Quote:
Originally Posted by Cannon Shell
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/25/comm...sbiz/index.htm
. Baseball will finish this year with just over $6 billion in revenue, according to Bob DuPuy, Major League Baseball's president and chief operating officer.
To put that into context, that puts baseball right on the heels of the more than $6 billion in revenue reported by the National Football League in 2006.
Yes, baseball has a lot more games from which to generate sales than the NFL, but that has always been the case. Simply put, baseball has done a much better job in the past few years of boosting its revenue beyond traditional sources, i.e. ticket sales and television broadcasting.
Baseball's sales have increased 50 percent from 2004 and have doubled since 2000. The NFL's sales grew at roughly half of baseball's pace during the same time period.
DuPuy told me the level of growth this year surprised even him and Commissioner Bud Selig. He attributed the gains to more competitive balance in the game, which has helped improve attendance for teams in smaller markets such as the National League champion Colorado Rockies and Milwaukee Brewers, which was in the race for a division title up until the final week of the season.
The growth of the online ticket resale market has also spurred more season ticket sales, DuPuy said. It also helped cut down on the number of no-shows, which increase sales at the concession stands. That's one of the reasons that the MLB signed a deal with eBay (Charts, Fortune 500) unit StubHub, which lets people buy and sell tickets, in August.
Online ticket sales is the perfect example of why baseball revenue has grown so dramatically. The sport has been able to take advantage of several sources of revenue that could hardly be imagined as baseball was coming out of the 1994-95 strike.
The MLB.com Web site, satellite radio broadcasts, an out-of-market television game package and much better than expected international growth have all boosted sales..
|
First of all, this is an editorial and the dollars that are being thrown around for "total rev" are being kicked around by the COO of MLB who might just have a little bit of an agenda...No? LOL. "competitive balance" benefits whom? It wouldnt be the commissioner's team would it?
As far as the NFL's total revenue, do you really think you or anyone else has an accurate guage of what they are really taking in? The fact is, the Player's association is going after the books pretty hard.
If anyone, you included, really thinks that Mlb's total revenue is equal to the NFL's revenue, there is a bridge in arizona to buy and a short bus to ride over it on.