MOTORSPORT: TV numbers and skewed views

The annual global media report by Ecclestone-controlled Formula One Management (FOM) reckons the TV audience for the 19 F1 GPs in 2014 was 425 million viewers.

The report hasn't been publicly released – it never is, but is made available to F1's key sporting and commercial participants and a few others – but that audience claim amounts to an average of about 22.37 million viewers a race.

Without the opportunity for close scrutiny of the report, the numbers nonetheless are far more realistic than the annual claims a couple of decades ago of hundreds of millions of viewers per GP and billions for a season.

Those claims, stated as fact, came on the letterhead of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the world governing body of motorsport in which Ecclestone also has been hugely influential.

Now the still relatively-new promoter of the World Rally Championship has claimed "a global annual TV audience of 800 million viewers" for last year's WRC.

More precisely, WRC Promoter GmbH – a Munich-based company that took on management of the rally series in 2013 and is a joint venture between Red Bull Media House and sportsman media holding – says last year's WRC TV audience was 799.46 million viewers, compared with 607.23 million in 2013 – an increase of 32 per cent.

WRC Promoter's communications manager Mark Wilford tells us that makes the average number of viewers for last year's 13 WRC rounds 60.78 million. On our calculator it's closer to 61.5 million.

WRC Promoter and Rally Australia organisers crowed in mid-November that last September's rally at Coffs Harbour had 46.34 million viewers – a jump of 18 million or 64 per cent on the year before (although, on WRC Promoter's full-year figures,  that's about three quarters the world average).

However you look at WRC Promoter's numbers, which it says are based on work done by sports marketing research company Repucom, they would have you believe that world rallying is almost three times bigger than F1.

One thing that can be said about WRC events is that they are competitive over three days, even a little longer with the opening stages on Thursday nights, while GP racing is on Sundays, with roughly an hour's qualifying on Saturdays the only other genuine competition.

But who would believe that the audience for world rallying is bigger than that of F1? Only the most blinded, gullible rally fan.

NASCAR is the biggest form of motorsport in America and the numbers it gives for the telecasts of its 36 Sprint Cup races are far more believable – an average of 5.3 million viewers in the US.

The contradiction this author sees in the numbers for F1 and the WRC come at a particularly interesting time in Australia.

V8 Supercars this weekend begins a six-year deal with the Fox pay-TV service to telecast its annual championship. The Ten network will simulcast six rounds of that series each year free-to-air. The contract is said to be worth $241 million – $196 million in cash (almost $33 million a season) and $45 million in advertising. The vast majority of the cash will come from Fox, ultimately controlled by American-based, Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

The Seven network, which telecast the V8 Supercar Championship in recent years and, before a decade on Ten, through its "childhood" as the Australian Touring Car Championship, lost out to Fox's cheque book this time around.

But, while the V8 Supercars test at Sydney Motorsport Park on both days of this weekend, Seven will screen Sunday's Bathurst 12-Hour GT and (largely) production race at the NSW regional city's famed Mt Panorama.

The first two-thirds will be on 7mate, but the final four hours on the main Seven channel.

While the 12-Hour boasts a field twice that of V8 Supercars' Bathurst 1000 each October, and a plethora of exotic cars, Seven faces an uphill battle to replicate the success it had in making the 1000 one of the marque events on the Australian sporting calendar.

There's potential upside for Seven though, and probably not a lot to lose if the 12-Hour doesn't keep growing with the bulk of the drivers of the Aston Martins, Audis, Bentleys, Ferraris, McLarens, Mercedes SLSs, Nissan GT-Rs, Lamborghinis, Porsches and other expensive brands little or even totally unknown to the Australian audience. The full-time V8 Supercar drivers have been precluded from taking part in the 12-Hour this year by the clash, deliberately orchestrated, with their test in Sydney stretched to two days for the first time. Not that many of them are particularly happy about any of that.

But what could be particularly pertinent in the V8 Supercar context is F1's experience as more of its races have gone to pay-TV.

It was Bernie Ecclestone's most anointed journalist, Christian Sylt, who revealed the crux of FOM's latest global broadcast report.

