Sport needs to embrace clip-sharing, just like the NBA's accessible social media powerhouse

Other sports need to become less precious about sharing clips and highlights to reach new-age fans.

In my sports-laden social timelines, we’ve entered a time of the year where I wake up each morning to a barrage of NBA clips. There’s big blocks, slam dunks, whacky moments and celebrations, on-court clashes between heated rivals. It makes the morning doom-scrolling all the more difficult to pull away from, with every second of action captured and the best clipped into digestible sub-15 second clips for social fodder.

I’m far from the biggest basketball fan—I would struggle to sit down and watch an entire game, regardless of the time difference making it all the more difficult for the likes of me who pride sleep over anything else. But I eat up the drama and exciting clips like a hungry dog. The NBA is never not boring, whether it’s cool stuff happening on the court or controversy and drama off it.

What makes the NBA so accessible to a completely passive and casual fan like myself, is that they’ve made it accessible. It’s that simple—they create the clips and they let anyone who wants to share them without reprieve. No copyright infringements or strikes or risk of your social account getting banned. They see the value in clip-sharing in the social age and have embraced it, allowing for as much scope as possible for some of their content to reach more casual eyes like myself.

In an interview with Strategy+Business, NBA commissioner Adam Silver spoke about the NBA’s embrace of social media to cultivate revenue and new fans

"We promote the posting of our highlights. The highlights are identified through YouTube’s software, and when ads are sold against them, we share in the revenue. We analogize our strategy to snacks versus meals. If we provide those snacks to our fans on a free basis, they’re still going to want to eat meals — which are our games. There is no substitute for the live game experience. We believe that greater fan engagement through social media helps drive television ratings.”

The NBA is a revenue juggernaut, earning more than the Premier League and becoming one of the most profitable sports organisations in the world, seeing $3billion in profit and immense growth across most major metrics in recent years.

They’re clearly doing something right. More eyes on the product is the easiest way to generate revenue—those people who have ready access to clips and highlights become more invested in the league, the players, and buy merchandise, perhaps watch more live games on television or even go to a game. It’s far more effective than someone not seeing anything at all.

If it’s so easy, why have other sports not embraced the positives of widespread clip sharing? Obviously there are copyright and rights issues at hand here, where television operators and broadcasters are very precious over what can and can’t be shared by whom. I’m sure there’s plenty of legal mumbo jumbo that prevents a lot of this more ever happening that more clever people than I can decipher, so I’m very much coming from a what-if, ideal-world outlook.

As the NBA skyrockets, other sport are quietly killing themselves in the meantime. Not everybody can gain access to live coverage, nor even afford a lot of the television rights packages. The least that could be offered to rope in more fans is having somewhat accessible clips and highlights that stretch beyond 30 seconds.

The 2023 Rugby World Cup is the latest organisation to receive some backlash over their stingy highlight offering, with bare clips and those who do share anything being banned across various social media platforms. The biggest competition in a sport that isn’t exactly thriving and begging for fresh fanbases being heavy-handed over the sharing of highlights is immense shooting yourself in the foot.

Can sports that are already struggling to attract new fans in the age of TikTok and YouTube really afford to be so strict? The competition has skated by and I can’t say much action ever penetrated my social timelines, which are already heavily sports-pilled. If I’m not seeing many clips then far more casual sports fans than I definitely aren’t.

Closer to home, the GAA are equally heavy-handed with clip sharing. In a previous life I administrated a GAA-focused social page and received a pleasant but strict message from a broadcaster to stop posting clips from their GAA games. A completely niche sport in our little corner of the world with some of the most viral-worthy clips anywhere in the world of sport, you’d think they’d be happy for the Gospel of hurling and football to spread and have every chance of breaking the wall into wider markets.

One of the more popular GAA clip-sharers Ray Boyne received similar pushback. With a large online following he shared clips which offered insight and inspiration and was doing far more good for the game than harm. Once again, an own goal from an organisation that needs all the promotion it can muster. Yes, I know they are tied by rights restrictions—but in a digital age where shortform content is king, you simply need to embrace it to have any chance of finding new fans.

Anyone who keeps an eye on Twitter for Premier League clips will see them posted from random faceless accounts, shared because they will inevitably be pulled and banned. Likewise for many other football leagues across the world. The Premier League needs little more promotion than it already gets, but once again the heavy-handed nature of clip sharing prevents a lot of people from getting the best access to content. It happens anyway—why not embrace it, share clips from your own feeds and let people at it?

The League of Ireland is another sports organisation that is crying out for promotion and although it has improved in recent seasons with the advent of LOITV and the easing of media restrictions, it always feels like an uphill battle and almost like a reluctance from those in charge to leave the door open for the explosion of TikTok, Instagram Shorts and other shortform clip sharing.

So while the NBA goes nuclear in revenue, eyes on its product and all major metrics when it comes to promoting its sport, maybe other organisations should take a leaf out of their book and loosen the vice-grip on social sharing.

In the digital age, eyes on the product are more valuable than ever and if the videos aren’t out there, people aren’t going to take the next step into investing time, energy and money in your sport.