Watching YouTube Build A Fan: Insights From My 7 Y/O Cousin’s Journey To Sports Fandom

When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 90’s I had some serious choices to make with regard to my team. Would I follow the East Bay (Oakland) teams…or would I put my allegiance toward the San Francisco teams?

The East Bay won out. From the age of 7, I became a Warriors, A’s, Cal, & Raiders fan. And really other than those friends that became SF fans that lived in the East Bay…I didn’t really have any that showed allegiance outside of the Bay Area teams.

But there were no additional choices. I was surrounded by television, radio, and other forms of distribution that showed me I only had 2 sides of the bay to choose my favorite teams from.

Sure there were national TV games…but the main exposure was to local teams.

Today, that has totally changed. The amount of access we have to consume content in sports has totally shifted how a fan is being built. I am watching it happen live with my 7-year-old cousin….and the reasons why he chooses his team allegiances are staggeringly different than what I grew up with.

I am watching the evolution of how a fan is built, and it is opening my eyes to how teams will need to adjust to win fans in this upcoming generation.

In this article, I’m going to dissect the reasons why my cousin is an LSU, Bengals, and 76ers fan….and he lives in Portland, Oregon.

Why is he a fan of this mix of teams? The epicenter has its roots in YouTube

The reason I am so high on YouTube in sports comes with where the next generation of fans gets their first introduction to sports. When they are curious about the sport, they learn through YouTube because it is the platform they grew up on and trust.

Let me start this off by stating that this kid does not get a lot of screen time access. It is not like he is on YouTube 24/7. He maybe gets half an hour a day to watch any screen programming (minus full sports games). I don’t want to give you the impression that his parents let him mindlessly binge on videos here. They are pretty strict on screen time.

Honestly, I got way more growing up.

As I mentioned, when I was growing up we relied on local TV and ESPN to consume content. The storylines that dominated those networks were the ones that shifted our fandom.

If you were an athlete on the cover of Sports Illustrated…It got my attention.

Today though, young fans consume in a very different way. The access to digital platforms to consume is what influences the next generation of fans.

And I think the key item here is the access part. He has multiple points in which he can access YouTube. His tablet, school laptop, and others.

But probably the biggest item is his smart TV. He can on his television search for sports videos and watch from his couch. YouTube, for him, has replaced cable.

Does he still surf cable? Yes…but only for live games. If he is looking to watch videos on a non-gameday…he is going straight to YouTube.

In the same way, I used to go to ESPN, he relies on YouTube to get his information at a time when he is curious and learning about sports. The main difference is he has the power to search.

Young fans today are empowered to not just be told what they should consume, they can actively search for it. And look, this is a bit scary…but with the right parental controls, he can safely fulfill his sports curiosity.

This is the key difference that I see here. If we understand what they are searching for (sample basketball highlights) we can create videos that influence which team he roots for (more on this later).

But let’s specifically dive into the teams.

So why is he a 76ers fan? The genesis of this journey.

My 7 y/o cousin is a fan of the Philadelphia 76ers because when he first started surfing YouTube on his smart TV….76er highlights were the first to populate the search term “basketball highlights”.

From there, I saw binge-watching Embid & Simmons highlights sessions every day. He became obsessed with the team.

He knew every player on the team. He learned about the 76ers history. He started to demand that when the 76ers play on TV he watch….which followed the next day of another view of 76ers highlights from the previous game on YouTube.

The 76ers won when the Trailblazers should because the highlights and videos on YouTube were the first to show up on search terms. Many times, it wasn’t from the 76ers team either. The content was from another account making highlight cutups.

I want to pause for a second here to highlight the enormity of that statement above. In a city where you see Blazer’s signs EVERYWHERE, where he lives 15 minutes from the Moda Center, in a time when the Blazers have Damian Lillard and went to the conference finals….the 76ers beat out the Blazers due to the videos that showed up on YouTube.

This to me made no sense. When I first saw this I fought it. I tried to get him to watch Baron Davis Warriors highlights and push my Warriors agenda on him. I even tried to have him watch Dame videos to build that fandom. But it was too late.

What are the short-term financial implications of this? This kid will not accept free Blazer tickets to a game unless they play the 76ers. I tried even with Warriors vs. Blazers tickets. That is how deep this fandom reaches.

Ok, but that is only one team. Is there a trend with his other favorite teams?

In short…yes. This is when I decided I couldn’t fight it and it was a real trend.

He became an LSU fan with the Joe Burrow run. But this part is one of the most interesting pieces that solidify this new process.

I’m a huge college football fan. For about a year I tried profusely to get this kid into watching and caring about college football.

Trying to get him to watch College GameDay as I had growing up to get him excited. Trying to get him to watch and care about the CFB playoffs.

Nothing would work…this kid just didn’t care about college football. That is until Joe Burrow’s highlights started popping up on YouTube…

After watching his first set of Joe Burrow YouTube highlights at the beginning of that magic LSU season…it turned into him knowing the entire schedule of LSU football, demanding to watch every game, and starting to care about college football.