Sylt reported on the admission of a 5.6 per cent decline in F1's global audience and even an "alarming loss" in Britain, despite British driver Lewis Hamilton winning last year's world title in a fight that went down to the last GP in Abu Dhabi.

"The revelation is the latest hard evidence that sports rights holders who opt for bigger paydays from subscription TV operators are doing so at the expense of wider, mainstream audiences for their sport," Sylt and co-author Nick Harris wrote in London's Mail on Sunday newspaper.

"The fall in F1 numbers ... showed that worldwide audiences fell by 5.6 per cent to 425 million different fans tuning in across the season from 450 million previously."

The "different" fans is questionable. Highly questionable. Surely some fans watched up to all 19 GPs last year and are being counted multiple times.

"Ecclestone attributes the decline to 'the move [F1] has towards pay-TV in several markets over the last three seasons'. This includes in Britain, where year-on-year audiences were down 5.2 per cent," Sylt and Harris wrote.

F1 switched to pay-TV in Britain in 2012 when Rupert Murdoch's Sky Sports there began screening all the races live, while the free-to-air BBC now only shows half of them live (and not the Australian GP this year).

Sylt and Harris said that move in Britain had "boosted F1's UK broadcast income by 110 per cent to £65 million [which converts to about A$126.5 million at today's rates], but at the cost of a wider audience".

V8 Supercars will see a massive financial boost too from its Fox/Ten deal, but there are fears about what the cost might be in terms of audience.

Sylt, writing alone this time, also analysed the FOM report for the website of American business magazine Forbes.  

While we query the accuracy of the reference to "different fans", Sylt says on Forbes.com that the FOM report "measures the number of unique viewers of F1 – anyone who watched at least 15 non-consecutive minutes of it".

We fear, or at least worry, that he – and it (the FOM report) are getting away from the standard measuring stick here – the average audience over the course of a race telecast.

That can be a matter for another day, but Sylt proclaims that F1 is "still the world's most-watched annual sports series".

Suspect he might come under challenge on that pretty quickly, if not already – perhaps firstly from those associated with American football, which has just concluded with its Super Bowl, and Britain's Premier League soccer.

Sylt says F1's teams have not been hurt by the trend towards pay TV, although the recently-defunct Caterham and Marussia teams might disagree. As too might Force India and Lotus, which could be the next to go.

"F1's teams ... share 63 per cent of the sport's profits as prizemoney, which came to US$797.5 million [A$1.0232 billion at today's rates] last year," he wrote.

"It compensates for the fact that a reduction in the number of viewers could in turn reduce the sponsorship rates commanded by the teams.

"... although the number of TV viewers has slightly reduced, they are more likely to have a higher disposable income and fervently follow the sport, which in turn makes them more valuable to F1's sponsors".

And Sylt quotes the FOM report claiming that over the three seasons of the shift towards pay-TV networks as the primary broadcasters "F1 has retained 85 per cent of the free-to-air reach achieved in 2011".

He also alludes to "an unexpected boost in website traffic".

"Mr Ecclestone is famous for not being a fan of digital and social media but, nevertheless, internet traffic increased 24 per cent year-on-year as 50 million unique users visited the sport's official website, Formula1.com," Sylt says.

"Even TV broadcasters benefited from this as the report states that last year the BBC website delivered more than 2.6 million streams of live coverage and almost 15 million requests for F1 content such as previews, highlights and summary edits."

Unsurprisingly, Sylt concludes that F1 is "on track for more deals which split coverage between pay TV and free-to-air".

There has been speculation that Australian F1 fans will see precisely that from next year, mirroring the V8 Supercar picture starting this year.

While the tone of the analysis on the trend towards F1 on pay-TV for the Mail on Sunday by Sylt and Harris was negative, Sylt's scribbling for Forbes.com on the same day ended with a much rosier summation.

"Any other sport would be in crisis if it lost tens of millions of viewers, but Mr Ecclestone's smart strategy has kept ardent fans, teams and sponsors satisfied," he wrote there. "It could prove to be the perfect formula."

We wait to see. On both V8 Supercar and F1 scores here in Oz.