Skating the Line Between Core and Casual: The Fan Engagement Challenge in Hockey
Neil Horowitz
Senior Customer Strategist; Director, Product Marketing at Greenfly, Inc.
Which sport's fans are the most avid?
Not which has the most fans, but the major sport whose average fan is highest on the avidity scale?
It's an interesting thought experiment because while everybody knows the NFL Rules the roost in the US, do they have the highest concentration of fervent fans? To have a high density of diehards is not necessarily desirable. Businesses, brands, creators — they all love their biggest, most passionate fans, but the common trend is to chase the casuals.
Sean McIndoe has a lot of avid fans. The longtime hockey writer who's also known as Down Goes Brown learned early on in his career that it was better to be the best in a niche than to try and compete for the generic masses. McIndoe took a new take to hockey content, infusing comedy and (eventually) esoteric minutiae and wit that a subset of fans fell in love with. He's been number one at what he does ever since.
"If there was a strategy that I mapped out I think at some point I kind of realized — and maybe this would be the advice to people starting out — is first of all, early on when there's nobody reading you, try a whole bunch of stuff," said McIndoe, who was working a full-time 9-to-5 when he started blogging about hockey on the side. "Go nuts. Because if it stinks who cares? Five people are going to see it. You'll know kind of what works for you and what doesn't or at least you'll form an idea, and then from there find that niche, find that voice. Try to be number one at something."
He continued: "It's better to be number one at something very small than to be number 100 in the 'I'm (national hockey writer) Greg Wyshynksi’s 100th backup; like if a hundred things happened to all the people ahead of me I'm the new Wysh' — and you know Greg's a friend of mine — he's awesome, but he's awesome because he can do everything and he can do it fantastic and he's built this decades-long career doing it.
"There's no market out there for the 100th-best Wysh, but there might be a market out there for the first or second or third best in some sort of niche."
McIndoe's work appeared in several major publications and he spent time at Grantland (RIP) before making his way to The Athletic, where he works today. He recognizes the advantageous equation at play for him at The Athletic. While wholly ad-supported sites are beholden to driving site traffic to every last fan, a subscription site like The Athletic thrives on fans who love journalism and/or individual writers so much that they'll pay for the right to read.
DGB (an abbreviation for Down Goes Brown) wants his work to be enjoyable for everybody who ends up on his stories, but he also recognizes there's something special about including some more obscure stuff within his stories, with a wink and a nod that only the geekiest and most ardent will understand.
"As a subscription-based business, [The Athletic] is not just about page views. Every time we write something someone doesn't like [readers] come in like ‘Oh, it's clickbait.’. It's like 'Dude, we're a subscription model. What — do you think it helps me to get 100,000 people to click on something that they hate. Like walk me through how you think that benefits me or the site," said McIndoe. "So it's been nice to do that in a way that you that I'm not constantly churning out [content], I'm not sitting there going I gotta do ten posts a day and I gotta rank first in Google and I gotta jam keywords into the headline and all of that stuff...
"You’re right, you can't go completely niche all the time," McIndoe continued while noting he tries to keep a balance. "If it's too niche, at some point, there just isn't enough even if that's not what you're being directly measured by. But at the same time that niche audience are going to be the ones who love you the best..."
McIndoe's niche audience loves him. (I read and listen to just about everything DGB produces) His fans likely have a high average avidity rate. The same could be said about fans of the National Hockey League. You won't find too many fly-by NHL fans. It's perhaps a blessing and a curse. The ceiling when it comes to ratings and self-identifying fans for the NHL will never have as many fans as the NFL, that's a given.
As McIndoe sees it, in some ways the league leans into that too much, focusing on growing revenue per capita instead of seeking more capitas (fans).
I think the NHL — I've been banging this drum for a long time — they haven't done enough to grow the audience they haven't done enough to make the product appeal to as many people as they can.
“I think what [NHL Commissioner] Gary Bettman has done well is he is figuring out how to squeeze more and more money out of the audience they do have, and to maximize how much they can get from that," he said. "That can be a business model. A lot of sports or entertainment places out there are realizing that Hey, I can't grow the audience but what I can do is figure out who my real core audience is and then just grabbing by the ankles and hold them upside down and shake them, and that's sort of what the Bettman model has been."
