Read Part One of Nathaniel Danziger's column The Vertical Shift here.
Continuing the ideas from my last column, it is important to center the human toll this shift in priorities to short-form content has taken. For every Stephen A Smith (figures large and adaptive enough to change the current landscape) and Pat McAfee (figures brought up by the rise of this new media environment, using their previously independent platform to boost legacy brands), there are hundreds of Max Kellermans and Zach Lowes. They represent the greatly talented creators lost in the shuffle as the cultural product of sports is reshaped in TikTok’s image.
Whether it be analysis or highlights, more and more of sports are ingested, at least partly, through platforms like TikTok or Instagram offering SFC. In 2021, Disney found 65% of people who stream sports are interested in social media conversation about players, teams, managers, coaches, or games. All major sports leagues benefit from this creator economy that exists in their periphery; whether it be the people who make video edits of their favorite teams, commentators who discuss the league, betting analysts, or anyone else. This system, operating in tandem with current cultural products, has hummed along for the majority of the decade with no worries, gaining the leagues fans and infinite free exposure in the meantime. However, we are now slowly reaching the turning point presented by McLuhan. The short form content is becoming the message and the derivative market is approaching the actual one.
Human Cost
Viewership numbers for linear TV have been steadily declining for a decade, and leagues including the NFL and NBA have instead started to opt for agreements with streaming platforms like Amazon and Peacock in an attempt to meet viewers where they stand. In addition, S&P Global calculates that “approximately four in 10 (38%) Americans said they often watch online sports highlights, clips and interviews.” Leagues are acutely aware of this shift in viewing habits as people cut the cord; there is too much money at stake not to be. Just recently, the NBA prioritized social media content creators at their All-Star weekend, getting “more than 200 global content creators- with over a billion followers overall.”
The gamble being that while the actual presentation itself might be weaker compared to traditional media’s method of showing the event, the medium it is on will allow it to garner a larger audience purely due to how short form is valued in the current marketing infrastructure.If someone with little training can garner millions of views by creating a well-edited video of LeBron James highlights over “Heroes” by David Bowie or a sped-up “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye (two of my personal favorites), why wouldn’t the NBA or ESPN just do it themselves? Leagues are starting to understand that this type of content can be made well in house, or it can be made by the public, but it will assuredly be made regardless.
We can expect this trend to continue pushing outward and expanding in all cultural avenues; actual cultural products being interacted with by a growing portion of people that understand it exclusively through the SFC they’ve seen surrounding it. Sports are one of the only events that demand same time viewing, if they cannot win against TikTok, how can any long-form content?
All of media is starting to converge on short-form based, never-ending, algorithmically processed feeds served up by tech companies. At the same time they are realizing it is impossible to compete against these new platforms and the new dominant medium; they can only try to reshape themselves to be appealing within new cultural-meta. The Oscar's Red Carpet fiasco acts as another example. To try and get the appeal of a new generation, TikTok creators were invited to interview nominees, with varying degrees of success.
Meeting Them
No longer are brands and streamers making social media content in addition to cultural products, the content is viewed as vital infrastructure in the creation of a cultural artifact and in some cases as the product in itself. To become a prominent part of pop-culture, something almost assuredly has to be accessible within the confines of SFC. At what point do streamers decide to cut out the proverbial middle man and just make TikToks? Are we just going to reverse engineer another Quibi?
Now, to participate and become a part of the zeitgeist, creators must flock to spaces that are increasingly run by a shrinking number of people dictating what is or isn’t seen by users. In the current media environment where all discussion and analysis happens digitally in spaces with no accountability that are increasingly dictated by algorithms controlled by an ever shrinking group of people, what remains of culture struggles to maintain the appearance of being led by the masses.
Shrinking Gatekeepers
The reliance and complete investment in social-media marketing strategies further enables the shaping of public opinion by American tech billionaires; a snowball effect happening before our eyes. More viewership on these platforms equates to a higher investment from marketers which further grows internal revenue of platforms that they can deploy to acquire viewers onward until (in theory) everyone has a TikTok, Instagram, or X that they supplement with sound in the background provided by Netflix, Prime, or Hulu. Because this is where the people are, advertisers must follow. In addition to the advertisers, creators also find themselves bound to the same cycle; if the majority of the viewing public is on one platform, it would be foolish not to use it if you want eyes on your work. This feedback loop only furthers the process of creating new cultural works with the new medium and platforms it inhabits in mind.
Feedback Loop
W. David Marx discussed this very abandonment, “The twentieth-century content industry’s former strategy of investments in auteurs and innovators as the potential hitmakers of tomorrow gave way to full algorithmic optimization.” It would be foolish to act as if movie studios have never cared about profits or authors were apathetic to being a bestseller, but the adaptation of SFC and algorithmic feeds as infrastructure has completely shifted incentive structures almost completely away from making good or at least challenging works of art.
Algorithms are made to recommend content that it thinks any given user would like; nothing challenging or different fits into those parameters the majority of the time. Work that challenges that status quo has a harder time getting attention, leading to a smaller funnel of success that starts to resemble itself more and more as time continues to pass.
This change of motivations is central to the inflection point for streamers and culture we are experiencing now. If streamers and creators, as producers and we as consumers, cannot figure out how to use social media in tandem with our cultural products, it threatens to swallow them whole. Institutional media players need to figure out a way to adapt this new TikTok and SFC-based infrastructure to work in their favor; if they can’t, they risk going the way of Max Kellerman and Zach Lowe.
