetrated international audience. That was definitely true when I started watching the Bulls beat all comers in the 90s. That is still true - though the ubiquity of Lakers / Warriors / Yankees merch around the world suggests the league has made a LOT of headway. It may be less true in 2030 than it was in 2024.
The NBA does not publicly disclose League Pass international subscriber growth at the country level. What the EuroLeague has disclosed is telling in its own right — EuroLeague.TV reported a 37% year-over-year increase in OTT subscriptions alongside the viewership growth cited above. The absence of a comparable NBA disclosure is, at minimum, something a second-half-of-deal bidder should notice.
The second-order effect is subtler but I think more important. The NBA has historically been able to define the sport of basketball internationally — what the game looks like, how it is played, what kids in playgrounds from Manila to Madrid emulate. That hegemony has started to fracture. A kid in Belgrade today can watch Nikola Jokić dominate the NBA playoffs and watch the EuroLeague final live and follow the ABA League standings, all without friction, all on the same device. The kid’s mental model of professional basketball is not NBA-centric the way it was in 2008. It is basketball-centric, with the NBA as one very prominent node in a graph.
A kid who grows up with that mental model is not lost to the NBA. But that kid is a different kind of customer than the kid who grew up thinking the NBA was basketball. And in media economics, different kinds of customers monetize at different rates.
Eleven years gives a lot of runway for mental models to shift.
Here is the shift I am most confident about, because it is already here and it is already the dominant mode of engagement for a large and growing segment of the NBA audience.
The most engaging NBA product in America, for millions of fans, is not the broadcast. It is the live-bet surface inside FanDuel, DraftKings, or their peer sportsbooks. The game is happening — but the game is happening inside an app where every possession is priced, every matchup is surfaced, every player prop is available to be played, reloaded, hedged, cashed out. The broadcast is a window on the action. The app is a participatory layer on top of the action. For a certain kind of fan, the app is now the primary interface and the broadcast is the ambient soundtrack.
I am not going to invent specific product-feature claims about any particular sportsbook. Operator-level NBA in-play handle, player-prop market counts per game, and bets-per-user metrics for 2025-26 are not disclosed at the granularity that would let me cite a number. Flutter’s FanDuel disclosures and the comparable DraftKings earnings commentary describe a product that is aggressively expanding the in-play surface — same-game parlays, player-prop injury protection, live-priced bet-builder markets — without publishing the per-game market counts.
What I will argue structurally is this: the sportsbook product gets better every year, and the broadcast product, structurally, does not. A broadcast in 2035 will still be a broadcast — a produced video feed of a basketball game with play-by-play commentary and advertising breaks. A sportsbook app in 2035 will be whatever the product teams at FanDuel and DraftKings and every competitor can ship in eleven years of iteration. The gap between those two surfaces, measured in engagement density per minute, is going to widen, not narrow.
The NBA, on the current structure, is a licensor to the sportsbooks. It sells data rights, integrity fees, official-partner designations. It does not, in any structural sense, own the live-bet surface. The sportsbooks own that. The sportsbooks are building the product that, increasingly, is how the NBA gets consumed.
I think the league cannot keep treating sportsbooks as licensees.
Not because the commercial deals are bad — the commercial deals are fine — but because the most engaging surface of your own product is being built by someone else, and that someone else is not obligated to optimize for the health of the league. The sportsbook optimizes for handle, for retention, for in-app engagement, for lifetime value. Those metrics correlate with a healthy NBA most of the time. They do not correlate all of the time. The divergences are where the problems live.
Consider the player-prop market. A sportsbook offering thousands of player props per game is, effectively, giving every bench player a market cap. Every rotation decision by a coach affects a market. Every stat-padding garbage-time minute is a payout event for somebody. The incentive structure that the sportsbook is introducing into the sport — at a scale that simply did not exist a decade ago — is not something the league designed. It is something the league is accommodating.
The second-half-of-the-contract question is whether the league remains accommodating or whether it tries to bring the live-bet surface inside the tent. The NBA has structural advantages here. It controls the officials, the data feeds, the schedule, the broadcast, the rules. If it wanted to ship a first-party betting-integrated product — and more importantly, if it wanted its media partners to ship such a product — it has the assets to do it. Amazon, especially, has the engineering and distribution to make an integrated watch-and-bet surface real inside Prime Video in a way no traditional broadcaster can. (Quick plug: we do too at Victory+)
Do I think this happens cleanly? No. Regulatory environments vary state by state. The league’s integrity concerns are real and well-founded. The history of sports betting and sports leagues is complicated by decades of mutual antagonism that the last several years have not fully undone. But the economic pressure to close the gap between the broadcast and the bet is going to keep rising for the entire duration of this contract.
Somewhere in the second half of this deal, somebody — league, partner, sportsbook, or some consortium of all three — is going to ship an integrated product that feels, to the fan, like the way to watch the NBA. And when that happens, every metric in the rights deal will need to be re-understood. Because the definition of what it means to “watch” an NBA game will have shifted.
I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.
