An abuse of Olympic IP undermining the TOP commercial model?
Or
What happens when you let creators spread the Olympic message to a vast and non traditional sports audience? Done with wit and a sense of fun, which are not words often associated with the Olympics and/or the IOC.
While we’re on Olympic marketing, is there a more annoying thing in sport than the IOC’s Visa exclusivity clause, which precludes everyone else from buying stuff without fannying around with prepaid Visa cards.
Reward Visa customers, but don’t punish Mastercard users.
Unofficial Partner is growing rapidly in the US. Substack’s data gives a breakdown of newsletter subscribers, by location:
The podcast audience has always been bigger and more widespread than the newsletter, but each week the data shows the same growth trend across North America - see below.
Questions arising
It’s great news that people are finding and sharing the podcast and the newsletter in the biggest and most influential sports marketplace in the world.
The lure of America brings a question, one I’ve been asked in a previous life.
Twenty years ago, I was editor of SportBusiness in London. The company was bought by a group of people keen to court the US market.
Warburg Pincus bit on the sales story and ploughed in millions of OPM, predicated on going head to head with SBJ in the US.
We opened a New York office. Then….nothing.
Spoiler: It failed.
Twenty years on and SBJ remains a big beast in the US market - they bought Leaders to have a foothold in London - and are now competing with a new generation of sports biz platforms such as Front Office Sport, Sportico and a host of Substack newsletters and podcasts of various shapes and sizes.
The US market doesn’t need another new entrant. It’s very well served.
But there is a gap, which we’re filling. To be the place people from that market come to when they’re thinking beyond the US.
It’s really hard to be relevant as a commentator on the business in the US.
We’re not close enough to it, we’re not out and about having conversations, gossipy lunches and after work drinks, testing pet theories and chatting about not-yet-announced new deals and have-you-heard-where-that-bloke-you-can’t-stand-is-going-next whispers.
The other thing that happens is more subtle.
It’s to do with tone of voice.
You start writing for people you don’t really know.
When I write this newsletter I assume a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader, a version of the Paul Hawksbee Rule: Keep up or fuck off.
Jokes in particular become difficult, because you need to give too much context.
I know the reader.
Or, more accurately, I’ve a very clear idea of who I’m writing to. Sometimes I personalise this, as though writing an email to a mate.
Problems begin when I start to write for an imaginary reader, who I don’t know. I’m guessing. Reaching. The language becomes blander, less colloquial, more generic, less interesting.
All these small details are what collectively get called tone of voice.
In the blizzard of stuff to hit your inbox, I think this is why you’ve clicked on this email and have read this far.
It’s another way of saying that focus is critical to creating something worthwhile.
I remember Two Circles co-founder Claire Rogan once said to me, it’s important to be known as the best at something.
When we started UP, we wanted to be the best sports business podcast and newsletter in the UK.
You’ll have a view as to whether we’re succeeding or not but this is not about that.
Of course, we’ll talk and write about America - but we’ll do it in our own way, from over here.
This week we did a podcast going deep in to three stories in the US marketplace, with Daniel Kaplan, formerly of SBJ, ironically.
And of course, if you’re over there and think that you can help make what we do better, we’d love to hear from you.
The global fan is one of those stories I’m beginning to lose faith in, like the conversion funnel and the pursuit of happiness.
The global fan exists because Netflix, Amazon and Apple want it to exist. And for as along as they want it to exist, the rights holders will play along.
At Sportel last year, Marissa Banu-Lawrence of Fox Sports put it well (on a very good APAC panel hosted by Imran Yusuf of SportBusiness): Australia is hyper localised. Even within Oz you have to go state by state. Australian sports fans are nuts for NRL, AFL, rugby codes, cricket.
What do the global streamers do with this information?
The NFL’s international rights remain stubbornly below 3%, ditto the IPL.
The Premier League is a weird outlier in this regard. Just because the Prem makes a pile of cash from Thailand doesn’t mean you will too, regardless of how you fiddle with your product to fit the international market.
This next phase may well settle the big argument as to whether sport is global or local.
The globalists say it’s only the heritage local media markets that stand in the way of sport and its gazillion worldwide fanbase, a story based mainly on social media impressions.
If and when the NFL goes global-one-ticket on Amazon or Apple, that friction is removed and with it the excuse.
At that point the long tail works its magic, local meets global and the rest is geography (terrible podcast).
But the research industry better be ready for the backlash if it turns out those global fan engagement numbers are just another hallucination.
I found an answer to a question I ask every day, usually when I'm about half an hour in to doom scrolling Spurs clips and dogs welcoming their owners back from war: What makes TikTok so addictive?
