Sunday, March 22, 2009

Crowded out

The Equispace blog covers the ESPN coverage situation this weekend of the Lane's End Stakes, complete with a link to Alex Waldrop's NTRA blog commenting on how and when the the NTRA decides to buy time on ESPN for Racing telecasts.

Still shaking my head that we had no coverage the weekend before last weekend. That weekend we had 4 nice derby prep races that were run, all within the same hour, which would have made for a nice one hour show on ESPN. Plus they would have avoided the March Madness Weekend which is a ratings monster. Instead this past weekend they decide to broadcast the Lane's End Stakes smack dab against the NCAA Men's Championship. CBS Sports has sent out a press release stating that on Saturday, March 21 the overall average metered market rating/share for the Tournament was a 6.3/14, up +5% from a 6.0/13 last year.

That's a tough number to compete against.

Bad enough that the NTRA has to actually buy the ad time (like infomercials do) but how is a Saturday slot against March Madness attractive to potential viewers or ad buyers?
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2 comments:

Amateurcapper said...

How about this coming weekend when the Florida Derby is on ESPN on Saturday potentially against the Elite 8 coverage?

Whaddya say we get the word out to all horse racing fanatics to watch the ESPN coverage of the Florida Derby?

2:24 AM
Gene Kershner said...

GateMaster Flash: I was thoroughly surprised that the NTRA has to buy the time...floored actually.

AW also stated somewhere in his blog about giving "a basic overview" of how the NTRA arrives at the number of telecasts "they can reasonably afford to present during the year." I'm still looking for the overview on that and I've read it about five or six times.

Thanks for the link!

12:00 PM

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