I am not claiming the NBA is in decline. It is not. By every measure that matters — revenue, player talent, international presence, cultural relevance — the league is in the healthiest position in its history. The 2024 media deal is the strongest single piece of evidence for that health, not a counterexample to it.
I am also not claiming the partners made a bad deal. Disney, NBC, and Amazon each got what they needed. Disney got ESPN’s marquee property for another cycle, which is existentially important to ESPN. NBC got a top-tier sports franchise to slot against football in a post-Comcast-cable world. Amazon got the thing it has been building toward since the NFL Thursday night package: legitimacy as a live-sports destination, with the scale of basketball’s hundreds of annual game windows to keep Prime subscribers coming back. Each of those outcomes was worth what each partner paid, measured against the alternatives available in 2024.
What I am claiming is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: the world underneath the deal is not holding still for eleven years.
Generational inversion means the cohort growing into peak-consumption age does not consume basketball the way the cohort paying for cable consumed basketball. International reconsolidation means the growth assumption about international League Pass and global audience share has more competition than it did. The betting-content merge means the most engaging surface of the sport is being built outside the rights-holder’s product and will keep being built there unless the league intervenes structurally.
Any one of these is manageable. All three, compounding over eleven years, produce a different sport.
The NBA has navigated transitions before. The shift from network to cable. The shift from cable to streaming. The Jordan retirement. The lockouts. The analytics revolution. The globalization of talent. The league has been, among major American sports institutions, the most willing to adapt — the most willing to let the product evolve, the most willing to experiment with rules and formats, the most willing to lean into cultural currents rather than fight them. That disposition is why the 2024 deal got priced where it did.
I think the same disposition is going to be required to get through 2035 intact. Not just intact — to come out the other side with the league meaningfully stronger than it is today, which is the bar the partners paid for. It will require a product roadmap that treats clip culture as a first-class citizen rather than a leakage problem. It will require an international strategy that assumes competitive pressure on attention rather than assuming uncontested growth. It will require a betting-and-media integration that the league owns rather than licenses.
None of that is impossible. Some of it is already underway. But the gap between what the contract assumes and what the world is about to deliver is, I think, wider than the people who signed the contract are prepared for.
I wrote last summer about what isn’t changing in live sports — that even amid every wave of disruption in the media economy, live sports remains the most resilient asset in television, because the thing it delivers (synchronous mass attention, unfakeable human drama, ritual and identity) is the thing that gets scarcer as everything else gets more abundant.
I still believe that. Nothing I have written here contradicts it.
The NBA will remain, across any plausible version of the next decade, one of the three or four most valuable sports properties in the world. The 2035 finals will draw a massive audience, across whatever combination of screens exists in 2035. Fans will still feel the same thing watching a Game 7 that I felt watching the 1990 World Cup final on a black-and-white television in India. That part does not change.
What changes is everything around the core. How the game gets to the fan. Who builds the product layer on top of the game. How the attention gets sliced, priced, and monetized. Where the cultural center of the sport lives when nobody is watching a full broadcast. Which leagues the international fan considers peer competition versus lower-tier alternatives.
These are the things the rights deal cannot freeze in place.
The first half of the contract will look a lot like the last cycle. Linear will shrink on schedule. Streaming will grow on schedule. The league will be healthy and profitable and culturally dominant in the ways it has been for the last fifteen years. Everyone will feel good about the deal.
The second half is where the interesting questions live. Not whether the NBA survives — it obviously does — but whether the product the partners bought in 2024 still exists, in any recognizable form, in 2035.
I think it will exist. I think it will have to have been rebuilt at least once, probably twice, along the way. And I think the partners who understand that upfront — who treat the rights deal as a license to build, not a license to extract — are the ones who come out of 2035 with something worth having.
The deal is not wrong. It is a snapshot of a sport priced at a moment.
The moment is already moving.
]]>After fifteen years of this, I have developed one strongly held view.
Measurement frameworks outlast the businesses they were invented for. They persist, in dashboards and in decks and in the muscle memory of the people who came up in them, long after the underlying economics have moved. And the damage a stale measurement framework does is not that it produces wrong numbers — it is that it produces numbers that look right, and therefore do not get questioned, while the business they describe quietly turns into a different business.
This is what has happened to creator-economy measurement. The canonical metrics — CPM, followers, watch time, RPM — are all inherited from businesses that existed before the creator economy did. CPM is a television-and-display-advertising metric. Followers is a social-media-platform-growth metric. Watch time is a broadcast-network metric dressed up for a streaming environment. RPM is a YouTube-era adaptation of CPM with some platform take adjustments baked in.
None of those four metrics describe the business that most serious creators are actually running in 2026. Modern creator revenue is a composition of three things — long-tail attention rent, backlog-compounding library value, and direct-relationship subscription premium. The canonical metrics price none of the three components correctly. That is the measurement problem, and it is, I think, the most significant unresolved structural issue in the creator economy today.
