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ABSTRACT
Research question: The aim of this paper is to analyze minute-by-minute TV demand in the case of road cycling. The paper addresses at least two new hypotheses. First, breakaways and episodes of climbing mountain passes increase the audience within a specific stage. Second, the presence of commercials during the broadcasting reduces the audience significantly.
Research methods: We have collected information about the minute-by-minute TV audience for all the stages of the 2015 Vuelta a España. To check our hypotheses, we have applied multivariate regression analysis, after controlling for other common variables such as competitive balance or stage profile.
Results and findings: Related to our first hypothesis, the TV audience increases when the leader is climbing a mountain, and when a top ten rider is involved in a breakaway. For our second hypothesis, the TV audience decreases when commercials are broadcasted even on a split screen.
Implications: This paper highlights the relevance of the analysis of the minute-by-minute TV audience demand in the case of road cycling, at the same time suggesting some hints for enhancing TV audience. On the one hand, organizers may wish to schedule more mountain stages, where breakaways tend to be more likely. On the other hand, TV channels should choose time slots for advertising carefully, since their negative effects on TV audience ratings appear to be quite significant.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Carmichael, Millington, and Simmons (Citation1999); Fizel and Bennett (Citation1989); Zhang and Smith (Citation1997); and Baimbridge, Cameron, and Dawson (Citation1996) or Buraimo and Simmons (Citation2009). It is interesting to point out that Buraimo (Citation2008) finds a crowding-out effect from TV audience to stadium attendance, but a crowding-in effect in the opposite direction.
2. Other fields of interest, when analyzing sports broadcasting audience, are the effect of different platforms, pay-per-view, subscription, free-to-the air (Buraimo & Simmons, Citation2009; Pérez, Puente, & Rodríguez, Citation2015); or the relevance of the audience when discussing rights sales (Hoehn & Kastrinaki, Citation2012; Noll, Citation2007).
3. For a better understanding of the marriage of cycling and television, see also Van Reeth (Citation2016).
4. This is not just the same in sports like football or boxing, where a goal or a knockout can happen at any moment.
5. The UCI World Tour is an international league composed by the best races of the cyclist season. Riders receive points depending on their standing in these races, allowing the construction of the UCI World Tour Ranking. When the season is finished, riders are ranked based on the points obtained in all the races.
6. The Vuelta was born in 1935. Since that year, this race was cancelled several times due to extreme circumstances, such as, for example, the Spanish Civil War. Since 2008, ASO (the owner of the Tour de France) also owns 49% of the Vuelta.
7. The share is defined as the percentage of viewers who watched the race in relation to the total number of viewers that were watching the TV at that particular moment in time (share is computed minute-by-minute). Although a share of about 20% for cycling seems to be low for countries like Belgium or France, in the case of Spain (where football monopolizes sports TV broadcasting), it is a significant figure.
8. This stage was broadcasted by Teledeporte (a specialized sports channel belonging to the Spanish public television) instead of tve1. But, actually, due to air traffic problems in Madrid, helicopters did not fly until the last eight minutes of the stage. Therefore, all the images broadcasted during the race were fixed images of the finish line or interviews. So, images from the 21st stage were not comparable with those of the 1st to 20th stages. On the other hand, information from the 1st stage was finally included in the dataset, in spite of this stage not being considered for setting time differences among riders (it was only used for ranking the overall standings). The reason was that cyclists considered that the road was very unsafe (most parts of the road were covered in sand, since it was quite close to the beach of Málaga). In any case, the special character of the 1st stage is taken into account, since the inclusion of a set of calendar variables in the estimations (six for the day of the week and two for the number of weeks) is equivalent to control for each one of the stages.
9. Since all the stages, except the first, were broadcasted almost in the same time frame, between 16:00 and 18:00, we do not need to control for different time slots, as Kanazawa and Funk (Citation2001) did in the case of basketball.
10.
The CQ-ranking is a world ranking of professional road cyclists, based on their performances during the last 12 months. It can be seen as the non-official successor of the UCI-ranking which disappeared when the Pro Tour was introduced in 2005. (see, http://www.cqranking.com/men/asp/info/whats.asp)
11. This competitive balance index has been proposed several times in the literature. See, for example, Mignot (Citation2014, Citation2016), Sterken (Citation2005) and Andreff (Citation2014). We try to include other variables describing competitive balance, such as the number of changes in the leader up until the end of the previous stage, as suggested by Mignot (Citation2014) and Rodríguez et al. (Citation2015), although this variable was not significant in the estimations.
12. Patriotism has been tested as a quite relevant factor to enhance TV audience for many other sports. See for example, Konjer, Meier, and Wedeking (Citation2015) for the case of tennis in Germany.
13. They are IbreakT10, GbreakT10, IbreaknotT10 and GbreaknotT10. For example, IbreakT10 takes a value of one if there was an individual breakaway of a rider placed among the top ten in the overall standings. The value is one for all the minutes during which the breakaway lasts. The minimum distance between riders for a breakaway is considered as those meters that may avoid slipstreaming for the rider who is at the head of the group. But a breakaway must be durable. For example, when a rider wins ten meters during a few seconds and he is captured again, this fact is not considered as a breakaway. It may only be an attempt to measure the strength of rivals. We had no problems in defining true breakaways, because mostly they last several minutes and usually cyclists stablish enough time differences to avoid slipstreaming.
14. Other sports were not considered, because only in one case and during four minutes, Cuatro channel broadcasted another sport: the European Basketball Championship.
15. Gender differences in sport TV audiences have been also observed, for example, by Meier and Leinwather (Citation2012) and Tainsky, Kerwin, Xu, and Zhou (Citation2013).
16. To know about the description and meaning of this test, see: http://www.stata.com/manuals13/rregresspostestimationtimeseries.pdf.
17. See, for example, Kanazawa and Funk (Citation2001); Rodríguez et al. (Citation2015) and Van Reeth (Citation2013).
18. And the difference between Saturdays and Sundays could be due to the fact that other sports, particularly football, are scheduled on Saturday afternoons and evenings. But pay-per-view TV channels broadcasted these sports and the corresponding audience data were not available.
19. Since a type of program (film) has always been broadcasted during the weekend by two rival channels for the same time slot as the Vuelta, it is impossible to include all the calendar variables and the whole set of rival TV programs at the same time. One of the calendar variables is automatically excluded due to perfect multicollinearity. So, the film variable was finally not included in the equations.