When UK media company TalkSPORT announced last month that it was entering a crowded Irishsports media market, some local operators may have raised their eyes to heaven.
After all, those who want to listen to chat about sport here are already spoiled for choice. As audience habits change and fans increasingly follow competitions via clips, liveblogs and social media posts, simply talking about sport, whether it’s on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or via proprietary apps, is where the action increasingly is. From multinational conglomerates to scrappy upstarts, everyone wants a piece of the action.
UK-based TalkSPORT, which will launch shows on Gaelic football, hurling and women’s sports from early May, joins two other international players: German-owned Bauer Media’s OTB (formerly Off the Ball) and Belgian-headquartered Mediahuis, which last year poached star Off The Ball presenter Joe Molloy to spearhead its Indo Sport offering.
In times gone by, all three of these would have been thought of as mere extensions of the legacy media brands from which they sprang. Bauer controls national radio stations Today FM and Newstalk, Mediahuis owns the Independent newspaper titles, while TalkSPORT’s parent company Onic, which owns a string of local Irish radio stations is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, proprietor of the London Times, the Sunday Times and Sun newspapers.
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It’s not hard to see what makes sport talk shows such an attractive proposition for these companies. It’s cheap: stick two or three pundits around a microphone and press “record”. And there seems to be an inexhaustible appetite among fans. But the low barrier to entry also means there is a lot of competition.
There’s the long-running and much-loved indie podcast Second Captains, who has successfully built a loyal community of paying subscribers. There’s The42.ie, a sub-brand of Journal Media, owners of the Daft property site. There’s RTÉ’s suite of GAA, rugby and soccer shows. The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner have their own sports podcasts.
And then there’s a plethora of local heroes and fans with mics serving niche audiences around the country with coverage of their local teams.
If there is a lesson to be learned here, it may be that people come to these shows not just to be informed about the latest match results but for humour, companionship and perhaps a sense of community
That’s before you even consider the big British providers such as the BBC, Sky, the Guardian, and Goalhanger.
You may not care about sport itself, or listen to any of these shows, but they have become one of the most interesting zones of combat in the struggle for survival in the digital media age. With MediaHuis’s expansion and TalkSPORT’s arrival, it seems inevitable that there will be casualties.
But the belated awakening by Irish advertisers to the potential of podcasting has led, for the moment at least, to a general effervescence and an appetite for more inventory – in other words, more shows.
That could spell trouble further down the road. Many people have little or no interest in sport and, while coverage is slowly becoming less male-dominated, it still skews heavily towards just one half of the population.
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Unlike broadcasting, there are no public analytics available on the audiences that these shows currently command. But it’s interesting to see sport is notable by its absence from the upper reaches of the Spotify and Apple charts in Ireland, with only Indo Sport registering in the top 20 of either.
As the market matures, and some of these realities start to seep in, some big decisions lie ahead. One is whether to remain free to all listeners and rely purely on advertising revenue, or to go partly or fully behind a paywall, as OTB and Second Captains have already done.
There are, of course, many options in between, with subscriber-only content interspersed with free shows. A successful subscription strategy can see a podcast disappear from the charts but deliver better revenues with a much smaller audience.
Another question relates to the shift to video. In the US and elsewhere, YouTube has become an engine of podcast growth, reaching audiences that the audio platforms don’t (although Spotify is also increasingly video-led). OTB produces a lot of video content, while TalkSPORT promises that every episode will be available on podcast platforms as well as on its new Irish YouTube channel.
If paid subscriptions and a shift to YouTube are the two forks in the road that lie ahead, it’s worth paying attention to the experience of Paul Machin, founder of The Redmen TV. Next week The Redmen will bring live shows to venues in Belfast, Dublin and Cork. Started by Machin after he completed his media studies course and realised he was never going to get a BBC traineeship, it is exclusively devoted to one subject – Liverpool Football Club.
Redmen began when Machin started recording chats with mates about everything and anything to do with his beloved Liverpool. The site grew and grew, and now employs 10 full-time staff, along with a number of part-timers.
The Redmen TV has more than half a million subscribers to its YouTube channel, but Machin tells me that what makes the business tick is the paying subscribers who come to the website.
He appreciates the reach that YouTube offers but contrasts the negativity and snark that characterises much of the conversation about sport on social media and the open internet with the positivity and sense of humour that he sees as part of the Merseyside identity. “Liverpool is a glass half-full place, and that’s what we try to reflect,” he tells me, while acknowledging that a sunny disposition is easier when your team is cruising to the league title.
If there is a lesson to be learned here, it may be that people come to these shows not just to be informed about the latest match results but for humour, companionship and perhaps a sense of community. The shows that can build that bond with their audiences are the ones that will prevail in the long run.