What follows is a framework-level argument. I am not going to name specific creators or specific platforms beyond what is necessary. I am not going to publish revenue figures I cannot source. The argument is structural, not anecdotal. It is about measurement. It is, specifically, about why the measurement is wrong.
To see why the current metrics fail, it helps to go back to what each of them was originally built to measure.
CPM — cost per thousand impressions — was a mid-twentieth-century advertising accounting convention. It existed because the buyer (an advertiser) and the seller (a network or a publisher) needed a common language for the unit of inventory, and that unit was an impression. The metric assumed a few things. It assumed the impression was real. It assumed the environment around the impression was roughly uniform. It assumed the advertiser’s goal was aggregate reach, because that is what television and print advertising could deliver at scale and what the attribution tooling of the era could measure.
None of those assumptions hold in the creator economy. The impression may or may not be attended. The environment around the impression varies wildly — a ten-second ad read inside a thirty-minute trusted-voice podcast is doing something structurally different from a programmatic pre-roll on a random vertical video. The advertiser’s goal is increasingly not aggregate reach but resonant attention, which CPM does not measure at all.
Followers is a vanity metric that became an economic metric through platform politics. Originally, it was a crude proxy for audience size — how many accounts had explicitly opted to receive content from a given creator. That proxy worked, approximately, for about five years. Then the platforms moved to algorithmic feeds. Once the feed was algorithmic, the follower relationship decoupled from the distribution relationship. A creator with a million followers who was deprioritized by the algorithm was reaching fewer people than a creator with ten thousand followers who was being pushed to a broader non-follower audience. Follower count persisted as a metric anyway, because it was easy to count and because the platforms had an incentive to keep it in the conversation as a proxy for value.
Watch time was introduced by YouTube in 2012 as the replacement for view count in the algorithm — the platform was being gamed by creators who optimized for clickthrough at the expense of actual consumption, and the platform needed a metric that rewarded content which held attention rather than content which merely triggered a click. Watch time did that. It was a better metric than views, for the platform’s purposes in 2012. But watch time, like CPM, treats a minute as a minute. It does not distinguish between a minute of attentive, arousal-weighted consumption and a minute of ambient, half-attended background play. I have argued at length elsewhere that those two minutes are not economically equivalent, and the creator economy is a particularly acute place for that distinction to matter.
RPM — revenue per thousand views, or per thousand minutes watched, depending on the platform’s convention — is a creator-facing derivation of CPM with platform-share adjustments baked in. It is useful, as a rough input for a creator trying to model whether a given piece of content will cover its production cost. It is catastrophically inadequate as a representation of the value a creator is actually generating across their full body of work and across their relationship with their audience.
The business that a serious creator is actually running, today, has three revenue components. They do not show up discretely on most dashboards. They are often bundled into a single aggregated “monthly earnings” number that hides the structure underneath. The structure matters.
The first component is what I will call long-tail attention rent. A creator produces a piece of content. That piece of content, under the current platform economics, continues to be surfaced to new audiences for months or years after it was published. Each surfacing produces some small increment of attention, which converts into some small increment of revenue — through platform ad share, through evergreen sponsorship placements, through the indirect mechanism of driving new audiences to the creator’s other properties.
Long-tail attention rent is the recurring royalty a creator earns for content they already shipped. It is the closest analogue, in the creator economy, to the back-catalog revenue that a television studio earns from licensing reruns, or that a music label earns from catalog streaming.
CPM measures the first-day-surface of a piece of content. RPM measures the first-month or first-year surface. Neither measures the fifth-year surface. And for a creator with a meaningful body of work, the fifth-year surface is a very large fraction of the total lifetime value of that work.
Most creator-economy conversations treat long-tail revenue as a nice-to-have rather than a structural component. That is backwards. For a creator with three to five years of output, long-tail attention rent can be a material and growing share of total earnings — and it grows without any new production effort, which makes it the highest-margin part of the business.
The second component is adjacent to the first but meaningfully different. A creator’s backlog — the archive of content they have produced over years — is not just an annuity that spins off long-tail attention rent. It is also a discovery mechanism. It is the library that a new audience member, having found the creator through one piece of content, can work backwards through. It is the thing that converts a casual viewer into a subscriber, because it is evidence that there is more where this came from.
The economic value of that evidence is enormous and is not currently priced into any standard creator metric.
When a potential subscriber is deciding whether to commit to a creator — whether via a platform-native subscription, a newsletter sign-up, a Patreon tier, a Substack subscription, a YouTube membership — the single biggest determinant of that decision is whether the backlog is deep enough to feel like a worthwhile investment. A creator with five years of strong backlog is much more subscribable than an equivalent creator with six months of strong backlog, even if their most recent work is at the same quality level. The backlog is doing the work of de-risking the subscription decision.
A creator's backlog is not just an annuity. It is the thing that converts a casual viewer into a subscriber, because it is evidence that there is more where this came from.— the thesis
No current metric captures this. Watch time does not capture it. CPM does not capture it. Follower count does not capture it. And because no metric captures it, creators in the middle of their careers systematically underinvest in backlog quality — cleaning up old content, re-packaging older pieces, making the archive more discoverable — because the dashboard does not reward that work. The dashboard rewards new production.
