The Rise of the Influencers
On June 30, the National Hockey League (NHL) made an announcement that I think is worth paying attention to. It tweeted that social media star Josh Richards, a 19-year old, has been appointed a special adviser. This is a fancy word for saying that he will help the league appeal to the younger generation.
Details are still sketchy about how much Josh is being paid for this role but it’s not hard to imagine it’d be a windfall.
The NHL, considered to be the premier professional ice hockey league in the world, is a professional ice hockey league in North America. It is the fifth-wealthiest professional sport league in the world by revenue, after the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the English Premier League.
Yet the sport is losing fans. More accurately, it is not gaining fans in the 16–24-year-old bracket that NHL is increasingly interested in. Curiously, I found out that all major US professional sports leagues have struggled with attracting younger fans. According to a recent study by Morning Consult, almost 50% of Gen Z respondents (Age 13–23) said they don’t even consider themselves sports fans.
It’s the same for football fans too. TEC Agency quoted studies made by sports demographers revealing that youngsters no longer display the same interest in football as past ones did. They neither watch football that often nor go to the stadiums.
But specifically speaking, the National Hockey League (NHL) has struggled more than their other league counterparts — the EPL, NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, etc. — to attract a younger generation of fans. So it’s looking at strategies to attract followership that would guarantee its future.
Attracting younger fans is beneficial for many reasons. Two quick reasons: One, being passionate about sport leads to revenue generation. Last week, I shared some statistics on my page about the matchday revenue of Manchester United. While matchday revenue was £115 million in 2009, it dwindled to £111 million in 2019. Two, a sport that is not attractive to the younger generation will struggle to attract great talents into the sport. It’s common sense: Getting into sport is partly about fame for the players. If there is no fame, then less people will be interested. And then we go back to the revenue question.
NHL isn’t growing as it should. In 2015, it generated $4.1 billion. That’s only $1 billion more than it did 5 years before in 2010. 5 years later, revenue was $4.4 billion in 2020. Many blame the coronavirus pandemic, but it was again just $1 billion more in 2019 than in 2015.
And this is where the NHL thinks Josh comes in. Josh Richards has built one of the largest & most engaged social platforms in the world at just 19-years-old.
- TikTok: 25.4 million followers
- Instagram: 7.3 million followers
- YouTube: 2.4 million followers
- Twitter: 2 million followers
An average video on a single TikTok video posted by Josh has 3 million views. Compare that to the 2020 Stanley Cup Finals, the Champion’s league competition equivalent in the Hockey world, which averaged 953,000 viewers per game.
Richards has more than 37 million followers across the four main social platforms, and accordingly to estimates he does somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion monthly impressions. For context, that would put him well within the top 1% of all social media accounts globally.
Even more interesting? The majority of his 37 million followers are 16 to 24 years old, exactly where the NHL is lacking.
Early this week, I was thinking about professions that didn’t exist while I was growing up. And it’s just incredible how much power and clout the social influencer profession continues to command.
Estée Lauder admits that somewhere around 30 to 50 percent of their social/digital budget goes toward funding social media influencers. One recent report by Insider Intelligence predicted that it would grow to $15bn globally by the end of 2022. For perspective, that is about half of Nigeria’s 2021 budget.
The tech consultant SignalFire thinks that “the creator economy” — built by those who post and monetise content online — employs more than 50 million people, and is the fastest-growing sector for small businesses in the world.
As it always happens to me, I am always thinking, “Are Nigerian policymakers paying attention?” How much of this pie can we help or just allow the Nigerian young people to take for themselves?
