Sports affiliates lose a serious amount of high-intent revenue every year by relying on static banner ads and generic betting prompts that fans tune out the second they arrive. When strong editorial is paired with run-of-the-mill ad inventory, users bounce. The problem compounds when you do deliver a new user to a sportsbook. The interface they land in feels like a math test. Users end up in rows and columns of numbers that are full of bets they don’t care about and may not understand. Whtyhme wicrroon-mg oamnsewnetsr are Every few years, the industry falls in love with a new term, and right now everybody wants to talk about micro-moments. Looking at fan engagement that way is a simplistic answer to a real problem. Capturing a six-second highlight clip after an amazing play sounds great on a slide deck, but social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram have an almost unassailable advantage in monetizing micro-moments. By the time a clip lands on screen, the moment is already in the past, and fans are scrolling past it for free in their feeds. Chasing afterthe-fact clips means competing on someone else’s playground, where the social algorithms always win. Live is where the value sits Live sports have the shortest shelf life of any content, and with that comes the biggest opportunity. As the last DVR-resistant genre on TV, the true value lives in that fleeting live window while the game is still in the balance: the outcome undecided, tension peaking, history not yet written. The catch is that fans struggle to find those games in the first place. When I founded Are You Watching This?! in 2006, it grew out of personal frustration at missing them. There’s no worse feeling than waking up to learn I missed a massive upset or triple-overtime thriller while I was raking the leaves or doing laundry. Today, it’s never been harder for sports fans to follow their teams. A third of all days now carry more than 100 sporting events, and Saturdays in the American football season can top 500. Gracenote’s 2025 State of Play report found that viewers spend an average of 14 minutes searching for something to watch, 12 minutes in the U.S., and that two-thirds of respondents want their service to tell them where to find a specific program, even when it sits on a different service. ENGAGE FANS. MONETIZE THE MOMENT. Capturing a six-second highlight clip after an amazing play sounds great on a slide deck. But by the time it lands on screen, the moment is already in the past, and fans are scrolling past it for free. Chasing afterthe-fact clips means competing on someone else’s playground, where the social algorithms always win. GPWAtimes.org 28
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