The misallocation of creator effort produced by that measurement gap is, I think, the most expensive single thing in the creator economy today.
The third component is the one that has received the most rhetorical attention and the least rigorous measurement. The direct-relationship subscription premium is what a creator earns from the fraction of their audience who have opted to pay for ongoing access — through a newsletter subscription, a podcast membership, a Patreon tier, a Substack paid tier, a platform-native support mechanism, a private community access fee.
The subscription premium is structurally different from ad-supported revenue in ways that the standard metrics completely miss.
A paid subscriber is not a unit of audience that happens to also pay money. A paid subscriber is a different economic relationship entirely. They are much less churn-prone than a free follower. They consume more content per visit. They share more. They convert at much higher rates to the creator’s other offerings — books, courses, live events, merchandise. They are, in other words, the compounding asset. The free audience is the traffic. The paid subscribers are the business.
No creator dashboard I have seen represents this correctly. The dashboards aggregate paid subscribers into the same “audience” number as free followers, apply the same engagement metrics to both, and then report a blended revenue figure that makes it impossible to see which part of the business is compounding and which part is just churning through.
It would be tempting to read the preceding sections as an argument that the platforms just need to add a few new metrics and the problem will be solved. That is not the argument.
The measurement problem is structural. It is baked into the revenue models of the platforms themselves. A platform that is primarily an advertising business — which most of the major creator platforms still are — has a strong incentive to optimize its measurement layer around ad-facing metrics, because those are the metrics that determine the platform’s own revenue. CPM, RPM, watch time, and follower count are all, in one way or another, metrics that the platform’s ad sales organization cares about. The platform publishes those metrics to creators because publishing them is cheap — the platform is already calculating them for its own purposes.
Long-tail attention rent, backlog value, and subscription premium are metrics the platform’s ad sales organization does not directly care about. They are creator-facing metrics that would require separate instrumentation, separate reporting, and separate engineering investment. The platforms have, with rare exceptions, not made that investment, because the return on that investment accrues primarily to creators rather than to the platform’s own P&L.
The mispricing, in other words, is not an oversight. It is the natural equilibrium of a system where the measurement infrastructure is paid for by one party and consumed by another, and the two parties do not have aligned interests.
This is the part of the creator-economy conversation that I think gets least attention. Everyone is arguing about platform take rates. Almost no one is arguing about the measurement stack on top of which the take rates operate. But the measurement stack determines what the creators can optimize for, and the creators’ optimization choices determine what kind of content gets made, and the content that gets made determines what the platform actually is.
If we were starting from scratch — if a platform were being built today specifically to represent the creator economics that actually exist — the measurement stack would look different in at least three ways.
First, it would report long-tail revenue separately from current-period revenue, broken out by content-cohort age. A creator would be able to see, at a glance, what share of this month’s earnings came from content shipped this month, this year, two years ago, and five-plus years ago. That single breakdown would transform creator investment decisions. It would make the backlog visible as the compounding asset it is.
Second, it would report subscriber metrics and follower metrics as separate categories, with separate engagement profiles, separate revenue attribution, and separate lifetime-value modeling. The conflation of subscribers and followers into a single “audience” number is the single most damaging convention in current creator dashboards. Unconflating them would clarify, for every creator in the category, which part of their business is worth investing in.
Third, it would attempt some form of attention-weighting on the consumption metrics, even if the weighting were imperfect. Completion rate, rewatch rate, share rate, the ratio of active-visit time to passive-background time, the gap between autoplay-started views and user-initiated views — these are all fragments that exist in platform telemetry and that could, in combination, produce a directionally correct attention-weighted consumption number. Nobody is publishing that number today. No major creator platform — not YouTube’s public Studio reporting, not TikTok’s analytics, not Patreon, not Substack — surfaces anything beyond standard watch time and completion-rate derivatives as of this writing. The first platform that does will have an advantage that is hard to appreciate until you try to optimize a creator career without it.
I do not want to end on an optimistic note that is not warranted. The most likely scenario, in my view, is that the measurement layer of the creator economy does not change meaningfully for the next several years, because none of the incumbent platforms have a direct incentive to change it.
If nothing changes, several things will continue to happen.
Creators will continue to over-invest in new production and under-invest in backlog, because the dashboard rewards the former and is silent on the latter. The careers that compound will be the ones whose operators intuit the backlog’s importance despite the dashboard, and those careers will be rare.
Creators will continue to treat subscribers and followers as interchangeable, because the platforms do. The subscription premium — which is the most durable revenue component in the creator economy — will continue to be systematically underdeveloped, because the tools for developing it are not well-instrumented.
Advertisers will continue to price creator inventory using CPM-derived conventions, which will continue to misprice the high-resonance inventory by a large margin. The creators running the most attention-dense formats — deep-dive podcasts, long-form video essays, serialized written work — will continue to extract less revenue per unit of earned attention than those formats are actually generating, and the category will continue to feel, to serious practitioners, slightly economically broken in a way they cannot name.
