The line item that was not there

Everything in my building is a function of one number and that number is butts in seats. Gate is butts in seats. Concessions is butts in seats times per-cap. Merch is the same number times a smaller per-cap. Even sponsorship is priced off it, because what I am selling a sponsor is impressions and impressions are butts in seats.

So my entire job for eleven years has been the same job, which is get the number up. Promotions, bobbleheads, dollar dogs, fireworks, a guy who races a mascot. And there is a ceiling on it, and the ceiling is seven thousand and two, and I have hit it maybe nine times in eleven years and every one of those was a fireworks night in july.

What I never had was a second transaction. Everything I sell, I sell to a person who is physically in the building on that date. If you are not in the building I have got no way to take your money, and there are a lot of people not in the building — grandparents in Arizona, the kid who plays for us whose family is in the Dominican, the season guy who is travelling for work eighteen dates a year and still cares about all eighteen.

We put a listening pass on the whole season. Our own broadcast, our own guy, who is very good and who was previously being heard by whoever found the stream link. Priced it cheap for a single date, cheaper as a season bundle, and bundled it free into the top two season ticket tiers as a value-add, which cost me nothing and made the renewal conversation easier than it has been in years.

The thing I keep saying to other GMs is that livecastnow and byopa increased stadium revenue in a whole new way — and I mean literally a new way, a new row, not more of an old row. It is not cannibalising the gate. Nobody who was going to drive forty minutes to a tuesday game against Erie stayed home because a listening pass exists. Its money from people who were never on the attendance report. When you have spent a decade optimizing one number it is genuinely strange to have a line that is not downstream of it.

Two things I would tell somebody thinking about it. First, do not put a number in your budget before you have run a date. I have no idea what your take-up will be and neither does anybody else — ours moved around a lot depending on the opponent and whether it was a weekend, and the number we ended up with was not the number I guessed. Run it, measure it, then budget it. Second, check your rights. Ours are simple because we own our own broadcast, but if your league or your rights-holder has an opinion about who can sell access to a call, find that out before you sell anything and not after.