LaVar's basketball league starts with surprising success, surpasses ESPN show in total views
LaVar Ball’s Junior Basketball Association has been, by most traditional metrics, a hilarious failure.
Ticket sales are nearly nonexistent, top talents laughed Ball out of the room when he tried to get them to play in his league, and the JBA doesn’t even have a TV contract, instead being forced to stream their games on Facebook’s “Live” service.
Well, it turns out that last one is a blessing in disguise, because on a platform as ubiquitous as Facebook, it’s easy to draw in curious onlookers who might have seen a video trending on the site or had that LaVar fan in the family share it the way your frothy campus-radical friend from college shares some lunatic-fringe leftist fake news and you find yourself clicking on it out of train-wreck curiosity.
Whatever the reasons, the numbers are in, and Ball’s league …
Wait, the JBA beat ESPN’s “Get Up” in the ratings? What’chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?
Ball’s livestream pulled in a peak of 25,000 people watching at once and ended up with a total of 390,000 views for the first game of the season.
The nightcap of Ball’s debut doubleheader, in which Ball’s 16-year-old son LaMelo played, pulled a shade under 500,000 views.
By contrast, ESPN’s “Get Up!” is pulling in an average of between 231,000 and 302,000 viewers.
Now granted, this is a bit apples-to-oranges. TV viewers are based on people actually watching the whole show, while Internet views are counted as soon as a video loads (what are known as “impressions” in the ad trade) and might not reflect people actually engaging with the content.
After all, YouTube works the same way, and this video of cute puppies that is absolutely not Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” in a popular internet bait-and-switch meme has pulled 448 million views, which makes it more popular than the Super Bowl.
And a tweet that your humble reporter made after the NBA All-Star Game about Fergie mangling the national anthem drew 214,292 views, which makes it more popular than the WNBA (which averaged 171,000 viewers per game on ESPN2 in 2017).
But that’s not the point. The point is that LaVar Ball got over half a million eyeballs at some point during the game to watch his son LaMelo torch sub-collegiate competition for 40 points, 11 rebounds and nine assists, and in the process drew more people to watch his show than ESPN draws in the morning to watch sports personalities push political agendas.
Granted, LaVar has the benefit of novelty on his side as well; after all, there are plenty of Gomez Addams types out there who love watching a good train wreck, but how many of them would sign up to watch the Train Wreck Channel on TV?
The world will have to see just how much of the audience Facebook Live retains for JBA games, how aggressively Facebook pushes its content partner and, most importantly, whether the league itself makes any money.
LaMelo Ball and his Los Angeles Ballers team (every team in the JBA is called the Ballers because of course they are) play in the Seattle suburb of Kent on Sunday at the ShoWare Center. The center is about a quarter-mile from where this article is being written, a place that draws great crowds for junior hockey and good crowds for lingerie football. At this writing, it appears that fewer than 200 tickets have been sold.
It’s going to take a lot more than even 500,000 internet page views (at current Google ad rates, a web page that draws that many views can expect to earn about $8,500) to make the JBA successful.
But at least LaVar Ball has some good news to crow about.
ESPN, meanwhile, has a show that can’t beat a league whose players are almost entirely guys who weren’t good enough to play college basketball and will never do anything professionally once either the JBA folds or they age out of the league, whichever comes first.
And that’s just embarrassing for the so-called Worldwide Leader in Sports.
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