The creator economy, in other words, will continue to behave like a large, growing market that is also — at the level of the individual creator P&L — a little more precarious and a little less lucrative than it should be. The gap between the aggregate growth story and the individual-creator experience will persist, and it will be explained, as it has been for years, by the somewhat mystical invocation of “platform dynamics” rather than by the much more prosaic reality of a measurement stack that is describing the wrong business.
I want to land on a claim that I think is strong.
The measurement layer is not a technical artifact sitting adjacent to the creator economy. The measurement layer is the creator economy, because it is the thing that determines what creators can see, what creators optimize for, and therefore what gets made and how it gets monetized. A creator economy with the right measurement layer is a fundamentally different market than a creator economy with the wrong one — different content, different revenue distribution, different career paths, different power dynamics with platforms.
The industry has, for fifteen years, treated the measurement question as a detail. An engineering task. Something that would get solved eventually. I do not think it will get solved eventually by the incumbents. I think it will get solved — if it gets solved — by a new generation of tools, likely independent of the major platforms, that start to represent long-tail revenue, backlog value, and subscription premium as first-class metrics in a way that the platforms do not.
When those tools arrive, the creator economy will feel, retrospectively, like it had been badly mismeasured for its entire existence. Careers that looked thin will turn out to have been deep. Careers that looked dominant will turn out to have been shallow. The people who understood the three components — long-tail rent, library value, subscription premium — without being able to measure them cleanly will turn out to have been operating on a different and better map than the dashboards allowed.
I do not know exactly when that arrives. I do know the direction the map is moving in. And I know that the creators who internalize the three-component framework now — who build their work around all three, rather than just the one the dashboard rewards — will be the ones building businesses that compound while the rest of the category is still counting followers.
The measurement problem is solvable. Nobody is solving it yet.
That is the opportunity.
]]>Sometime around the spring of 2024 — and the pivot was marked, for me, by the May 2024 announcement that Disney+, Hulu, and Max would sell as a combined package — the streaming industry collectively conceded that the Great Unbundling was over. The services that had spent a decade explaining why the cable bundle was a relic, a regressive cross-subsidy, a tax on consumers who only wanted the good parts, now stood up and said, with straight faces, that actually what the consumer really wanted was a bundle. Just a better one. A smarter one. A streaming-native one.
I watched this happen with some amount of grim amusement. I had written the previous fall about what the death of the universal remote really meant — that the subscription bundle was a child of the cable era and that it could not simply be reassembled in software. I did not think that view would be validated as quickly as it was.
In the eighteen-ish months since the Disney-Hulu-Max announcement, the industry has tried a lot of bundle shapes. Co-branded stacks. Telco-plus-streamer sleeves. Sports-plus-entertainment packages. Plus-Plus tiers. Family tiers. Household tiers. Wallet-based promotional stacks routed through credit card co-brands. A joint sports product — Venu — announced with fanfare on February 6, 2024, blocked by a federal judge in August 2024, and abandoned by its three partners in January 2025 before it shipped a single minute.
Most of these bundles have collapsed. The ones that have not collapsed yet are trending, by any reading, toward collapse. And the failures are not random. They fall into a small number of recurring modes, and the modes rhyme, and once you see the modes you cannot stop seeing them.
This essay is a short taxonomy. Four modes. Each of them is a different way a streaming bundle dies.
The first and most common mode is what I will call the dual-sub stack. You take two standalone subscription services, staple them together, discount the combined price by some amount, and launch the result as “a bundle.”
On a whiteboard, the math looks compelling. Service A costs fifteen dollars. Service B costs twelve. Together they would be twenty-seven. You offer them together for twenty-two. Consumers save five dollars a month. Both services get credit for a new incremental subscriber. Churn goes down because users are now anchored to two content libraries instead of one. Everybody wins.
In practice, almost nobody buys the dual-sub stack. The consumer who would have bought both services separately buys the bundle and saves five dollars, which is not a new acquisition — it is margin compression dressed up as growth. The consumer who would have bought only one service is not actually going to add a whole second service just to save money on the one they wanted. They look at the bundle, compare it to their single-service subscription, and keep the single-service subscription.
The dual-sub stack, in other words, does not expand the market. It just re-prices the intersection of the two existing markets. And it re-prices that intersection downward.
This is what has happened with most of the headline “bundle” announcements of the last eighteen months. Disney has not, to date, publicly disclosed a specific take rate for the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle — an absence that tells you something in itself, given how prominently the bundle was positioned at launch. What has been disclosed is that the bundle’s monthly price moved up in October 2025, from $16.99 / $29.99 to $19.99 / $32.99, which is the move a service makes when discount-driven acquisition is not paying for itself. The stack exists. You can buy it. The services have a line item in their investor decks that proudly reports the bundle as a retention lever. But the actual behavior — the movement of subscribers from one-service to two-service — is much smaller than the whiteboard said it would be, and the discount-driven margin compression is much larger.