TikTok isn’t just addictive by accident. Its algorithm is constantly learning, testing, and adapting to keep you scrolling — often without you realizing it. #bytedance#tiktok#socialmedia#addictive#algorithm
TikTok isn't playing the same game as everyone else.
The platform's recommendation engine, known internally as Monolith, doesn't care who your friends are. It doesn't need you to follow anyone, like anything, or build a profile. It watches what you actually do - and it learns in real time.
Most recommendation systems work in batches. They collect your behaviour, process it overnight, then serve you updated suggestions the next day. Monolith updates continuously. Every scroll, every pause, every half-second you linger on a video before swiping away - it's all feeding the machine, which adjusts its predictions immediately.
The system tracks micro-behaviours that users aren't even conscious of making. Rewatch a clip? Data point. Speed up your scroll after certain content? Noted. The length of time between opening the app and your first engagement? That matters too.
This is why TikTok can hook new users so quickly. The "cold start" problem - how do you recommend content to someone you know nothing about? - gets solved within minutes. A few swipes and Monolith has enough signal to start serving content that keeps you watching. The result is an algorithm that knows what you want before you do.
🧵 Here's a similar deep dive on the X algorithm. Some dark shit.
The X algorithm now shows you how censored or suppressed your account is. Details from what penalties you incurred from past posts and subject matter. It’s a blueprint for how censored TikTok and Instagram might become and I highly recommend you search your own account as well. #elon#algorithm#censorship
Why has Mr. Beast’s Beast Games underperformed on Amazon despite $100 million budget, why did The Sidemen drop from 73 million YouTube views to 2.4 million on Netflix, why did Pop the Balloon see similar declines?
The mistake: assuming top-tier creator success represents the average outcome when creators migrate platforms. It’s the ceiling, not the floor. Most creators moving to streaming miss the charts entirely. The best performers are acquisitions like The Amazing Digital Circus—where Netflix paid bargain prices after creators shouldered all risk.
What happened to 'broadcast quality'?
Traditional notions of “quality”, dictated by producers and broadcasters, have inverted. Audiences define quality based on interest, not technical specifications. A Roblox game with “16-bit console from 25 years ago” aesthetics can attract 25 million concurrent users (World Cup final numbers). Jen Topping identifies emerging demand for sophisticated storytelling as AI slop floods platforms. Professional production may find opportunity precisely because trustworthy, authentic content becomes scarce. The challenge: platform economics reward sameness.
The 4 future opportunities in AI 🤖 20VC with Groq Founder & CEO Jonathan Ross. Link in bio. — HarryStebbings Business businesstips businessadvice entrepreneur ceo startup founder entrepreneurship ai artificialintelligence grok nvidia futuretech techtok #careertips
The four problems represent the evolutionary stages that AI companies must solve to reach full potential:
The Hallucination Problem: This is the first and most critical hurdle to overcome. It involves ensuring that models do not generate false or fabricated information, which is a foundational requirement before more complex tasks can be reliably automated.
Breaking Down Sub-goals for Agentic AI: Once hallucinations are addressed, the next challenge is enabling AI to effectively deconstruct large objectives into smaller, actionable sub-goals. Solving the hallucination problem first is vital here because long chains of agentic tasks are currently prone to introducing errors and "hallucinations" that can derail the entire process.
The "Invent" Stage: Currently, Large Language Models (LLMs) function by making the most probable prediction, which results in predictable and often "terrible" creative output in art and writing. The challenge for the "invent" stage is to move beyond probability to generate insights or content that are non-obvious yet clearly correct once they are seen.
The Proxy Stage: The final stage is reached when a model can effectively proxy decisions for the user. This involves the model acting with the level of trust and authority granted to a Chief of Staff or Executive Assistant, making autonomous choices regarding logistics, scheduling, and priorities—such as deciding which interviews to take and which flights to book.
This progression is similar to climbing a ladder where each rung must be secure before reaching for the next; you cannot trust an AI "Proxy" to handle your entire schedule (the top rung) if it still "hallucinates" your destination or fails to understand the "sub-goals" of travel logistics (the bottom rungs).
Jonathan Ross’s third bullet point is the most interesting and relevant to the SportsbizGPT question.
The Invent Stage is about the machine providing non-obvious answers.
From here you get to the ‘proxy stage’, when you can trust an LLM to make decisions on your behalf. Because making decisions is a creative act. It requires selecting one option and forgoing others.
Each of the four problems will be solved by ‘an industry defining tech company’. That’s the big race. And it will set off a series of other races.
Who will build the machine that makes real sense of sports media, betting, ticketing and fan engagement datapoints?