The NHL revenues, like every major pro sports league, continue to go increase — those avid fans are paying off. But the ceiling for the NHL is lower without the finding avenues to bring in new or casual fans. A lot of emerging sports are also on a constant quest for new and casual fans to notice them and sample their product with an open mind, in hopes they'll seek to learn and follow more (For example, sports like lacrosse, cricket, rugby, and volleyball, among many others).
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The optimal set of conditions is existing fans welcoming newbies with open arms, serving as their sherpa and helping them learn the ropes. As McIndoe has seen all too often in his career, however, hockey fans are quick to call out novices and, well, shunning or shaming them. Is the 'I liked this band when they were playing small clubs' audience alienating new fans?
"The gatekeepers can go get bent," said an exasperated McIndoe. "I hate that stuff. I hate that stuff where it’s ‘Can you name five players?' Shut up, man. Hockey fans are ridiculous for that because the two things the hockey fans love doing most are complaining that there aren’t enough hockey fans. ‘How come everybody doesn't see this sport the way I do?’ And then the second anybody new shows up just absolutely kicking them in the ass and turning them around and sending them home because they don't know or how dare you ask a question. How dare you get a player's name wrong?"
McIndoe recounted a time when his former boss at Grantland Bill Simmons, a powerhouse in the sports industry for years and still today, wrote about hockey but messed up a player's name. The fans were relentless, possibly chilling Simmons from delving more into NHL content.
McIndoe did note that such overly protective ownership is not necessarily just a hockey thing; social media and the internet foments such tribalism.
"That's not a hockey fan thing or even a sports fan thing, that's an internet thing," he said. "I know there are other industries that have much bigger problems with the gatekeeping stuff, but my message to hockey fans is Man, pick a lane. If you want hockey to be a little niche small thing that only you're cool enough to know about, okay. You want to be the cool indie band, that's fine.
"But then don't complain and at the same time you’re going to complain not enough people are hockey fans like we are. We're all like 'We've got the cool indie band; we're like Hey, this isn't this the biggest band in the world and then they put out an album that goes to number one and we go 'Oh, man, they've changed.' No, they haven't it's exactly the same."
The NHL may be the answer to which league's fans have the highest avidity rate. That concentrated cohort has helped McIndoe and others like him succeed, he concedes, but it's all those diehard fans that may be stopping the NHL from moving more mainstream.
We want to move fans up the passion spectrum; more superfans of your team, league, or sport is a great outcome. But there's a balance (just like with McIndoe in his articles) — serve the superfans, for sure, but also develop the easy avenues and entrypoints for fly-by and casual fans. You want a big cohort of diehards who consume every nook and cranny of the sport, but you also want a sizable segment that knows next to nothing.
This was such a good interview with Sean McIndoe and I wanted to also include his insightful take on the increased presence of tribalism among media outlets. Such polarizing cliquishness is obvious in the world of politics, but that same us vs. them mentality is starting to penetrate sports, too, as this statement from McIndoe implies.
“You have this relatively new thing where people used to almost identify themselves by what team they cheered for, that's as old as sports. But now it's like a lot of people identify themselves based on what media they consume, which is deeply weird to me. Like I'm a [Spittin’ Chiclets] guy. I'm like Alright. Cool. You know, I get all my stuff from Outkick. Awesome, never talk to me, please, I don't know, I guess. But you know some of that is the more personal style of writing and certainly podcasts it feels like a much more social thing and you start to identify with people. And it's all good; like it's more opportunities…I really mean that when I said Hey, if you like Outkick, please never talk to me. I feel that way. But also I'm not saying shut the site down. I'm not saying you don't ever get to like the stuff that you like. Go like the stuff that you like, don't ever talk to me about it because it's stupid, but go ahead and like your stupid stuff. You're allowed to. I like some stupid stuff too. Let's get the audience out there.
“I don't love the thing where it kind of turns into If you like my site that means you have to hate these guys or if you listen to my podcast we're enemies with these guys — like, what are we doing? But at the same time some marketing guy would be like, No, That's how you build loyalty. That's how you do this and that. I guess that makes sense. It's not really my angle on things."