The dual-sub stack is the bundle shape that looks most like a bundle on paper. It is, for exactly that reason, the one that fails first.
The second mode is what happens when a single service tries to bundle itself, internally, by creating a tier structure that is supposed to satisfy everyone and instead satisfies no one.
Almost every streamer now has some version of this. There is an ad-supported tier at the bottom, at a promotional price. There is an ad-free premium tier at the top, at a price that keeps climbing. And there is, in between, a middle tier that nobody at the company can really explain.
The middle tier was supposed to be the bundle inside the service. A little cheaper than premium, a little richer than the ad tier. It was supposed to capture the subscriber who was price-sensitive but did not want ads, or who wanted ads but wanted some kind of upgrade in quality. On a whiteboard, it looks like a reasonable compromise.
In practice, the middle tier is a zombie. Nobody chooses it deliberately. The subscribers who land on it are mostly legacy — they were on the premium tier when it was cheaper, got price-migrated to the current middle tier during some reorganization, and have not yet bothered to check whether the new structure makes sense for them. They will check, eventually. And when they check, some of them will move up to premium and some of them will move down to the ad tier and some of them will cancel entirely.
The middle tier is a zombie. Nobody chooses it deliberately. The subscribers who land on it are legacy, and when they check what they are paying for, they leave.— the thesis
The zombie middle tier is a bundle in the sense that it is trying to be many things to many people at once. It is failing for the same reason the dual-sub stack fails. The bundle is not expanding the market. It is cannibalizing the two good tiers that bracket it.
Netflix did the honest thing. It eliminated the Basic plan for new customers in 2023 and migrated existing Basic subscribers off the tier in June 2024, collapsing its pricing architecture into a cleaner three-point menu: ad-supported, standard, premium. Most of the other major streamers are still defending their middles, and their middles are still emptying. The ones who keep the middle tier are usually doing it because eliminating it would require admitting, publicly, that the previous pricing architecture was wrong. That is a harder conversation than continuing to report the tier.
The third mode is the most embarrassing one. The co-branded tourniquet is a bundle announced, usually with press-release fanfare, in response to a churn crisis. Two services — typically ones that are not natural partners — stand up together on a stage, announce a joint offering, describe it as strategic, and then quietly abandon it within a quarter or two when the underlying numbers do not move.
The Venu Sports arc is the canonical example, and it did not even make it to market. Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced on February 6, 2024 a joint sports streaming service. It was positioned as the answer to the cord-cutting-and-sports problem. FuboTV sued on antitrust grounds, and on August 16, 2024, federal judge Margaret Garnett granted a preliminary injunction blocking the service from launching. The partners began appealing. And then, on January 10, 2025, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced they would not pursue Venu at all — the same week Disney announced a merger of Hulu + Live TV into Fubo that resolved the underlying lawsuit. Eleven months from announcement to abandonment. The service never launched.
The thing to notice about Venu is that it was the correct idea, in the abstract. A single destination for the sports that are otherwise scattered across three disconnected services is, structurally, what the user actually wants. I have written before about why a consolidated sports experience would outperform a fragmented one by a very large multiple — the audience will find the game if the game is findable.
The reason Venu collapsed was not that the product idea was wrong. It was that the three partners could not agree on whose P&L the bundle would protect, what the sub-economics of a joint venture between three rivals would look like, and — most importantly — whose churn problem the bundle was solving for. All three companies were trying to use the same bundle as a tourniquet on three different wounds. When the courts intervened, the partners were ready to walk away. The bundle had not been strategically necessary to any of them. It had been politically expedient for all of them.
Every co-branded tourniquet launched since has some version of this problem. Two partners, each solving their own quarterly churn, stapling together a temporary offering and calling it strategy. The offerings get announced with phrases like “long-term partnership” and “reimagining the consumer experience.” They get deprioritized, quietly, within two to three quarters when the partners figure out that the bundle was not saving either of their balance sheets, and then they get unwound in an even quieter press release some weeks after that.
The co-branded tourniquet fails because it was never designed to succeed. It was designed to show motion on a quarterly earnings call. The motion was the product. Once the quarter had closed, the bundle’s job was done.
The fourth mode is the one I find most structurally interesting, and it is the one most relevant to the work I do every day. Call it the sports-shaped hole.
Every bundle that has been attempted in the last eighteen months has had, at its center, an unresolved question about sports. Sports is the content category with the most retention value per minute, the highest ad load tolerance, the lowest substitutability, and the worst fit with the rest of the streaming library. Sports lives on a different calendar. It has a different rights structure. It is licensed in ways that make it hard to include in a general-entertainment bundle and hard to exclude from one without creating a visible gap.
So every bundle ends up building around a sports-shaped hole.
Some bundles put sports in a separate tier and charge extra for it, which makes the bundle feel like a cable bundle with an extra sports charge, which is the exact thing the streaming pitch was supposed to eliminate. Some bundles include only a partial sports lineup, which generates constant support tickets asking where the other games are. Some bundles exclude sports entirely and watch their churn spike in October and February and then again during playoff season, when the users who were willing to tolerate a sports-free service for a few months finally give up and go to wherever the games are.