Again let me pause here and reinforce this point. About five YouTube LSU highlights with Joe Burrow turned him into a college football fanatic with LSU at the forefront. He went as far as starting to ‘despise’ Alabama and actively rooting against them in other matchups.

Let’s again look at his local options. You have Oregon and Oregon State being the usual local choices. From a team standpoint, it is very easy to get a kid to become an Oregon fan. Cool jerseys, exciting football play, you have all the pieces for them to be the clear pick.

But again, when he searched for “best football player” Joe Burrow’s videos popped up first, not Oregon or Oregon State ones…(I was actually present for this search and watched him become an LSU fan. My jaw dropped).

Here is the kicker. He had no favorite NFL team until Joe Burrow was drafted by the Bengals.

As with college football, he would watch NFL games but had no favorite team. Nothing on YouTube had caught his eye for that.

And this wasn’t due to a lack of NFL games present in his life. Literally every Sunday we would go over and watch NFL football (Thanks to CBS for not having NFL games on streaming, had to find a cable box and they had one).

But with that fateful NFL Draft, when the Bengals called his name….he immediately started asking about the Bengals and searching for Bengals highlights.

Now it is pushed beyond just Joe Burrow. He knows all the players. He is asking me how the team can protect Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow left, it wouldn’t matter. The Bengals have him seemingly for life.

The Seahawks, the local team here in the Northwest had no shot…and honestly, in this situation, I’m not sure how much they could have done on YouTube to grab his attention.

They would have to overpower his love for Burrow in that content.

But this is still an issue. Again in a world where the Seahawks should have grabbed his fandom…they weren’t in the mix early with a lack of videos that he watched on YouTube.

YouTube was more of an influence than all the sports fans around him.

The key takeaway here is for the next generation of sports fans, YouTube is a foundational pillar for influencing the teams you choose. Watching a fan being built in front of my eyes, this was absolutely the pillar item that swayed his allegiances.

YouTube because his trusted source for what team to root for. The videos that the platform popped up with his general searches around sports were the ones that won out.

YouTube had more influence than any family or local team. He had Warriors, A’s, Dodgers, Colts, Raiders, and Cal fans at every turn trying to influence his fandom (I even made a deal that I would only buy Warriors, Cal, A’s, & Raiders gear for him for Christmas and birthdays…that was turned down. He only wanted gear from his teams).

He had sports in the traditional sense all around him through TV and local events…but his interest was directly driven by the videos that popped up on YouTube.

This on the one hand for society is immensely scary. The fact that a platform can help form a fanatical following at such an early age is frightening. That is an overall discussion that I think we will have as a society have to hash out in the very near future.

But from a micro sports perspective, we no longer can rely on traditional or local coverage to persuade the next generation of fans. Either in sport or team. There is a new consumption habit that we are, for the most part, dropping the ball on.

YouTube is where fans are being formed. Like it or not, it is one of those items that we cannot fight any longer.

The key here is with a few hacks…you can dominate the story

As I witnessed this over the last 4 years something kept coming to my mind that is a key part of the future of sports. In the past, it was PR that drove the national stories. Whatever team Sports Illustrated or ESPN was talking about was the one that drove fandom. That was decided by the producers at those publications. Certain teams and stories got more weight.

But as we look at this process, the real key is making sure that on YouTube your team is one of the first teams that show up for certain search queries.

Think about this. You can be a minor league hockey team and dominate the keyword search on terms and build a fan across the globe. You can be an FCS program that tells a story better than anyone else on YouTube with your content for young fans and literally snatch their fandom from the larger teams.

In marketing, this is done constantly to take down giants. D2C brands are taking down generational giants because they understand that commerce online is more impactful than sending someone to a store.

JC Penney’s is losing in this way to Amazon. Blockbuster to Netflix. Toys R’ Us to Amazon.

The music industry is the same way. An artist can blow up with a SoundCloud account or Tik Tok trend faster than they can by going through a record label today.

Program directors on the radio are thing of the past for the most part because artists now have a direct link to the listeners without needing the gatekeeper of radio for distribution.

I bring all this up to say today if you dominate YouTube. I mean really immerse yourself in the mechanics and content, you can literally build a fan base larger than any legacy team.

If you are a minor league team, you can beat your major league counterparts if your YouTube strategy is more effective than theirs. Literally, ESPN doesn’t matter anymore. With a focused search strategy and key content to a younger demographic, you can become the most followed team in your sport.

But what about the Nickelodeon game for the NFL?

A lot of times when I go down this YouTube road, I get asked about the Nickelodeon game for the playoffs the NFL did last season on cable. Overall, I think it was amazing. My cousin watched it and was enthralled with it (slime in the end zone, game over).

But I think the key thing here is I had to tell him about it. He had no idea that the game was happening. Why? He doesn’t watch Nickelodeon. All of the shows he watches are on YouTube.

While the execution was amazing…it did not understand where that attention begins. It made the assumption that kids still watch cable TV shows (which they do, I am not saying they don’t). That is trying to fit an old consumption model into a new generation of fans. Imagine trying to get a business today to buy a Fax Machine…you would have some trouble.

The biggest thing I took away from the Nickelodeon game was every team can produce content like this, put it on YouTube, and they will win.