The underlying issue is that sports rights are currently structured across too many services for any single bundle to solve the sports problem. The NBA’s eleven-year deal announced on July 24, 2024, for roughly $76 billion, split rights across Disney (ESPN / ABC), NBC (NBCUniversal / Peacock), and Amazon (Prime Video), with the first season of the new contract beginning 2025–26. The NFL has games on CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Amazon, and a Sunday Ticket package that moved exclusively to YouTube TV beginning with the 2023 season in a reported $2 billion annual deal. The regional sports network business, meanwhile, has collapsed into itself — Diamond Sports Group filed for Chapter 11 on March 14, 2023 and eventually emerged as Main Street Sports Group, with the surviving networks now pushing direct-to-consumer wrappers because the cable-distributed RSN model is no longer solvent.
No bundle currently in market solves all of that. None can, structurally. The rights are not available to be consolidated at bundle-construction time. And so every bundle announcement in the last eighteen months has included some version of the line “we are working to bring more sports to the platform over time,” which is a sentence that means, in practice, that the sports-shaped hole will remain a sports-shaped hole for the foreseeable future.
A bundle with a sports-shaped hole is not a bundle. It is a fragment marketed as a unified experience. Users figure this out quickly. Most of them do not object loudly. They just keep a second subscription to whatever service carries the games they care about, and the bundle becomes the thing they use for everything other than the thing they most wanted the bundle to solve.
If the four failure modes all have in common that they try to look like bundles — announced as bundles, marketed as bundles, invoiced as bundles — then the implication of the pattern is that the bundle which actually works will look, on its surface, almost nothing like a bundle at all.
I think that is right, and I think the shape of the successful bundle is already visible in outline.
It is a single service with a single interface and a single remote action. You open one app. You browse one library. You press play on one title and the thing plays. Behind the scenes, the content may be coming from six different rights holders and ten different billing arrangements. The user does not know and does not care. The experience is unified.
That is what a real bundle is. It is not an invoice decision. It is an experience decision. The cable bundle, in its time, worked not because it discounted the per-channel price but because it restored a single remote — one set of buttons, one channel guide, one expectation about how the television worked. You did not think, when you clicked up and down through channels, about which content company owned which channel. You just watched television.
The industry has not yet built the thing I am describing. Most of what is being marketed as a bundle today is an invoice staple — two subscriptions sold together, two billing events, two apps, two remotes. That is not a bundle. That is two services with a shared line item.
The successful bundle will be something different. It will be one service with one remote that happens, under the hood, to have licensing agreements with many rights holders. It will not be launched with a press event. It will not be co-branded. It will not have a dedicated landing page explaining the partnership. It will just be the service that works, and it will grow because it is the thing users actually want, which is not a bundle discount but a single act of turning on the television.
I suspect we are at the tail end of the bundle-announcement era. The four failure modes have repeated enough times that even the executives most invested in the bundle narrative are starting to notice that the announcements are not producing the subscriber numbers the announcements predicted. The dual-sub stack is not converting. The zombie middle tiers are being collapsed one by one. The co-branded tourniquets are unwinding. The sports-shaped holes remain unresolved.
The next eighteen months, I think, will look different. Fewer bundle announcements. More consolidation. More services buying each other rather than partnering with each other. More direct-to-consumer sports services rolled into general-entertainment services rather than offered as separate tiers. More library content flowing between companies as licensing deals replace failed partnerships. The single-remote experience will start to emerge — not from any one company’s strategic masterstroke, but from the accumulation of consolidation decisions driven by the fact that none of the standalone strategies are working.
The companies that will be around in 2030 are the ones that are already designing for that single-remote outcome. The ones that are still announcing bundles in 2027 will be the ones that did not notice the pattern had changed.
The bundle, as currently marketed, is dead. The bundle, as experienced by the user, has not even been built yet.
That is where the next decade of this business is going to be won.
]]>This was India in the early 1990s, and the rules were simple. You were a science student or you were an arts student. You picked a track, it picked your future, and that was that. Science meant engineering or medicine. Commerce, meant accountancy. Arts meant law or — and this was always said with a slight wince — journalism. There was no third door. There was no “what if I like physics and I want to write?” That question did not compute.
I picked science. I ended up in journalism. And then marketing. And then streaming media. And now I spend my days building data dashboards, negotiating distribution deals, and writing essays like this one on the weekend.
The binary was wrong. It is almost always wrong.
Here is what I have come to believe after twenty-some years of working across countries, industries, and disciplines: binary thinking is the most dangerous shortcut the human mind takes. Not because the categories it creates are always false — sometimes there really are only two options — but because the habit of reducing the world to two buckets is so deeply satisfying that we reach for it even when it destroys nuance, flattens reality, and leads us to terrible decisions.
We do it in politics. We do it in business. We do it in our personal lives. And every time, the thing that matters most — the texture, the tradeoff, the spectrum — gets crushed in the compression.
A binary feels decisive. It feels clean. You are either with us or against us. You are either growing or dying. You either succeeded or you failed.
But the world is not clean. The world is a gradient. And the people who navigate it best are the ones who have learned to sit with that.
Consider how we talk about politics — not just in America, but increasingly everywhere. Left or right. Red or blue. Progressive or conservative.
These labels are not useless. They describe real tendencies, real coalitions, real differences in how people think society should be organized. But the moment you turn a spectrum into a binary, something insidious happens: the middle disappears. Not because moderate people stop existing, but because the framing no longer has a place for them.
I have watched this happen in real time over the last decade. The Pew Research Center has been tracking political polarization in the United States since 1994. In their landmark study, the share of Americans who hold consistently liberal or consistently conservative views across a range of policy issues jumped from 10% in 1994 to 21% by 2014. The median Democrat and the median Republican, who once overlapped significantly in their policy views, now barely touch.
But here is the part that gets less attention: the majority of Americans still hold a mix of liberal and conservative positions. They want fiscal discipline and a social safety net. They believe in border security and a path to citizenship. They are, in other words, living on the spectrum. The binary does not describe them. It just ignores them.
And the cost of that ignorance is enormous. When you frame every policy debate as a zero-sum war between two camps, compromise becomes betrayal. Negotiation becomes weakness. The politician who reaches across the aisle is not praised for pragmatism — she is primaried for disloyalty.
The binary does not just describe polarization. It produces it.
The same pattern shows up in boardrooms. I have sat through more strategy meetings than I can count where a complex decision gets collapsed into a false choice.
Should we focus on growth or profitability? Build or buy? Go direct-to-consumer or keep our distribution partners? Double down on our core product or diversify?
These are not either/or questions. They have never been either/or questions. And yet the structure of a board deck — the two-column comparison, the pros-and-cons slide, the “Option A vs. Option B” framework — practically begs you to turn them into one.
I have seen this play out in my own industry. The sports media world spent the better part of five years arguing about whether the future was streaming or linear television. Streaming or cable. Digital or traditional. Pick a side.
The answer, as it turned out, was both — in shifting proportions, for different audiences, at different price points, on different timelines. The companies that committed fully to one side of the binary — the ones who dismissed streaming as a fad — are the ones that lost the most ground.
(I wrote about the 10x opportunity in sports streaming last year. The thesis was not “streaming beats linear.” It was “free, ad-supported streaming unlocks an audience that neither model was reaching.” That is a third option. Binaries do not have third options.)
The best strategic thinkers I have worked with share a common trait: they resist the binary. When someone presents them with two options, their first instinct is to ask, “What is the third option you are not showing me?” or “Is there a version where we do both, but sequence them?” That instinct — the refusal to accept the frame — is worth more than any MBA framework I have ever encountered.
But the place where binary thinking does the most damage, I think, is in how we think about our own lives.
Success or failure. Winner or loser. Passion or pragmatism. Career or family. Ambitious or content.
These are the binaries we carry around in our heads, often without even noticing them. And they are brutal, because they turn a rich, complicated, evolving life into a pass/fail exam.
I chose science over arts at fourteen. But the truth is that I never stopped writing. I never stopped being curious about language and narrative and how ideas move through culture. I was crazy enough to never tell myself those interests were secondary — hobbies, not a vocation — just because the binary said so. Science was the real thing. Writing was the other real thing.
It took me a long time to understand that the most interesting version of my career was not on either side of that binary. It was in the intersection. The ability to think analytically and communicate clearly. To help build a financial model and write the narrative that explains why the numbers matter. To sit in a room full of engineers and translate what they are saying to a room full of salespeople, and vice versa.
That intersection — the space the binary told me did not exist — turned out to be the most valuable place I could stand.
I suspect this is true for most people. The things that make you distinctive are rarely the things that fit neatly into a single category. They are the combinations, the contradictions, the both/and.
I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that all distinctions are false, or that taking a clear position is somehow a failure of nuance. There are moments when you have to choose. There are hills worth dying on. There are genuine either/or decisions — you accept the job or you do not, you ship the product or you do not, you marry the person or you do not.
But those moments are rarer than we pretend. And even when the final decision is binary — yes or no, in or out — the thinking that leads to that decision should never be.
The danger of the binary is not that it forces you to choose. The danger is that it forces you to choose before you have understood what you are choosing between. It compresses the deliberation. It skips the part where you sit with complexity, explore the gradient, and discover that the best answer might be one that neither bucket anticipated.
In politics, the gradient is where policy actually gets made — in the messy, unglamorous work of compromise and coalition.
In business, the gradient is where strategy lives — not in the bold declaration of “we are a streaming company” or “we are a linear company,” but in the quiet, unglamorous work of figuring out what this particular audience needs, right now, and how to serve them.
In life, the gradient is where you actually live. Not as a success or a failure, not as one thing or another, but as a person who is — on any given Tuesday — some complicated mix of both.
The binary is a shortcut. And like most shortcuts, it gets you somewhere fast, but it is rarely where you meant to go.
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