You don’t need a cable channel to have success here. You only need to put that same content on YouTube.

In fact, you could have massively pirated that excitement when the game was going on. If you would have known the game was coming and built videos around key search terms like “slime end zone football” you would have pirated the attention it received for free.

Think about that. If you were a college team and attacked those search terms, you would have been in the mix for all the young fans searching for that term on YouTube.

If they hadn’t made up their mind on allegiances, you would have won in the college space. All basically for free (keyword research and creative content to promote).

My point here is you don’t need to rely on the big production to replicate what the NFL did with the Nick-ified game. You can create your own game highlights that have similar features and put them into the YouTube world. It will bring in young fans.

I am stating here today that if your team is the top team on YouTube in views and content for young fans…you will win the fandom game.

A lot of times in sports we try to take legacy ideas and put them into current environments. Many people say that fans follow athletes over teams and that’s is why team following & loyalty are down.

In my opinion, this isn’t true. While players are exciting, the reason why they win is they understood where attention was before teams did and took advantage of it by posting content.

They were the first to the game and grabbed the loyalty first. When they did, young fans became loyal to the player over the team. Had teams been integral in posting content here…the fan would follow the team.

It is a simple supply and demand mechanism. There is demand for sports content by young fans on YouTube, athletes were the first to supply and therefore won.

What I am proposing is that if you are a team and really double down on channels like YouTube to win the search war on key search terms….you will win the young fans.

I don’t care how many times your team is on national TV or how many Sports illustrated covers you are on. I don’t care how many mentions you get on ESPN. If your Youtube game is strong….you will win.

Again as I watched this process unfold there was no clearer picture as to why he became a fan of each team other than YouTube. This video platform told him who he should be a fan of based on the videos that popped up first.

There is a way to make sure your videos are the first to show up. There are hacks, tricks, and content that you can put onto the platform that will allow any team to become the top spot.

In all honesty, most teams aren’t implementing it. There are individuals on YouTube that talk about hockey in their basement that have more subscribers than entire NHL teams and command the same amount of engagement. They built it with ZERO team brand. (see The Hockey Guy, he is beating NHL teams on this platform).

And these individuals are doing nothing more than seeing the gap, learning the hacks to make sure their video was the top spot, and produce content. They are beating major league teams because they understand their customer and their consumption habits more than the team.

This has HUGE implications in sports for your team beyond the early year

When we look at attention, we see dollars. Grabbing early attention leads to a loyal customer. But how can we grab them early to ensure they become a lifelong customer?

If we look at this as a business, the earlier we capture a fan the longer they are a loyal customer.

In the case of my cousin, he has three 76ers hats, two sweaters, and two stuffed players that were purchased in the last year alone. Those are dollars that the Blazers lost.

In addition, he doesn’t watch Blazers games. He watches 76ers games…which is viewership lost for the Blazers.

Last, as he grows older he will watch more videos. Those videos all have pre-roll ads on them on YouTube.

The amount of brand exposer that has been put into his brain is a lot at this point from YouTube is insane. In the same way commercials on cable commanded my attention growing up, the pre-rolls command his (If Liberty Mutual isn’t his insurance company when he grows up I don’t know what will be. He recites “You only pay for what you need” daily).

Beyond that, the amount of money that has been made by those video owners on pre-roll ads (which by the way aren’t always from the teams) is insane for those channels. Overall, YouTube pulls in more ad revenue than Viacom (MTV & Nickelodeon).

Most of the videos he watches are highlights put up by non-team affiliated accounts (mainly because the team ones aren’t in the top 5 shown or aren’t there at all).

If I am a sponsor deciding on whether to spend with your team or simply pay for pre-roll ads on accounts that capture your fan’s attention, I choose pre-roll every time. It commands way more attention and influence.

The consequence of not being here early will have very real financial implications for your team in the next 5 years. In fact, it already has had real implications for your team…most of the time we just don’t know it (Liberty Mutual is no longer the insurance sponsor of USA Soccer…but I have seen them sponsor USA soccer-based YouTube content, unaffiliated with the organization, on YouTube).

Simply put, if you don’t command the attention on YouTube through your content…not only will you lose fans….but you’ll see brands target content around your team search terms and run pre-roll ads.

Your team needs to rethink your strategy here. The teams that do will win.

You need to invest in YouTube more than you do on any other platform. If your team put the same effort into YouTube as it did for Twitter content over the last 3 years you would be seeing an insane amount of ROI.

I am by far not suggesting that you should in any way be selling to young fans. But the kid-friendly content you produce on this medium will be more influential toward the future of your fan base than anything you do today.

Beyond young fans, it is where people consume sports content. It is where they search for content around your team. If you aren’t putting out great content there….someone else will and make a lot of money doing it.

As we look at the new genesis as to how a fan’s loyalty will be decided, today it is YouTube. It is a platform that many are not putting nearly enough time and energy into.

But it isn’t too late, there is still time to build this channel up. The first agenda on your digital (and sponsorship) team should be your YouTube strategy. If you don’t have one that looks at capturing young fans…you need to be having those discussions ASAP.